Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Usability Of Performance Dashboards, Usefulness Of Operational And Tactical Support, And Quality Of Strategic Support: A Research Framework, Bih-Ru Lea, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Performance dashboards are used as a strategic decision support tool in organizations. In this research, we examine the relationships between the usability of performance dashboards, the usefulness of operational and tactical support, and the quality of strategic support that they provide. We hypothesize that usability of performance dashboards will influence user perceptions of the usefulness of the operational and tactical support provided by the dashboards, which in turn influence the perceived quality of strategic support provided.

Correlation Of Partial Frames In Video Matching, Boris Kovalerchuk, Sergei Kovalerchuk

Computer Science Faculty Scholarship

Correlating and fusing video frames from distributed and moving sensors is important area of video matching. It is especially difficult for frames with objects at long distances that are visible as single pixels where the algorithms cannot exploit the structure of each object. The proposed algorithm correlates partial frames with such small objects using the algebraic structural approach that exploits structural relations between objects including ratios of areas. The algorithm is fully affine invariant, which includes any rotation, shift, and scaling.

Understanding Effects Of Presentation On Concept Learning In Technology Supported Learning, Nivedita Singh

Theses

The world of technology has had a significant impact on learning and instructional domain. Today, a large number of devices and software are specifically designed to afford faster and effective learning and instruction. They have not only erased the physical boundaries to resources in education but have also helped create new interactions and engagements for learners and instructors. With this changed scenario, the content or instructional material also needs our attention to become usable and compatible with the changed learning styles and preferences of the learners today. Not only does the content need to seamlessly integrate with the delivery methodology …

Guinform: Interactive Fiction For Gui Prototyping, Tesca Fitzgerald

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

There are many methods of rapidly prototyping a graphical user interface (GUI), the most prominent being paper prototyping and wireframe prototyping. In paper prototyping, the developer creates a physical GUI prototype using simple materials such as paper, pencils, and tabbed cards. Paper prototyping, while easy to implement, leads to unrealistic and awkward user interaction. Wireframe prototyping involves the use of simplified software tools to develop a primitive version of the proposed user interface. This method enables graceful interaction, but requires major implementation e↵ort. I propose a middle ground: a method of rapid, interactive GUI prototyping using Interactive Fiction (IF) tools. …

Gravity Evolved, Clark Duvall

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Gravity Evolved is a galactic physics game, created for mobile devices. In the game, you make your own solar system by creating planets, and then placing weapons on the planets. The physics of these planets and projectiles shot by the weapons are then simulated. Gravity Evolved has a Battle mode, where your solar system is pitted against an opposing solar system. In Battle mode, you earn money to unlock, create, and upgrade items in your solar system. Gravity Evolved will be on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in the summer of 2013.

Channels: Easy Video Content Consumption, Alexander R. Ledwith

Computer Engineering

The idea for this project is to take a user’s digital movie and television show library, and organize the individual videos into lists that will continuously and concurrently play like cable TV channels. This means that when a list of channels is switched to, video content will automatically start playing, possibly in the middle, based on a schedule. It should serve the needs of the user by allowing the user to quickly watch any of their existing channels, easily add a new channel based on chosen criteria or manual selection, and easily add new video content. In addition, the product …

Finding Evidence Of Metacognition In An Eportfolio Community: Beyond Text, Across New Media, Kathryn Wozniak, Jose Zagal

School of Continuing and Professional Studies Faculty and Staff Works

Finding evidence of how metacognition is demonstrated in educational ePortfolios is often limited to written artifact analysis and ignores new media such as images, video, links, and navigation schema. This study seeks to begin to fill this gap through a qualitative content analysis of 30 learners’ ePortfolios developed in a networked ePortfolio community. We found evidence of learners’ metacognition in their choices, integration, and organization of new media content in the ePortfolio. We propose that intentional analysis of learners’ choices and arrangement of new media can help educators and researchers find additional evidence of metacognition beyond text within digital learning …

3d Virtual Worlds And The Metaverse: Current Status And Future Possibilities, John David N. Dionisio, William G. Burns Iii, Richard Gilbert

Computer Science Faculty Works

Moving from a set of independent virtual worlds to an integrated network of 3D virtual worlds or Metaverse rests on progress in four areas: immersive realism, ubiquity of access and identity, interoperability, and scalability. For each area, the current status and needed developments in order to achieve a functional Metaverse are described. Factors that support the formation of a viable Metaverse, such as institutional and popular interest and ongoing improvements in hardware performance, and factors that constrain the achievement of this goal, including limits in computational methods and unrealized collaboration among virtual world stakeholders and developers, are also considered.

