Freehand gestures have long been considered to potentially deliver natural, intuitive, terse but powerful human-computer interaction techniques. Over years, researchers have been attempting to employ freehand gestures as an alternative input modality to the conventional devices (e.g. keyboard and mouse) in a wide array of application domains, and a huge number of gesture recognition systems and gesture-based interaction techniques have been created in lab. However, a fundamental question remains: is it possible to establish an interaction framework so that we may approach freehand gestural interaction from a systematic perspective, and design coherent and consistent freehand gesture-based human-computer interaction experience? Existing research tends to focus on the technologies that enable the gestural interaction, or on the novel design of gestural interaction techniques for specific tasks and applications. Such "point designs" are claimed to be insufficient, and an existing application-specific design lends very limited insights and guidance to design problems in another application. An interaction framework allows us to move from individual designs to a more holistic approach. The goal of this research is to construct a framework to support a systematic approach for designing freehand gesture-based interactions. Toward this goal our research began with a review and examination of the gesture interaction literature, followed by an analysis of the essential components of an interaction framework. We then proposed and justified the scope of research and the approach we took to construct the interaction framework. We have designed and evaluated (analytically and empirically) gestural interaction techniques for two broad categories of freehand gestures we specified — spatial gestures, and surface gestures. In the design activity, we have discovered and proposed the core design principles and guidelines, and validated them via user studies. Finally, we assessed the ability of the freehand gesture interaction framework we have constructed to help designers create new applications and designs, by putting together a few proof-of-concept examples of a coherent and consistent freehand gesture user interface. / Ph. D.

Children of the 21st century are digital learners and have various technologies at their fingertips. As a result, classrooms have evolved and school systems are equipping students and teachers with the technological tools that are believed to meet the needs of 21st century learners. However, researchers say there is still a need to examine students\ and teachers' perceptions of, and attitudes about, technology and its use in the classroom (Maninger & Holden, 2009). There has also been a growing interest in knowing if the investment of the technology is having any positive effects in the classroom, what effect technology has on academic progress, and understanding what teachers and students think about the implementation and integration of technology in the classroom as an instructional tool. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of middle school teachers and students, in a select rural Virginia middle school, on the effect that one-to-one computing had on the frequency and type of instruction that is taking place in the core areas of English, math, science, and social studies.  The study also looked at the teachers' and students' perceived effect on the educational performance of individual subgroups. A quantitative analysis was done using an electronic survey, which provided information on the perceived frequency and type of educational activities using one-to-one computers and the perceived effect one-to-one computing had on the educational performance of different subgroups. Questions on the survey were developed by correlating the theoretical ideas of Bloom's taxonomy / Bloom's web 2.0 technology pyramids and then categorizing the questions so the complexity of the questions could be looked at on the range of use chart. The research found, of the students surveyed, 90% of English students, 78% of math students, 75% of science students, and 77% of social studies students found the computers to have a positive effect on their academic performance. Therefore, one major finding of this study was that students' perceptions of the overall effect of one-to-one computers were positive. / Ed. D.

University, Diss.--Bamberg, 2007.

As people age there is an overwhelming desire to remain in the familiar surroundings of the family home, what is called Aging in Place. But inevitable changes that occur in their lives force the aging adults and their families to consider a move to some form of institutional living. Living at a distance from one another, the adult child attempts to maintain peace of mind concerning the well-being of their aging parents but finds it to be a difficult task. I propose to address this problem by first proposing that technology can help minimize the anxieties experienced by the adult child concerning their aging parents well being by appropriately presenting information on the aging parents daily life. This technological design concept does not require that the aging parent input, or for that matter, do anything other than live their lives as they normally live them. Further, this technology provides this information in a manner that is continuously available to the adult child for either opportunistic or planned perusal. As a single instance of the technological design concept proposed above, the Digital Family Portrait embeds well-being related information into an item commonly found in homes, the picture in a picture frame. The Digital Family Portrait was first tested in a wizard-of-oz field trial, then redesigned based on the outcome of this initial field trial coupled with the results of two lab-based studies and a further informal evaluation. The redesigned Digital Family Portrait was built and installed in the home of an adult child while the sensors to drive it were installed in an aging parents home. A field trial of this installation lasting for one year was conducted. The result of this field trial was to find that the Digital Family Portrait was an acceptable means of resolving certain peace of mind issues for the adult child while not raising privacy. It was found to be used in a socially acceptable manner by the adult child while the aging parent to reported feeling less lonely.

