Intelligent devices are quickly becoming necessities to support our activities during both work and play. We are already bound in a symbiotic relationship with these devices. An unfortunate effect of the pervasiveness of intelligent devices is the substantial investment of our time and effort to communicate intent. Even though our increasing reliance on these intelligent devices is inevitable, the limits of conventional methods for devices to perceive human expression hinders communication efficiency. These constraints restrict the usefulness of intelligent devices to support our activities. Our communication time and effort must be minimized to leverage the benefits of intelligent devices and seamlessly integrate them into society. Minimizing the time and effort needed to communicate our intent will allow us to concentrate on tasks in which we excel, including creative thought and problem solving. <br /><br /> An intuitive method to minimize human communication effort with intelligent devices is to take advantage of our existing interpersonal communication experience. Recent advances in speech, hand gesture, and facial expression recognition provide alternate viable modes of communication that are more natural than conventional tactile interfaces. Use of natural human communication eliminates the need to adapt and invest time and effort using less intuitive techniques required for traditional keyboard and mouse based interfaces. <br /><br /> Although the state of the art in natural but isolated modes of communication achieves impressive results, significant hurdles must be conquered before communication with devices in our daily lives will feel natural and effortless. Research has shown that combining information between multiple noise-prone modalities improves accuracy. Leveraging this complementary and redundant content will improve communication robustness and relax current unimodal limitations. <br /><br /> This research presents and evaluates a novel multimodal framework to help reduce the total human effort and time required to communicate with intelligent devices. This reduction is realized by determining human intent using a knowledge-based architecture that combines and leverages conflicting information available across multiple natural communication modes and modalities. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated using dynamic hand gestures and simple facial expressions characterizing basic emotions. It is important to note that the framework is not restricted to these two forms of communication. The framework presented in this research provides the flexibility necessary to include additional or alternate modalities and channels of information in future research, including improving the robustness of speech understanding. <br /><br /> The primary contributions of this research include the leveraging of conflicts in a closed-loop multimodal framework, explicit use of uncertainty in knowledge representation and reasoning across multiple modalities, and a flexible approach for leveraging domain specific knowledge to help understand multimodal human expression. Experiments using a manually defined knowledge base demonstrate an improved average accuracy of individual concepts and an improved average accuracy of overall intents when leveraging conflicts as compared to an open-loop approach.

Intelligent devices are quickly becoming necessities to support our activities during both work and play. We are already bound in a symbiotic relationship with these devices. An unfortunate effect of the pervasiveness of intelligent devices is the substantial investment of our time and effort to communicate intent. Even though our increasing reliance on these intelligent devices is inevitable, the limits of conventional methods for devices to perceive human expression hinders communication efficiency. These constraints restrict the usefulness of intelligent devices to support our activities. Our communication time and effort must be minimized to leverage the benefits of intelligent devices and seamlessly integrate them into society. Minimizing the time and effort needed to communicate our intent will allow us to concentrate on tasks in which we excel, including creative thought and problem solving. <br /><br /> An intuitive method to minimize human communication effort with intelligent devices is to take advantage of our existing interpersonal communication experience. Recent advances in speech, hand gesture, and facial expression recognition provide alternate viable modes of communication that are more natural than conventional tactile interfaces. Use of natural human communication eliminates the need to adapt and invest time and effort using less intuitive techniques required for traditional keyboard and mouse based interfaces. <br /><br /> Although the state of the art in natural but isolated modes of communication achieves impressive results, significant hurdles must be conquered before communication with devices in our daily lives will feel natural and effortless. Research has shown that combining information between multiple noise-prone modalities improves accuracy. Leveraging this complementary and redundant content will improve communication robustness and relax current unimodal limitations. <br /><br /> This research presents and evaluates a novel multimodal framework to help reduce the total human effort and time required to communicate with intelligent devices. This reduction is realized by determining human intent using a knowledge-based architecture that combines and leverages conflicting information available across multiple natural communication modes and modalities. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated using dynamic hand gestures and simple facial expressions characterizing basic emotions. It is important to note that the framework is not restricted to these two forms of communication. The framework presented in this research provides the flexibility necessary to include additional or alternate modalities and channels of information in future research, including improving the robustness of speech understanding. <br /><br /> The primary contributions of this research include the leveraging of conflicts in a closed-loop multimodal framework, explicit use of uncertainty in knowledge representation and reasoning across multiple modalities, and a flexible approach for leveraging domain specific knowledge to help understand multimodal human expression. Experiments using a manually defined knowledge base demonstrate an improved average accuracy of individual concepts and an improved average accuracy of overall intents when leveraging conflicts as compared to an open-loop approach.

