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- HCI (2)
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- Bonnie A. Nardi (1)
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Articles 1 - 27 of 27
Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Shaping Swarms Through Coordinated Mediation, Shin-Young Jung
Shaping Swarms Through Coordinated Mediation, Shin-Young Jung
Theses and Dissertations
A swarm is a group of uninformed individuals that exhibit collective behaviors. Without any information about the external world, a swarm has limited ability to achieve complex goals. Prior work on human-swarm interaction methods allow a human to influence these uninformed individuals through either leadership or predation as informed agents that directly interact with humans. These methods of influence have two main limitations: (1) although leaders sustain influence over nominal agents for a long period of time, they tend to cause all collective structures to turn in to flocks (negating the benefit of other swarm formations) and (2) predators tend …
The Pseudo-Rigid-Body Model For Fast, Accurate, Non-Linear Elasticity, Anthony R. Hall
The Pseudo-Rigid-Body Model For Fast, Accurate, Non-Linear Elasticity, Anthony R. Hall
Theses and Dissertations
We introduce to computer graphics the Pseudo-Rigid-Body Mechanism (PRBM) and the chain algorithm from mechanical engineering, with a unified tutorial from disparate source materials. The PRBM has been used successfully to simplify the simulation of non-linearly elastic beams, using deflections of an analogous spring and rigid-body linkage. It offers computational efficiency as well as an automatic parameterization in terms of physically measurable, intuitive inputs which fit naturally into existing animation work flows for character articulation. The chain algorithm is a technique for simulating the deflection of complicated elastic bodies in terms of straight elastic elements, which has recently been extended …
Sensor-Driven Hierarchical Path Planning For Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Canonical Tasks And Sensors, Spencer James Clark
Sensor-Driven Hierarchical Path Planning For Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Canonical Tasks And Sensors, Spencer James Clark
Theses and Dissertations
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly becoming economical platforms for carrying a variety of sensors. Building flight plans that place sensors properly, temporally and spatially, is difficult. The goal of sensor-driven planning is to automatically generate flight plans based on desired sensor placement and temporal constraints. We propose a simple taxonomy of UAV-enabled sensors, identify a set of generic sensor tasks, and argue that many real-world tasks can be represented by the taxonomy. We present a hierarchical sensor-driven flight planning system capable of generating 2D flights that satisfy desired sensor placement and complex timing and dependency constraints. The system makes …
Human-Swarm Interaction: Effects On Operator Workload, Scale, And Swarm Topology, Brian O. Pendleton
Human-Swarm Interaction: Effects On Operator Workload, Scale, And Swarm Topology, Brian O. Pendleton
Theses and Dissertations
Robots, including UAVs, have found increasing use in helping humans with dangerous and difficult tasks. The number of robots in use is increasing and is likely to continue increasing in the future. As the number of robots increases, human operators will need to coordinate and control the actions of large teams of robots. While multi-robot supervisory control has been widely studied, it requires that an operator divide his or her attention between robots. Consequently, the use of multi-robot supervisory control is limited by the number of robots that a human or team of humans can reasonably control. Swarm robotics -- …
Distributed Agent Cloud-Sourced Malware Reporting Framework, Kellie Elizabeth Kercher
Distributed Agent Cloud-Sourced Malware Reporting Framework, Kellie Elizabeth Kercher
Theses and Dissertations
Malware is a fast growing threat that consists of a malicious script or piece of software that is used to disrupt the integrity of a user's experience. Antivirus software can help protect a user against these threats and there are numerous vendors users can choose from for their antivirus protection. However, each vendor has their own set of virus definitions varying in resources and capabilities in recognizing new threats. Currently, a persistent system is not in place that measures and displays data on the performance of antivirus vendors in responding to new malware over a continuous period of time. There …
Interactive Techniques Between Collaborative Handheld Devices And Wall Displays, Daniel Leon Schulte