Context-aware computing aims at making mobile devices sensitive to the social and physical settings in which they are used. A necessary requirement to achieve this goal is to enable those devices to establish a shared understanding of the desired settings. Establishing a shared understanding entails the need to manipulate sensed data in order to capture a real world situation wholly, conceptually, and meaningfully. Quite often, however, the data acquired from sensors can be inexact, incomplete, and/or uncertain. Inexact sensing arises mostly due to the inherent limitation of sensors to capture a real world phenomenon precisely. Incompleteness is caused by the absence of a mechanism to capture certain real-world aspects; and uncertainty stems from the lack of knowledge about the reliability of the sensing sources, such as their sensing range, accuracy, and resolution. The thesis identifies a set of criteria for a context-aware system to capture dynamic real-world situations. On the basis of these criteria, a distributed architecture is designed, implemented and tested. The architecture consists of Primitive Context Servers, which abstract the acquisition of primitive contexts from physical sensors; Aggregators, to minimise error caused by inconsistent sensing, and to gather correlated primitive contexts pertaining to a particular entity or situation; a Knowledge Base and an Empirical Ambient Knowledge Component, to model dynamic properties of entities with facts and beliefs; and a Composer, to reason about dynamic real-world situations on the basis of sensed data. Two additional components, namely, the Event Handler and the Rule Organiser, are responsible for dynamically generating context rules by associating decision events ? signifying a user?s activity ? with the context in which those decision events are produced. Context-rules are essential elements with which the behaviour of mobile devices can be controlled and useful services can be provided. Four estimation and recognition schemes, namely, Fuzzy Logic, Hidden Markov Models, Dempster-Schafer Theory of Evidence, and Bayesian Networks, are investigated, and their suitability for the implementation of the components of the architecture of the thesis is studied. Subsequently, fuzzy sets are chosen to model dynamic properties of entities. Dempster-Schafer?s combination theory is chosen for aggregating primitive contexts; and Bayesian Networks are chosen to reason about a higher-level context, which is an abstraction of a real-world situation. A Bayesian Composer is implemented to demonstrate the capability of the architecture in dealing with uncertainty, in revising the belief of the Empirical Ambient Knowledge Component, in dealing with the dynamics of primitive contexts and in dynamically defining contextual states. The Composer could be able to reason about the whereabouts of a person in the absence of any localisation sensor. Thermal, relative humidity, light intensity properties of a place as well as time information were employed to model and reason about a place. Consequently, depending on the variety and reliability of the sensors employed, the Composer could be able to discriminate between rooms, corridors, a building, or an outdoor place with different degrees of uncertainty. The Context-Aware E-Pad (CAEP) application is designed and implemented to demonstrate how applications can employ a higher-level context without the need to directly deal with its composition, and how a context rule can be generated by associating the activities (decision events) of a mobile user with the context in which the decision events are produced.

Context-aware computing aims at making mobile devices sensitive to the social and physical settings in which they are used. A necessary requirement to achieve this goal is to enable those devices to establish a shared understanding of the desired settings. Establishing a shared understanding entails the need to manipulate sensed data in order to capture a real world situation wholly, conceptually, and meaningfully. Quite often, however, the data acquired from sensors can be inexact, incomplete, and/or uncertain. Inexact sensing arises mostly due to the inherent limitation of sensors to capture a real world phenomenon precisely. Incompleteness is caused by the absence of a mechanism to capture certain real-world aspects; and uncertainty stems from the lack of knowledge about the reliability of the sensing sources, such as their sensing range, accuracy, and resolution. The thesis identifies a set of criteria for a context-aware system to capture dynamic real-world situations. On the basis of these criteria, a distributed architecture is designed, implemented and tested. The architecture consists of Primitive Context Servers, which abstract the acquisition of primitive contexts from physical sensors; Aggregators, to minimise error caused by inconsistent sensing, and to gather correlated primitive contexts pertaining to a particular entity or situation; a Knowledge Base and an Empirical Ambient Knowledge Component, to model dynamic properties of entities with facts and beliefs; and a Composer, to reason about dynamic real-world situations on the basis of sensed data. Two additional components, namely, the Event Handler and the Rule Organiser, are responsible for dynamically generating context rules by associating decision events ? signifying a user?s activity ? with the context in which those decision events are produced. Context-rules are essential elements with which the behaviour of mobile devices can be controlled and useful services can be provided. Four estimation and recognition schemes, namely, Fuzzy Logic, Hidden Markov Models, Dempster-Schafer Theory of Evidence, and Bayesian Networks, are investigated, and their suitability for the implementation of the components of the architecture of the thesis is studied. Subsequently, fuzzy sets are chosen to model dynamic properties of entities. Dempster-Schafer?s combination theory is chosen for aggregating primitive contexts; and Bayesian Networks are chosen to reason about a higher-level context, which is an abstraction of a real-world situation. A Bayesian Composer is implemented to demonstrate the capability of the architecture in dealing with uncertainty, in revising the belief of the Empirical Ambient Knowledge Component, in dealing with the dynamics of primitive contexts and in dynamically defining contextual states. The Composer could be able to reason about the whereabouts of a person in the absence of any localisation sensor. Thermal, relative humidity, light intensity properties of a place as well as time information were employed to model and reason about a place. Consequently, depending on the variety and reliability of the sensors employed, the Composer could be able to discriminate between rooms, corridors, a building, or an outdoor place with different degrees of uncertainty. The Context-Aware E-Pad (CAEP) application is designed and implemented to demonstrate how applications can employ a higher-level context without the need to directly deal with its composition, and how a context rule can be generated by associating the activities (decision events) of a mobile user with the context in which the decision events are produced.

