Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Cse: U: Mixed-Initiative Personal Assistant Agents, Joshua W. Buck, Saverio Perugini, Tam Nguyen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Specification and implementation of flexible human-computer dialogs is challenging because of the complexity involved in rendering the dialog responsive to a vast number of varied paths through which users might desire to complete the dialog. To address this problem, we developed a toolkit for modeling and implementing task-based, mixed-initiative dialogs based on metaphors from lambda calculus. Our toolkit can automatically operationalize a dialog that involves multiple prompts and/or sub-dialogs, given a high-level dialog specification of it. The use of natural language with the resulting dialogs makes the flexibility in communicating user utterances commensurate with that in dialog completion paths—an aspect …

Homeomorphic Tetrahedral Tessellation For Biomedical Images, Jing Xu, Andrey N. Chernikov

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a novel algorithm for generating three-dimensional unstructured tetrahedral meshes for biomedical images. The method uses an octree as the background grid from which to build the final graded conforming meshes. The algorithm is fast and robust. It produces meshes with high quality since it provides dihedral angle lower bound for the output tetrahedra. Moreover, the mesh boundary is a geometrically and topologically accurate approximation of the object surface in the sense that it allows for guaranteed bounds on the two-sided Hausdorff distance and the homeomorphism between the boundaries of the mesh and the boundaries of the materials. The …

Cross-Modal Recipe Retrieval: How To Cook This Dish?, Jingjing Chen, Lei Pang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In social media users like to share food pictures. One intelligent feature, potentially attractive to amateur chefs, is the recommendation of recipe along with food. Having this feature, unfortunately, is still technically challenging. First, the current technology in food recognition can only scale up to few hundreds of categories, which are yet to be practical for recognizing ten of thousands of food categories. Second, even one food category can have variants of recipes that differ in ingredient composition. Finding the best-match recipe requires knowledge of ingredients, which is a fine-grained recognition problem. In this paper, we consider the problem from …

A Two-Sided Collaborative Transparent Display Supporting Workspace Awareness, Jiannan Li, Saul Greenberg, Ehud Sharlin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Transparent displays naturally support workspace awareness during face-to-face interactions. Viewers see another person’s actions through the display: gestures, gaze, body movements, and what one is manipulating on the display. Yet we can design even better collaborative transparent displays. First, collaborators on either side should be able to directly interact with workspace objects. Second, and more controversially, both sides should be capable of presenting different content. This affords: reversal of images/text in place (so that people on both sides see objects correctly); personal and private territories aligned atop each other; and GUI objects that provide different visuals for feedthrough vs. feedback. …

Easing Cross-Border Communication: Mobile-Mediated Communication And Its Framework, Kyungsub Choi, Young Soo Kim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Communication is probably the most critical component of an organization engaged in a cross-border collaboration. Today’s smart devices substantially contribute to such communication. Combined with social media, mobile communication technologies are becoming the main platform for many core functions within organizations. In this paper, we identified seven media identifiable attributes: synchronicity (SYN), de-individuation and co-presence (DCP), accessibility readiness (ARD), cognizance of environment change (CEC), wearability-portability (WRB) modality-select (MDS) and visibility (VSB). These seven attributes significantly impact the course of mobile-mediated communication. We believe that development of a theoretical perspective that embraces the complexity of mobile-mediated communication is due in order …

Building A Foundation For Digital Animation, Paulynne Castillo

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

An analysis of the Philippine digital animation sub-sector reveals that the key areas on which resources should be focused to move up the industry’s value chain are: 1) recruiting, developing, and retaining talent; 2) financing the cultivation of original content; and 3) expanding and improving the country’s information communication technology (ICT) infrastructure.