Interactive Techniques Between Collaborative Handheld Devices And Wall Displays, Daniel Leon Schulte
Theses and Dissertations
Handheld device users want to work collaboratively on large wall-sized displays with other handheld device users. However, no software frameworks exist to support this type of collaborative activity. This thesis introduces a collaborative application framework that allows users to collaborate with each other across handheld devices and large wall displays. The framework is comprised of a data storage system and a set of generic interactive techniques that can be utilized by applications. The data synchronization system allows data to be synchronized across multiple handheld devices and wall displays. The interactive techniques enable users to create data items and to form …
Practical Cost-Conscious Active Learning For Data Annotation In Annotator-Initiated Environments, Robbie A. Haertel
Practical Cost-Conscious Active Learning For Data Annotation In Annotator-Initiated Environments, Robbie A. Haertel
Theses and Dissertations
Many projects exist whose purpose is to augment raw data with annotations that increase the usefulness of the data. The number of these projects is rapidly growing and in the age of “big data” the amount of data to be annotated is likewise growing within each project. One common use of such data is in supervised machine learning, which requires labeled data to train a predictive model. Annotation is often a very expensive proposition, particularly for structured data. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore methods of reducing the cost of creating such data sets, including annotated text corpora.We …
User Experience Engineering Adoption And Practice: A Longitudinal Case Study, Brady Edwin Redfearn
User Experience Engineering Adoption And Practice: A Longitudinal Case Study, Brady Edwin Redfearn
Theses and Dissertations
User Experience Engineering (UxE) incorporates subject areas like usability, HCI, interaction experience, interaction design, "human factors", ergonomics", cognitive psychology", behavioral psychology and psychometrics", systems engineering", [and] "computer science," (Hartson, 1998). It has been suggested that UxE will be the main success factor in organizations as we enter the "loyalty decade" of software development, where the repeat usage of a product by a single customer will be the metric of product success (Alghamdi, 2010; Law & van Schaik, 2010, p. 313; Nielsen, 2008; Van Schaik & Ling, 2011). What is relatively unknown in the current academic literature is whether existing UxE …
Dynamic Near Field Communication Pairing For Wireless Sensor Networks, Steven Charles Cook
Dynamic Near Field Communication Pairing For Wireless Sensor Networks, Steven Charles Cook
Theses and Dissertations
Wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes communicate securely using pre-installed cryptographic keys. Although key pre-installation makes nodes less expensive, the technical process of installing keys prevents average users from deploying and controlling their own WSNs. Wireless pairing enables users to set up WSNs without pre-installing keys, but current pairing techniques introduce numerous concerns regarding security, hardware expense, and usability. This thesis introduces dynamic Near Field Communication (NFC) pairing, a new pairing technique designed for WSNs. This pairing overcomes the limitations of both key pre-installation and current pairing techniques. Dynamic NFC pairing is as secure as using pre-installed keys, requires only inexpensive …
Inverted Sequence Identification In Diploid Genomic Scaffold Assembly Via Weighted Max-Cut Reduction, Paul Mark Bodily
Inverted Sequence Identification In Diploid Genomic Scaffold Assembly Via Weighted Max-Cut Reduction, Paul Mark Bodily
Theses and Dissertations
Virtually all genome assemblers to date are designed for use with data from haploid or homozygous diploid genomes. Their use on heterozygous genomic datasets generally results in highly-fragmented, error-prone assemblies, owing to the violation of assumptions during both the contigging and scaffolding phases. Of the two phases, scaffolding is more particularly impacted and algorithms to facilitate the scaffolding of heterozygous data are lacking. We present a stand-alone scaffolding algorithm, ScaffoldScaffolder, designed specifically for scaffolding diploid genomes. A fundamental step in the scaffolding phase is the assignment of sequence orientations to contigs within scaffolds. Deciding such an assignment in the presence …
Patchmatch-Based Content Completion Of 3d Images, Joel Arthur Howard
Patchmatch-Based Content Completion Of 3d Images, Joel Arthur Howard