Shark Sim: A Procedural Method Of Animating Leopard Sharks Based On Raw Location Data, Katherine S. Blizard

Master's Theses

Fish such as the Leopard Shark (Triakis semifasciata) can be tagged on their fin, released back into the wild, and their location tracked though technologies such as autonomous robots. Timestamped location data about their target is stored. We present a way to procedurally generate an animated simulation of T. semifasciata using only these timestamped location points.

This simulation utilizes several components. Input timestamps dictate a monotonic time-space curve mapping the simulation clock to the space curve. The space curve connects all the location points as a spline without any sharp folds that are too implausible for shark traversal. We create …

Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes

Master's Theses

In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between "a nice rock" and "a gneiss rock". These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words.

Our paper demonstrates a technique used to validate word frequency dictionary values. We chose to use frequency values from the UNISYN dictionary, which tallies each word on a per-occurance basis, using a proprietary text corpus, …

Computer Sketch Recognition, Richard Steigerwald

Master's Theses

Tens of thousands of years ago, humans drew sketches that we can see and identify even today. Sketches are the oldest recorded form of human communication and are still widely used. The universality of sketches supersedes that of culture and language. Despite the universal accessibility of sketches by humans, computers are unable to interpret or even correctly identify the contents of sketches drawn by humans with a practical level of accuracy.

In my thesis, I demonstrate that the accuracy of existing sketch recognition techniques can be improved by optimizing the classification criteria. Current techniques classify a 20,000 sketch crowd-sourced dataset …

Evaluating Usability Evaluations, Allen Leo Dunlea

Master's Theses

We live in an age when consumers can now shop and browse the web using hand-held devices. This means that competitive companies need to have a website to represent their brand and to conduct business. E-commerce sites need to pay special attention to the usability of their sites, since it has such an impact on how potential costumers view their brand.

Jakob Nielsen defines usability as a "quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use"; he separates usability into five quality components: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors and satisfaction. The current standard for testing usability involves having …

An Examination Of Presentation Strategies For Textual Data In Augmented Reality, Kanrawi Kitkhachonkunlaphat

Department of Computer Graphics Technology Degree Theses

Videos with embedded text have been widely used in the past and the text in the videos usually contained valuable information. However, it was difficult for people to fully understand the text in videos displayed on smartphones due to obstructions such as color conflicts between letters and the moving background. Adjustments to texts that would support the human visual system, such as changes to brightness and color contrast, increased legibility of text, and taking into account the phantom illumination (PI) illusion (the optical illusion that increases the perception of brightness in a certain area), should be able to improve peoples’ …

Building Capable, Energy-Efficient, Flexible Visualization And Sensing Clusters From Commodity Tablets, Thomas Delgado Dias, Xian Yan, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

We explore the application of clusters of commodity tablet devices to problems spanning a “trilogy” of concerns: visualization, sensing, and computation. We conjecture that such clusters provide a low-cost, energy-efficient, flexible, and ultimately effective platform to tackle a wide range of problems within this trilogy. This is a work in progress, and we now elaborate our position and give a preliminary status report.

A wide range of Android tablet devices are available in terms of price and capabilities. “You get what you pay for” w.r.t. display resolution, sensors, and chipset---corresponding to the trilogy. $200 gets one a 1280x800-pixel touch display, …

Mebook: A Novel Device Using Video Self-Modeling To Enhance Literacy Among Children With Asd, Nchuaobah Ukaobah, Ju Shen, Sen-Ching S. Cheung

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The aim is to build a video application, MEBOOK, to overlay features of the protagonist on the face of the reader and replace the scene background with animated video pertinent to the story.