Musical Exercise For People With Visual Impairments, Ridwan Ahmed Khan

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

However, it is hard specifically for people with visual impairments to do exercise without proper guidance. They have accessibility issues and thus, without others ’ help, they cannot be sure if they are doing exercise in a consistent form. To address this problem, I have developed a Musical Exercise platform for people with visual impairments . With the help of audio feedback of Musical Exercise, people with visual impairments can perform exercises in a good form consistently. To assess usability of the system and compare different audio profiles of the system, I designed six different con ditions, including blindfolded or …

Distance Perception In Virtual Environment Through Head-Mounted Displays, Bochao Li

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Head-mounted displays (HMDs) are popular and affordable wearable display devices which facilitate immersive and interactive viewing experience. Numerous studies have reported that people typically underestimate distances in HMDs.

This dissertation describes a series of research experiments that examined the influence of FOV and peripheral vision on distance perception in HMDs and attempts to provide useful information to HMD manufacturers and software developers to improve perceptual performance of HMD-based virtual environments.

This document is divided into two main parts. The first part describes two experiments that examined distance judgments in Oculus Rift HMDs. Unlike numerous studies found significant distance compression, our …

Improving Everyday Computing Tasks With Head-Mounted Displays, James Walker

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The proliferation of consumer-affordable head-mounted displays (HMDs) has brought a rash of entertainment applications for this burgeoning technology, but relatively little research has been devoted to exploring its potential home and office productivity applications. Can the unique characteristics of HMDs be leveraged to improve users’ ability to perform everyday computing tasks? My work strives to explore this question.

One significant obstacle to using HMDs for everyday tasks is the fact that the real world is occluded while wearing them. Physical keyboards remain the most performant devices for text input, yet using a physical keyboard is difficult when the user can’t …

Evolving Art: Modifying Context Free Art With A Genetic Algorithm, Marina Kent

Scripps Senior Theses

Context Free Design Grammar (CFDG) is a programming language for defining recursive structures that can be used to create art. I use CFDG as a design space for genetic programming, experimenting with various options for crossover, mutation, and fitness. In this exploratory work, multiple generations are manually assessed to determine the usefulness of the mutation strategies and fitness functions. I find that simple value mutation and fitness that alters general program structure is not enough to produce an increase of interesting images in CFDG. I discuss these findings as well as future avenues of inquiry for genetic programming in artistic …

Visualizing Multidimensional Data With General Line Coordinates And Pareto Optimization, Jacob Brown

All Master's Theses

These results will show that the use of Linear General Line Coordinates (GLC-L) can visualize multidimensional data better than typical methods, such as Parallel Coordinates (PC). The results of using GLC-L will display visuals with less clutter than PC and be easier to see changes from one graph to the next. Visualizing the Pareto Frontier with GLC-L allows n-D data to be viewed at once, compared to typical methods that are limited to 2 or 3 objectives at a time. This method details the process of selecting a ”best” case, from a group of equals in the Pareto Subset and …

Creating A Game With Procedural Generation, Kirsten Baker

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In today’s world, gaming is ever growing in popularity. The amount of games is forever increasing and there are many genres of games to suit any player’s desires. I have created a game that generates explorable mazes. Originally written in Java as a 2D game, I translated it into C# and utilized the Unity game engine to make it 3D. The randomly generated mazes would allow players to have endless fun navigating through the different levels and customizing it to fit their preferences.

Iphone Swift 3 Development For “What’S Good?”, Cameron Reilly

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Cameron Reilly

Major: Computer Science Management Track

Project Sponsor: Michael Collard

What’s Good?

“What’s Good?” is an iOS application that uses augmented reality to present information about nearby restaurants to the user in real time. Users can hold up their device and look through their camera to see information presented above the restaurant including it’s name, average cost, and average review rating. The user’s location is gathered and used in tandem with the Zomato API to select what data display as those dining locations are currently near the user. Using the gyroscope, compass, and accelerometer to tell the exact orientation …

Game Collection Development And Marketing, Todd R. Locker Jr

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The reasons for completing this project include expanding my knowledge of programming features and methodology, and to learn about game platform development and design. This was done by using the Java programming language to create a game platform which can host a variable number of games. One of the most notable features that was utilized is the JavaFX platform. Much programming experience was gained from this platform and all the features and methods it provides for customization. The application that was produced is graphical user interface based and created with event-driven programming. The result of this project was a custom …