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis presents a method for completing target regions ("hole filling") in RGB stereo pairs. It builds upon the state of the art for completing single images by matching to and then blending source patches drawn from the rest of the image. A method is introduced for first completing the respective disparity maps using a coupled partial differential equation based on that of Bertalmio, et al. extended to create mutual disparity consistency. Estimated disparities are then used to guide completion of the missing color image texture. An extension to the coherence-based objective function introduced by Wexler, et al. is then …
Interactive Depth-Aware Effects For Stereo Image Editing, Joshua E. Abbott
Interactive Depth-Aware Effects For Stereo Image Editing, Joshua E. Abbott
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis introduces methods for adding user-guided depth-aware effects to images captured with a consumer-grade stereo camera with minimal user interaction. In particular, we present methods for highlighted depth-of-field, haze, depth-of-field, and image relighting. Unlike many prior methods for adding such effects, we do not assume prior scene models or require extensive user guidance to create such models, nor do we assume multiple input images. We also do not require specialized camera rigs or other equipment such as light-field camera arrays, active lighting, etc. Instead, we use only an easily portable and affordable consumer-grade stereo camera. The depth is calculated …
Computational Techniques For Public Health Surveillance, Scott H. Burton
Computational Techniques For Public Health Surveillance, Scott H. Burton
Theses and Dissertations
Public health surveillance is a critical part of understanding, and ultimately influencing, health behaviors. Traditional methods, such as questionnaires and focus groups have significant limitations including cost, delay, and size. Online social media data has the potential to overcome many of the challenges of traditional methods, but its exploitation is not trivial. We develop and apply computational techniques to enable public health surveillance in novel ways and on a larger scale than currently performed.In this regard, we present techniques for mining the who, what, and where of public health surveillance in social media. We show how computational methods can identify …
Message Protector: Demonstrating That Manual Encryption Improves Usability, Nathan I. Kim
Message Protector: Demonstrating That Manual Encryption Improves Usability, Nathan I. Kim
Theses and Dissertations
Billions of people currently use the Internet. Many Internet users share sensitive information through online services. Several secure data sharing tools have been developed to protect this sensitive information. A common practice in the design of usable security is to provide automatic data encryption that is transparent to users. We hypothesize that automatic encryption can decrease usability and comprehensibility, increasing the likelihood that users will unknowingly disclose sensitive information. This thesis presents Message Protector (MP), a novel Internet secure data sharing tool design that through manual encryption, purposely exposes technical details in a usable manner to increase usability and reduce …
Improving Crowd Simulation With Optimal Acceleration Angles, Movement On 3d Surfaces, And Social Dynamics, Brian C. Ricks
Improving Crowd Simulation With Optimal Acceleration Angles, Movement On 3d Surfaces, And Social Dynamics, Brian C. Ricks
Theses and Dissertations
Crowd simulation plays a critical role in modern films, games, and architectural design. However, despite decades of algorithmic improvements, crowds use sub-optimal heuristics, are primarily constrained to 2D surfaces, and show few if any social dynamics. This dissertation proposes that a solution to these problems lies in altering how each agent perceives its environment as opposed to new obstacle avoidance algorithms. First, this dissertation presents a theoretical look at optimal agent movement. Next, in order to place crowds on arbitrary 3D manifolds, algorithms are proposed that change how each agent perceives its environment. The resulting crowds move naturally across a …
Prevalence Of Reflexivity And Its Impact On Success In Open Source Software Development: An Empirical Study, Brandon D. Foushee
Prevalence Of Reflexivity And Its Impact On Success In Open Source Software Development: An Empirical Study, Brandon D. Foushee
Theses and Dissertations
Conventional wisdom, inspired in part by Eric Raymond, suggests that open source developers primarily develop software for developers like themselves. In our studies we distinguish between reflexive software (software written primarily for other developers) and irreflexive software (software written primarily for passive users). In the first study, we present four criteria which we then use to assess project reflexivity in SourceForge. These criteria are based on three specific indicators: intended audience, relevant topics, and supported operating systems. Based on our criteria, we find that 68% of SourceForge projects are reflexive (in the sense described by Raymond). In the second study, …