This dissertation is based upon the work within a number of research projects, five of which are presented in detail. The work follows the direction of research laid out by the Ubiquitous Computing and Augmented Reality research programs and concerns the broad question of where to go as we seek to take digital technology, and human interactions with this technology, beyond the traditional desktop computer. The work presented takes a design-oriented approach to Human Computer Interaction research. Five prototype systems are presented: Ambient displays for remote awareness, a navigation device providing guidance through tactile cues, a personal device for wastewater plant operators, paper cards enabling control of video playback, and a cell phone that enables you to ‘talk silent’. It is discussed how these prototypes, despite obvious differences, all reflect the same overall attitude towards the role of digital technology. It is an attitude emphasizing that integration of digital technology with everyday human activities means making computational power manifest as part of a larger patchwork of resources. Furthermore, it is an attitude promoting the design of digital technology that leaves the control and initiative with people and their earned ability to take appropriate action when faced with the particularities of the social and physical settings encountered in everyday life beyond the computer screen. In other words, this dissertation brings forward, by using five prototypes as examples, an attitude that encourages us to recognize, embrace, and take advantage of, the fact that human interaction with digital technology takes place, not in a vacuum, but in a rich and diverse world full of many resources for human action other than the digital technology we bring about. / <p>In collaboration with School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, Sweden.</p>