<p>The research presented in this thesis investigates the design challenges associated with the development and use of mobile applications and tools for supporting collaboration in educational activities. These technologies provide new opportunities to promote and enhance collaboration by engaging learners in a variety of activities across different places and contexts. A basic challenge is to identify how to design and deploy mobile tools and services that could be used to support collaboration in different kinds of settings. There is a need to investigate how to design collaborative learning processes and to support flexible educational activities that take advantage of mobility. The main research question that I focus on is the identification of factors that influence the design of mobile collaborative learning.</p><p>The theoretical foundations that guide my work rely on the concepts behind computer supported collaborative learning and design-based research. These ideas are presented at the beginning of this thesis and provide the basis for developing an initial framework for understanding mobile collaboration. The empirical results from three different projects conducted as part of my efforts at the Center for Learning and Knowledge Technologies at Växjö University are presented and analyzed. These results are based on a collection of papers that have been published in two refereed international conference proceedings, a journal paper, and a book chapter. The educational activities and technological support have been developed in accordance with a grounded theoretical framework. The thesis ends by discussing those factors, which have been identified as having a significant influence when it comes to the design and support of mobile collaborative learning.</p><p>The findings presented in this thesis indicate that mobility changes the contexts of learning and modes of collaboration, requiring different design approaches than those used in traditional system development to support teaching and learning. The major conclusion of these efforts is that the learners’ creations, actions, sharing of experiences and reflections are key factors to consider when designing mobile collaborative activities in learning. The results additionally point to the benefit of directly involving the learners in the design process by connecting them to the iterative cycles of interaction design and research.</p>

Participatory Sensing (PS) systems rely on the willingness of mobile users to participate in the collection and reporting of data using a variety of sensors either embedded or integrated in their cellular phones. Users agree to use their cellular phone resources to sense and transmit the data of interest because these data will be used to address a collective problem that otherwise would be very difficult to assess and solve. However, this new data collection paradigm has not been very successful yet mainly because of the lack of incentives for participation and privacy concerns. Without adequate incentive and privacy guaranteeing mechanisms most users will not be willing to participate. This thesis concentrates on incentive mechanisms for user participation in PS system. Although several schemes have been proposed thus far, none has used location information and imposed budget and coverage constraints, which will make the scheme more realistic and efficient. A recurrent reverse auction incentive mechanism with a greedy algorithm that selects a representative subset of the users according to their location given a fixed budget is proposed. Compared to existing mechanisms, GIA (i.e., Greedy Incentive Algorithm) improves the area covered by more than 60 percent acquiring a more representative set of samples after every round, i.e., reduces the collection of unnecessary (redundant) data, while maintaining the same number of active users in the system and spending the same budget.