Probabilistic Explicit Topic Modeling, Joshua Aaron Hansen
Probabilistic Explicit Topic Modeling, Joshua Aaron Hansen
Theses and Dissertations
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is widely used for automatic discovery of latent topics in document corpora. However, output from analysis using an LDA topic model suffers from a lack of identifiability between topics not only across corpora, but across runs of the algorithm. The output is also isolated from enriching information from knowledge sources such as Wikipedia and is difficult for humans to interpret due to a lack of meaningful topic labels. This thesis introduces two methods for probabilistic explicit topic modeling that address these issues: Latent Dirichlet Allocation with Static Topic-Word Distributions (LDA-STWD), and Explicit Dirichlet Allocation (EDA). LDA-STWD …
Probability Of Belonging To A Language, Kevin Michael Brooks Cook
Probability Of Belonging To A Language, Kevin Michael Brooks Cook
Theses and Dissertations
Conventional language models estimate the probability that a word sequence within a chosen language will occur. By contrast, the purpose of our work is to estimate the probability that the word sequence belongs to the chosen language. The language of interest in our research is comprehensible well-formed English. We explain how conventional language models assume what we refer to as a degree of generalization, the extent to which a model generalizes from a given sequence. We explain why such an assumption may hinder estimation of the probability that a sequence belongs. We show that the probability that a word sequence …
Warping-Based Approach To Offline Handwriting Recognition, Douglas J. Kennard
Warping-Based Approach To Offline Handwriting Recognition, Douglas J. Kennard
Theses and Dissertations
An enormous amount of the historical record is currently trapped in non-indexed handwritten format. Even after being scanned into images, only a minute fraction of the existing records can be manually transcribed / indexed with reasonable amounts of time and cost. Although progress continues to be made with automatic handwriting recognition (HR), it is not yet good enough to replace manual transcription or indexing. Much of the recent HR work has focused on incremental improvements to methods based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and other similar probabilistic approaches. In this dissertation we present a fundamentally new approach to HR based …
Face Tracking User Interfaces Using Vision-Based Consumer Devices, Norman Villaroman
Face Tracking User Interfaces Using Vision-Based Consumer Devices, Norman Villaroman
Theses and Dissertations
Some individuals have difficulty using standard hand-manipulated input devices such as a mouse and a keyboard effectively. For such users who at the same time have sufficient control over face and head movement, a robust perceptual or vision-based user interface that can track face movement can significantly help them. Using vision-based consumer devices makes such a user interface readily available and allows its use to be non-intrusive. Designing this type of user interface presents some significant challenges particularly with accuracy and usability. This research investigates such problems and proposes solutions to create a usable and robust face tracking user interface …
Online Survey System For Image-Based Clinical Guideline Studies Using The Delphi Method, Todd Martin Harper
Online Survey System For Image-Based Clinical Guideline Studies Using The Delphi Method, Todd Martin Harper
Theses and Dissertations
The increasing use of health information technology (HIT) is due to a rising interest in improving the quality of health care. HIT has the potential to reduce cost and transform services. Proper clinical support systems will contribute to the meaningful use of HIT systems by providing a wide array of data to clinicians for the diagnosis and treatments. Clinical guidelines, created by a consensus of experts, can be put in place to assist physicians in making clinical decisions. Delphi methods are commonly used to create consensus from surveys completed by a team of experts. Image-based studies could create guidelines that …
Toward Scalable Human Interaction With Bio-Inspired Robot Teams, Daniel Sundquist Brown
Toward Scalable Human Interaction With Bio-Inspired Robot Teams, Daniel Sundquist Brown
Theses and Dissertations