Services based on the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) are present more and more in the lives of people. The advancement of ICT in technical and social acceptance terms has led the creation of new models of service provision. These provision models involve further integration with people's activities so that are not only present in their professions or civic space but also in a more intimate areas related to their own identity. So it is now common to find services aware of user's health, their domestic habits, ideology, etc. Therefore, the analysis of existing services must be open out to include other aspects related to the way of being and feeling of their members. This way is possible to ensure both the technical correctness of its features as promoting safe and respectful solutions both of civic rights as the way of being and feeling of its members. From the engineering point of view, the user perspective has historically encompassed under the concept of technological acceptance. Within this field can be interpreted as friendly solutions adapted to users will encourage the acceptance by them. Solution acceptance is desirable although it is difficult to ensure. This difficulty is due to the lack of the number of variables that affect the acceptance of technological solutions and the difficulty of optimizing the known variables. In this thesis it is studied and characterized one of the variables that affect the acceptance of existing services: confidence. Confidence is defined in psychological terms, providing its characterization with the aim of be used in typical methods of engineering. Also different tools are proposed to facilitate the optimization of this confidence in services whose complexity establishes this variable in a basic issue to improve acceptance. Health services deployed in a home have been chosen as working context for this thesis. This scenario presents a number of acceptance restrictions on the technology used to create services and how they manage the acquired user information. It comes to highly sensitive and delocalized services that can affect to the user's perception of the environment, the home, and generate fear or rejection to prevent final adoption as a valid solution. Once defined the generic framework, the main objective of this dissertation is focused on promote the acceptance of new pervasive and personalized health services and their deployment in domestic intelligent environments through a layout that promotes a psychological state of confidence in users. To achieve this goal, a set of results, both conceptual, technological and experimental, have been provided. In particular, it has offered a complete characterization of the feeling of confidence from a viewpoint of engineering and a definition of sensitive or delocalized pervasive service. Furthermore, a method for the inclusion of the Interaction Design discipline in engineering processes of such services through a set of patterns of interaction is offered. Finally, this thesis provides the development of a software architecture to ensure proper deployment of these pervasive sensitive services in intelligent environments in a confident way. Discussion of the results suggests the extension of the deployment model to different services of the Information Society that handle sensitive data both in the context of the digital home and other settings where the user perform everyday activities such as work spaces or schools. The future work lines include the imminent need to apply the results to ongoing developments, within research projects in those the author takes part, and the development of new research lines aimed at creating new spaces and interaction technologies as advanced accessible interfaces, toys of the future, confident visualization systems or security systems based on the condition of the user. / Tjänster baserade på informations- och kommunikationsteknik (IKT) blir allt mer vanligare i människors liv. För att främja acceptansen för IKT i både tekniska och sociala aspekter av människors liv har nya modeller för dessa tjänster skapats. Dessa modeller har en närmare knytning till människors verksamhet så att de inte bara förekommer i deras yrken eller fritid men också i mer intima områden som anknyter till individens egen identitet. Det är nu därför vanligt att hitta tjänster som tar hänsyn till användarens hälsa, vanor, ideologi, etc.  En analys av befintliga tjänster måste inkludera dessa aspekter men även användarnas känsla av identitet och medlemskap. På detta sätt är det möjligt att säkerställa den tekniska riktigheten hos dessa funktioner som i sin tur borgar för säkra och respektfulla lösningar som tar hänsyn till medlemmarnas medborgerliga rättigheter likväl som deras känsla av identitet och medlemskap. Historiskt sett, och ur ett tekniskt perspektiv, har användarperspektivet omfattats under begreppet teknisk acceptans. Inom detta område har användarvänliga lösningar anpassade till användarna själva uppmuntrat acceptans av dem. Acceptans av lösningar är önskvärt även om det är svårt att säkerställa. Denna svårighet beror på avsaknaden av antalet variabler som påverkar acceptansen av tekniska lösningar och svårigheten att optimera de kända variablerna. I denna avhandling studeras och karaktäriseras en av de variabler som påverkar acceptansen av befintliga tjänster: förtroende. Förtroendet definieras i psykologiska termer med syftet att kunna använda termen i typiska metoder för teknik. Det föreslås också olika verktyg för att underlätta optimering av detta förtroende inom tjänstesektorn. Hälso- och sjukvård i hemmet har valts som scenario för denna avhandling. Detta scenario presenterar ett antal restriktioner med avseende på acceptansen av den teknik som används för att skapa tjänster och hur dessa tjänster hanterar den förvärvade användarinformationen. För användaren är situationen mycket känslig och de erbjudna tjänsterna kan påverka användarens uppfattning av miljön och hemmet och/eller generera rädsla eller avsmak för att acceptera lösningen. När den generiska ramen är etablerad är det huvudsakliga syftet med denna avhandling att främja acceptans av nya tjänster för personlig hälsovård och deras användning i hemmet. Detta skall uppnås genom en layout som främjar ett psykologiskt förtroende hos användarna. För att uppnå detta mål har en uppsättning resultat, både begreppsmässiga, tekniska och experimentella, analyserats. Framför allt har en fullständig karaktärisering gjorts av känslan av förtroende från en teknologisk synvinkel och en definition av en känslig och allomfattande tjänst. Dessutom framläggs en metod för införandet av interaktionsdesign i de aktuella tjänsterna genom ett antal interaktionsmönster. Slutligen behandlar denna avhandling utvecklingen av en mjukvaruarkitektur för att säkerställa en korrekt användning av dessa känsliga tjänster. Resultaten pekar på att distributionsmodellen även kan användas för andra tjänster i informationssamhället där användaren utför vardagliga sysslor, såsom i det digitala hemmet eller andra miljöer (t.ex. skolor och arbetsplatser), där känsliga uppgifter hanteras. De framtida arbetsuppgifterna omfattar det överhängande behovet av att tillämpa resultaten på den pågående utvecklingen av forskningsprojekt som författaren är involverad i. Detta omfattar även utveckling av ny forskning som syftar till att skapa ny interaktionsteknik t.ex. avancerade gränssnitt, framtida leksaker, säkra visualiseringssystem eller säkerhetssystem baserat på användarens hälsa/tillstånd. / <p>This PhD research has been conducted under a double PhD agreement degree between the School of Telecommunications Systems and Engineering (ETSIST) at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) in Spain and the School of Technology and Health (STH) at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden.</p><p>QC 20160129</p>

Σε αυτή τη διδακτορική διατριβή μελετήσαμε τις δυνατότητες αξιοποίησης των οντολογιών στην αναπαράσταση γνώσης σε συστήματα απανταχού και κινητού υπολογίζειν. / In this thesis we studied the use of ontologies for knowledge representation in ubiquitous and mobile computing.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Computer Science and Information Systems / Master / Master of Philosophy