Personalized News Recommender Using Twitter, Satya Srinivasa Nirmal Jonnalagedda

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Online news reading has become a widely popular way to read news articles from news sources around the globe. With the enormous amount of news articles available, users are easily swamped by information of little interest to them. News recommender systems are one approach to help users find interesting articles to read. News recommender systems present the articles to individual users based on their interests rather than presenting articles in order of their occurrence. In this thesis, we present our research on developing personalized news recommendation system with the help of a popular micro-blogging service "Twitter". The news articles are …

Onespace: Shared Depth-Corrected Video Interaction, David Ledo, Bon Adriel Aseniero, Sebastian Boring, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Video conferencing commonly employs a video portal metaphor to connect individuals from remote spaces. In this work, we explore an alternate metaphor, a shared depth mirror, where video images of two spaces are merged into a single shared, depth-corrected video. Just as seeing one’s mirror image causes reflective interaction, the shared video space changes the nature of interaction in the video space. We realize this metaphor in OneSpace, where the space respects virtual spatial relationships between people and objects, and in so doing, encourages cross-site, full-body interactions. We report preliminary observations of OneSpace in use, describing the role of depth …

Identifying Robust Sift Features For Improved Image Alignment, Sanjay Abhinav Vemuri

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we will study different ways to improve feature matching by increasing the quality and reducing the number of SIFT features. We created an algorithm to identify robust SIFT features by evaluating how invariant individual feature points are to changes in scale. This allows us to exclude poor SIFT feature points from the matching process and obtain better matching results in reduced time. We also developed techniques consider scale ratios and changes in object orientation when performing feature matching. This allows us to exclude false-positive feature matches and obtain better image alignment results.

Personal Informatics In Chronic Illness Management, Haley Macleod, Anthony Tang, Sheelagh Carpendale

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many people with chronic illness suffer from debilitating symptoms or episodes that inhibit normal day-to-day function. Pervasive tools offer the possibility to help manage these conditions, particularly by helping people understand their conditions. But, it is unclear how to design these tools, as prior designs have focused on effortful tracking and many see those tools as a burden to use. We report here on an interview study with 12 individuals with chronic illnesses who collect personal data. We learn that these people are motivated through self-discovery and curiosity. We explore how these concepts may support the design of tools that …

An Architecture For Online Semantic Labeling On Ugvs, Arne Suppe, Luis Navarro-Serment, Daniel Munoz, Drew Bagnell, Martial Hebert

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe an architecture to provide online semantic labeling capabilities to field robots operating in urban environments. At the core of our system is the stacked hierarchical classifier developed by Munoz et al.,1 which classifies regions in monocular color images using models derived from hand labeled training data. The classifier is trained to identify buildings, several kinds of hard surfaces, grass, trees, and sky. When taking this algorithm into the real world, practical concerns with difficult and varying lighting conditions require careful control of the imaging process. First, camera exposure is controlled by software, examining all of the image’s pixels, …

Unified Entity Search In Social Media Community, Ting Yao, Yuan Liu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tao Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The search for entities is the most common search behavior on the Web, especially in social media communities where entities (such as images, videos, people, locations, and tags) are highly heterogeneous and correlated. While previous research usually deals with these social media entities separately, we are investigating in this paper a unified, multilevel, and correlative entity graph to represent the unstructured social media data, through which various applications (e.g., friend suggestion, personalized image search, image tagging, etc.) can be realized more effectively in one single framework. We regard the social media objects equally as “entities” and all of these applications …

Development Of A Comprehensive Database System For A Highway Safety Engineering And Management, Naveen Veeramisti, Justin Baker, Indira Khanal, Kenny Moupita, Alexander Paz

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

In simple words, the objective of this study is to develop a comprehensive database system to provide a data for highway safety engineering and management.