Supporting emerging mobile applications in densely populated environments requires connecting mobile users and their devices with the surrounding digital landscape. Specifically, the volume of digitally-available data in such computing spaces presents an imminent need for expressive mechanisms that enable humans and applications to share and search for relevant information within their digitally accessible physical surroundings. Device-to-device communications will play a critical role in facilitating transparent access to proximate digital resources. A wide variety of approaches exist that support device-to-device dissemination and query-driven data access. Very few, however, capitalize on the contextual history of the shared data itself to distribute additional data or to guide queries. This dissertation presents Gander, an application substrate and mobile middleware designed to ease the burden associated with creating applications that require support for sharing and searching of hyper-localized data in situ. Gander employs a novel trajectory-driven model of spatiotemporal provenance that enriches shared data with its contextual history -- annotations that capture data's geospatial and causal history across a lifetime of device-to-device propagation. We demonstrate the value of spatiotemporal data provenance as both a tool for improving ad hoc routing performance and for driving complex application behavior. This dissertation discusses the design and implementation of Gander's middleware model, which abstracts away tedious implementation details by enabling developers to write high-level rules that govern when, where, and how data is distributed and to execute expressive queries across proximate digital resources. We evaluate Gander within several simulated large-scale environments and one real-world deployment on the UT Austin campus. The goal of this research is to provide formal constructs realized within a software framework that ease the software engineering challenges encountered during the design and deployment of several applications in emerging mobile environments. / text

Η διπλωματική εργασία αυτή εκπονήθηκε στο Εργαστήριο της Ερευνητικής Ομάδας Αλληλεπίδρασης Ανθρώπου – Υπολογιστή του Τμήματος Ηλεκτρολόγων Μηχανικών και Τεχνολογίας Υπολογιστών υπό την επίβλεψη του καθ. Ν.Αβούρη. Στόχος της εργασίας είναι η σχεδίαση και ανάπτυξη μίας φορητής εφαρμογής – χωροευαίσθητου παιχνιδιού, με τη χρήση τεχνολογιών επαυξημένης πραγματικότητας. Ο χρήστης της εφαρμογής θα μπορεί να περιηγείται στον χώρο που ορίζει το παιχνίδι και να αλληλεπιδρά με πραγματικά αντικείμενα του χώρου αυτού, με σκοπό τη μάθηση και την ψυχαγωγία. Ο χώρος στον οποίο αναφέρεται η διπλωματική εργασία, είναι η πλατεία Γεωργίου Α’ στην Πάτρα. / This thesis was conducted at the Laboratory of Human Interaction Research Group - Computer Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering under the supervision of Prof. N.Avouris . The goal of this project is the design and development of a pervasive, location-based game, using augmented reality technologies . The user can navigate through the gamespace and interact with real-world objects, in order to learn and enjoy . The selected area, to which the thesis refers, is George the 1st Square, in Patras .

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

在數位時代來臨的今日，利用數位媒體或科技將虛擬的遊戲世界與現實的世界連結整合的隨境遊戲，乃是未來趨勢上相當重要的一種行銷手段。然而目前學界上卻沒有確切關於隨境遊戲的一套設計方法。有鑒於此，本研究先蒐集相關的理論與研究，進而發展出隨境遊戲模型與刺激閾模型。利用這兩個模型設計一個以推廣流浪動物TNR為議題的隨境遊戲—Trap paw。在Trap paw中，玩家可以透過各種不同的方式與情境在現實世界裡面尋找線索來進行遊戲。之後，研究者採用半結構式的深度訪談法，訪談了六位不同身份背景的玩家，以探詢他們對於遊戲的回饋與建議。綜合此訪談結果與創作經驗，除了修正Trap paw的遊戲內容外，也提出了關於使用上述兩個模型進行創作的幾點建議。 在實作之後，發現這兩個模型宛若隨境遊戲的基石般穩固、實用性也很高，沒有需要特別修改之處。只不過若要應用在行銷活動式隨境遊戲設計上的話，針對隨境遊戲模型的使用可提供三點建議：（1）考慮先從明顯易見的空間擴增發想遊戲架構。（2）嘗試創造可見的魔法圈界。（3）舉辦效果良好的慶典式遊戲活動。至於使用刺激閾模型的部分，則建議：將「權變因子」這個因素作為主動促使個體逆轉成容易接受遊戲的行為導向狀態；將「厭膩」與「挫折」這兩個因素作為尋找個體已經是處於行為導向狀態的情境。透過這兩種面向的思考，以求在正確的時間與場合讓個體接觸到遊戲，使其容易接受遊戲而成為真正的玩家。 / In this digital marketing generation, the pervasive games which connected the game world with the reality by ubiquitous computing or digital medias get more and more attentions as a method for marketing. However, there are still not specific design theories or methods of the pervasive games. For that I developed two models that can be used to design the pervasive game: pervasive game model and liminal model by the collections of concerned theories and studies. By the pervasive game model and the liminal model, I created a pervasive game which is about promoting TNR-—Trap paw. In the Trap paw, players can find clues in a wide range of ways and in the different scenario out of their imagines. Qualitative interview is adopted as a research method and I interviewed six people to look for the feedbacks and suggestions about the game. Combined with the outcomes of interviews and my personal experience, I modified parts of the game. In the end, I give some suggestions about creating a pervasive game by using these two models. After completing the game, I find out that the two models are not only stable as the foundation stones of the pervasive games, but they can be applied widely. No further modifications are needed. However, when applying the pervasive game model to the field of promoting campaign, there are three suggestions: (1) begin with the space expansion (2) try to make some visible or tangible magic circles (3) through some gaming ceremonies. As for using liminal model to developing a game, I suggest that “contingent events” can be used to be an active factor to reverse individuals from telic state into paratelic state and concerning “frustration” and “satiation” to be factors to define whether an individual is in the paratelic states. Through these kinds of thinking, game might contact to the target audience in the right time and space. In this way, it’s easier for them to embrace the game and become real players.