Bio-inspired swarming behaviors provide an effective decentralized way of coordinating robot teams. However, as robot swarms increase in size, bandwidth and time constraints limit the number of agents a human can communicate with and control. To facilitate scalable human interaction with large robot swarms it is desirable to monitor and influence the collective behavior of the entire swarm through limited interactions with a small subset of agents. However, it is also desirable to avoid situations where a small number of agent failures can adversely affect the collective behavior of the swarm. We present a bio-inspired model of swarming that exhibits …
A Hierarchical Multi-Output Nearest Neighbor Model For Multi-Output Dependence Learning, Richard Glenn Morris
A Hierarchical Multi-Output Nearest Neighbor Model For Multi-Output Dependence Learning, Richard Glenn Morris
Theses and Dissertations
Multi-Output Dependence (MOD) learning is a generalization of standard classification problems that allows for multiple outputs that are dependent on each other. A primary issue that arises in the context of MOD learning is that for any given input pattern there can be multiple correct output patterns. This changes the learning task from function approximation to relation approximation. Previous algorithms do not consider this problem, and thus cannot be readily applied to MOD problems. To perform MOD learning, we introduce the Hierarchical Multi-Output Nearest Neighbor model (HMONN) that employs a basic learning model for each output and a modified nearest …
Cliff Walls: Threats To Validity In Empirical Studies Of Open Source Forges, Landon James Pratt
Cliff Walls: Threats To Validity In Empirical Studies Of Open Source Forges, Landon James Pratt
Theses and Dissertations
Artifact-based research provides a mechanism whereby researchers may study the creation of software yet avoid many of the difficulties of direct observation and experimentation. Open source software forges are of great value to the software researcher, because they expose many of the artifacts of software development. However, many challenges affect the quality of artifact-based studies, especially those studies examining software evolution. This thesis addresses one of these threats: the presence of very large commits, which we refer to as "Cliff Walls." Cliff walls are a threat to studies of software evolution because they do not appear to represent incremental development. …
Optimized Simulation Of Granular Materials, Seth R. Holladay
Optimized Simulation Of Granular Materials, Seth R. Holladay
Theses and Dissertations
Visual effects for film and animation often require simulated granular materials, such as sand, wheat, or dirt, to meet a director's needs. Simulating granular materials can be time consuming, in both computation and labor, as these particulate materials have complex behavior and an enormous amount of small-scale detail. Furthermore, a single cubic meter of granular material, where each grain is a cubic millimeter, would contain a billion granules, and simulating all such interacting granules would take an impractical amount of time for productions. This calls for a simplified model for granular materials that retains high surface detail and granular behavior …
An Optimized R5rs Macro Expander, Sean P. Reque
An Optimized R5rs Macro Expander, Sean P. Reque
Theses and Dissertations
Macro systems allow programmers abstractions over the syntax of a programming language. This gives the programmer some of the same power posessed by a programming language designer, namely, the ability to extend the programming language to meet the needs of the programmer. The value of such systems has been demonstrated by their continued adoption in more languages and platforms. However, several barriers to widespread adoption of macro systems still exist. The language Racket defines a small core of primitive language constructs, including a powerful macro system, upon which all other features are built. Because of this design, many features of …
Animating Non-Rigid Bodies Using Motion Capture, Jie Long
Animating Non-Rigid Bodies Using Motion Capture, Jie Long
Theses and Dissertations
Simulating the motion of a non-rigid body under external forces is a difficult problem because of the complexity and flexibility of the non-rigid geometry and its associated dynamics. Physically based animation of objects moving in the wind is computationally expensive, so simulation-based approaches oversimplify the model by ignoring important effects, such as tree's sheltering. Motion capture records actual responses of a non-rigid body to external forces and helps solve these problems. Mainly focusing on natural trees and ropes as instances of non-rigid bodies, we present a new approach to building motion for objects in wind using incomplete motion capture data …