Designing An Intervention For Novice Programmers Based On Meaningful Gamification: An Expert Evaluation, Jenilyn L. Agapito, Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Gamification is defined as the addition of game-like elements and mechanics to non-game contexts to encourage certain desired behaviors. It is becoming a popular classroom intervention used in computer science instruction, including CS1, the first course computer science students take. It is being operationalized to enhance students' learning experience and achievement. However, existing studies have mostly implemented reward-based game elements which have resulted to contrasting behaviors among the students. Meaningful gamification, characterized as the use of game design elements to encourage users build internal motivation to behave in a certain way, is contended to be a more effective approach. The …

Real-Time Capture And Rendering Of Physical Scene With An Efficiently Calibrated Rgb-D Camera Network, Po-Chang Su

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

From object tracking to 3D reconstruction, RGB-Depth (RGB-D) camera networks play an increasingly important role in many vision and graphics applications. With the recent explosive growth of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) platforms, utilizing camera RGB-D camera networks to capture and render dynamic physical space can enhance immersive experiences for users. To maximize coverage and minimize costs, practical applications often use a small number of RGB-D cameras and sparsely place them around the environment for data capturing. While sparse color camera networks have been studied for decades, the problems of extrinsic calibration of and rendering with sparse RGB-D …

Grasping The Void: Immersion Tactics Using Gesture Controlled Physics Interaction Systems In Virtual Reality, Avery Rapson

Senior Independent Study Theses

This thesis uses the HTC Vive in Unity to compare two different types of object interaction systems in order to determine the effectiveness of physics based interaction systems in a virtual environment. The research problem that motivates this project is the fact that there is no standardized method for defining successful object interaction techniques in VR. There are numerous interaction techniques in VR that fall short of simulating realistic object interaction. This project explores a physics based interaction system and examines how effective it is by comparing it to a non-physics based system. A model house with various interactable objects …

Big Data Visualization Platform For Mixed Reality, Aliakbar Panahi

Theses and Dissertations

The visualization of data helps to provide faster and deeper insight into the data. In this work, a system for visualizing and analyzing big data in an interactive mixed reality environment is proposed. Such a system can be used for representing different types of data such as temporal, geospatial, network graph, and high dimensional. Also, an implementation of this system for four different data types are created. The data types include network data, volumetric data, high dimensional, and spectral data for different mixed reality devices such as Microsoft HoloLens, Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, and Android ARCore were created. It …

Online Health Recommendation System: A Social Support Perspective, Tareq Nasralah, Cherie Noteboom, Abdullah Wahbeh, Mohammad Aref Al-Ramahi

Research & Publications

Online Health Communities (OHC) aim to support patients through offer them the opportunities to exchange support with others. However, patients have difficulties and problems locating expertise within the online health communities. In this regard, this study aims to create a patient recommender system to help users locate those with relevant experience and similar health status. Specifically, we aim to leverage the type of online social support users seek to determine the patient health status to build a patient status prediction model. Building the model will help create a peer recommendation system for online support group members to easily locate peers …

Towards A Continuous Assessment Of Cognitive Workload For Smartphone Multitasking Users, Angel Jimenez-Molina, Hernan Lira

H-Workload 2017: Models and Applications (Works in Progress)

The intermeshing of Smartphone interactions and daily activities depletes the availability of cognitive resources. This excessive demand may lead to several undesirable cognitive states, which can be avoided by continuously assessing the user cognitive workload. Recently, many attempts have emerged to assess this workload by using psycho physiological signals. This paper provides evidence that it is possible to train models that accurately identify in short time windows such cognitive workload by processing heart rate and blood oxygen saturation signals. This assessment could be applied in Smartphone notification delivery, interface adaptations or cognitive capabilities evaluation.