Weighted granular best matching algorithm is proposed for the operation of context matching in context-aware computing systems. New algorithm deals with the subjective, fuzzy and multidimensional characteristics of contextual information by using weights and a granular structure for contextual information. The proposal is applied on a case: CAPRA &ndash / Context-Aware Personal Reminder Agent tool to show the applicability of the new context matching algorithm. The obtained outputs showed that proposed algorithm produces the results which are more sensitive to the user&rsquo / s intention, more adaptive to the characteristics of the contextual information and applicable to a current Context-aware system.

Στόχος της εργασίας είναι η μελέτη, ανάπτυξη και αξιολόγηση συνεργατικών εφαρμογών σε φορητές συσκευές. Για την μελέτη αυτή, αναπτύχθηκε ένα παιχνίδι διάχυτου υπολογισμού, το οποίο υποστηρίζει την χρήση του από πολλούς παίκτες ταυτόχρονα και μπορεί να παιχτεί παράλληλα σε διαφορετικές πόλεις από διαφορετικές ομάδες παικτών. Το παιχνίδι αυτό ανήκει σε ένα αναδυόμενο είδος παιχνιδιών που αναμιγνύουν την πραγματικότητα με τον εικονικό ψηφιακό κόσμο, χρησιμοποιώντας τον πραγματικό χώρο σαν το περιβάλλον του παιχνιδιού. Το παιχνίδι που αναπτύχθηκε εδώ χρησιμοποιεί σαν βασικά στοιχεία την μπλόφα, την παραπλάνηση και την ανάθεση ρόλων. Για την ανάπτυξή του ακολουθήθηκε ένα επαναληπτικό μοντέλο σχεδιασμού με την αξιολόγηση να παίρνει μέρος με διάφορες τεχνικές και μεθόδους στα διάφορα στάδια ανάπτυξης. Η υλοποίηση πραγματοποιήθηκε για κινητά τηλέφωνα με λειτουργικό σύστημα Android, μια επίσης καινούργια πλατφόρμα για φορητές συσκευές από την Google και την OHA. / The aim of this project is the design, development and evaluation of collaborative applications on mobile devices. For this study, a pervasive game was developed, which supports the use of it by many players simultaneously and can be played simultaneously in different cities by different groups of players. This game belongs to an emerging genre that mixes reality with the virtual digital world, using the real space as the gaming environment. The game was developed here uses the main elements of the bluff, deception and the assignment of roles. For its development an iterative design model was followed. The evaluation phase took place with various techniques and methods in different stages of development. The implementation was made for mobile phones running Android, also a new platform for mobile devices from Google and the OHA.