Development Of A Smart Application For Police Crash Reports, Sebastien Bonnet, Victor Molano, Alexander Paz

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

• Gaining a significant amount of time to help police work
• Developing a User Friendly Interface
• Optimizing the GPS Gaining a significant amount of time to help police work
• Developing a User Friendly Interface
• Optimizing the bar code scan technology
• Application for MC 75 mobile technology

A Visualization Tool For A Highway Safety Management System, Indira Khanal, Naveen Veeramisti, Justin Baker, Alexander Paz

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

• With lot of research, Federal Highway Administration
  has released a highway Safety management System
  software called as SafetyAnalyst (SA)
• SA has a suite of analytical tools to identify and
  manage system-wide safety improvements:
  Network Screening
  Diagnosis and Countermeasure Selection
  Economic Analyses and priority Ranking
  Countermeasure Evaluation
• SA provides a very rudimentary approach to display
  results just in tabular and textual format
• This study proposes a visualization tool that expands
  the output capabilities provided by SafetyAnalyst

Separable Subsurface Scattering: An Opengl Implementation, Michael Tetzlaff

Honors Student Works

The light reflection of many materials, including skin, milk, and marble, are not dominated by direct reflection, but rather by the subsurface scattering of light [1]. Most real-time computer graphics techniques, most notably Phong lighting, do not account for subsurface scattering of the diffuse reflectance term. Recently, however, Jorge Jiminez has produced an efficient technique involving only two screen-space blur passes which can achieve the effect of subsurface scattering in real time[3]. Jiminez’ implementation was in Microsoft’s DirectX, so this project is an attempt to implement his technique in OpenGL, which has free open-source implementations.

Your Brain On Video Games: Ted Talk Annotated Resource List, Jordan D. Dobbs

Undergraduate Research Award

No abstract provided.

Project Writeup On Amethyst: A 3d Adventure Game For Tablets, Adam Hintz

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Amethyst is a point-and-click science fiction adventure game for tablets, developed over two quarters to demonstrate applied principles of computer graphics and software engineering discipline. Using a novel interaction system, players can engage in environmental puzzles. Development of Amethyst required non-trivial quality assurance measures and workflow enhancements. The end result is a functional technical demo showcasing a single level, with the ability to rapidly produce more content.

Searching Visual Instances With Topology Checking And Context Modeling, Wei Zhang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Instance Search (INS) is a realistic problem initiated by TRECVID, which is to retrieve all occurrences of the querying object, location, or person from a large video collection. It is a fundamental problem with many applications, and also a challenging problem different from the traditional concept or near-duplicate (ND) search, since the relevancy is defined at instance level. True responses could exhibit various visual variations, such as being small on the image with different background, or showing a non-homography spatial configuration. Based on the Bag-of-Words model, we propose two techniques tailored for Instance Search. Specifically, we explore the use of …

The Use Of Visual-Based Simulated Environments In Teacher Preparation, Sharon Judge, Jonna Bobzien, Ann Maydosz, Sabra Gear, Petros Katsioloudis

Communication Disorders & Special Education Faculty Publications

While virtual technology for training in the simulation field has a long history in medicine, aviation, and the military, the application of similar emerging and innovative technologies in teacher preparation and education has been limited. TLE TeachLive™ (Teaching Learning Environment, Teaching in a Virtual Environment) [TLE] is an inventive mixed-reality environment (the blending of real and synthetic content) where prospective teachers can interact with a group of virtual students. The purpose of the virtual teaching environment of TLE is to strengthen teacher recruitment, preparation, and retention in education by allowing teachers to improve their skills with virtual students, providing a …

Circular Reranking For Visual Search, Ting Yao, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Search reranking is regarded as a common way to boost retrieval precision. The problem nevertheless is not trivial especially when there are multiple features or modalities to be considered for search, which often happens in image and video retrieval. This paper proposes a new reranking algorithm, named circular reranking, that reinforces the mutual exchange of information across multiple modalities for improving search performance, following the philosophy that strong performing modality could learn from weaker ones, while weak modality does benefit from interacting with stronger ones. Technically, circular reranking conducts multiple runs of random walks through exchanging the ranking scores among …