Visual search is an important component of many human-computer interactions and a critical task in a variety of domains. These include screening for prohibited items in x-ray imagery of luggage in airports, identifying anomalies in medical imagery, and looking for unusual activity and changes over time in satellite imagery. Unlike many other human-machine interface tasks where a small error rate is quite acceptable, a crucial element of visual search tasks in these application areas is that a single mistake can have catastrophic consequences. Thus, any improvements in technology, interfaces, or human processes that can be made to aid visual search would be invaluable in these safety critical areas. Furthermore, even when one does not consider consequential activities such as cancer screening and airport security, most human-computer interactions involve some search component, and the impact of even small improvements is magnified by a high frequency of use. This thesis explores how some of these issues affect individuals' and teams' ability to perform visual searching tasks. Considerations such as group size and display configuration are examined, as are novel interfaces that aid search on tabletop and wall displays. The overarching goal of this work is to provide system designers with immediately implementable advice and guidelines on how to improve their systems in respect to visual search and to outline further research in this critical area.

In recent years, integrated circuit technology has spawned the development of many low cost and high performance microprocessors and microcontrollers. With these devices, there is an increasing interest in the implementation of distributed control networks, utilizing microprocessors in the control nodes. In this work, a low-cost liquid crystal display (LCD) unit utilizing a Hitachi HD44780 controller was designed to provide a visual display node for COLAN (Control Oriented Local Area Network). An Intel 8051 microprocessor was used to provide control services for the display and also to provide a communication interface to the network. The users in the COLAN network can remotely display and easily control the panel of LCDs by sending commands to the display control nodes through the local area network. This capability is especially useful to provide instructions to operators, provide synchronization for human interaction, and for use in locating faults in the system. The software necessary for implementing display and control functions has been developed, including file transfer and text transfer between supervisory nodes and display nodes. This software fits within the task structure associated with the COLAN communication protocols. The display node has been designed, fabricated, and tested in a system involving multiple COLAN nodes and a personal computer host. The emphasis of this work is in the implementation of the display control node and HD44780 controller including hardware and software developments. The hardware work includes designing and interfacing, and the software work includes high level and low level language programming. / Graduation date: 1993

Visual search is an important component of many human-computer interactions and a critical task in a variety of domains. These include screening for prohibited items in x-ray imagery of luggage in airports, identifying anomalies in medical imagery, and looking for unusual activity and changes over time in satellite imagery. Unlike many other human-machine interface tasks where a small error rate is quite acceptable, a crucial element of visual search tasks in these application areas is that a single mistake can have catastrophic consequences. Thus, any improvements in technology, interfaces, or human processes that can be made to aid visual search would be invaluable in these safety critical areas. Furthermore, even when one does not consider consequential activities such as cancer screening and airport security, most human-computer interactions involve some search component, and the impact of even small improvements is magnified by a high frequency of use. This thesis explores how some of these issues affect individuals' and teams' ability to perform visual searching tasks. Considerations such as group size and display configuration are examined, as are novel interfaces that aid search on tabletop and wall displays. The overarching goal of this work is to provide system designers with immediately implementable advice and guidelines on how to improve their systems in respect to visual search and to outline further research in this critical area.

The Web has opened up many possibilities for disabled people to interact with society, but there is unfortunately a lack of parity between the user interface presented to different users. This dissertation presents a proof of concept on designing a spatial layout presentation for blind users using a screen reader. This is done in three steps by first conducting a survey to determine current practices of web developers, then implementing an instant spatial feedback and comparison function that present the spatial layout, and ends with an evaluation of the spatial layout presentation by the way of user testing The survey yielded a set of guidelines for the realistic development of web technologies for disabled persons based on the participants answered. From the implementation a concept for spatial feedback functions that are portable and expandable is presented. The evaluation shows that the created spatial presentation method passes both objectively and subjectively.

Dissertation (Ph.D.) - Simon Fraser University, 2006. / Theses (School of Kinesiology) / Simon Fraser University. Includes bibliographical references. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008. / Vita. Advisor : Gregory P. Crawford. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 149-174).

Thesis (M.S.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: hierarchy; sunburst; dimension reduction; high dimensional data set; multidimensional visualization; parallel coordinates; scatterplot matrices; star glyphs. Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-91).

ITC/USA 2012 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Eighth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2012 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / This paper discusses the current development of all-in-one telemetry displays. This system provides a self-configuring environment utilizing common telemetry display objects that setup and deploy. Often range display systems require frequent revision to reason with changing requirements. The display is rendered accordingly as a strip-chart equivalent or other element, per requirements from a flight safety officer for example. Our reusable code system approach is based on a novel abstraction of the display elements. The approach may be deployed beyond the decommutation stage as is typically done or interface directly to a plug in software decommutator. This system's plug-and-play functionality facilitates rapid deployment of interoperable Department of Defense (DOD) range displays and recorders.

Existing guidelines detail assessment criteria that should be used to evaluate offshore emergency response (ER) team members’ performance; however, minimal research has investigated this testing. Therefore, using a Human System Integration approach, this thesis examines the impact of including an electronic Emergency Response Focus Board (ERFB) during simulation testing. Archival ER performance videos were analyzed, subject matter experts (SMEs) were interviewed, and an iterative human-centered design process was used to test prototype ERFBs. Situation awareness, accuracy, and reaction times were collected during ERFB testing in simulated emergencies. Results indicate that SMEs use different assessment factors to predict future ER performance and that the type of ERFB and offshore experience significantly influenced speed and accuracy of responses. Based on these results, it was concluded that a dynamic ERFB improves the development and maintenance of SA. Therefore, it was recommended that a similar ERFB configuration be implemented into future offshore ER assessments.

As robots continue to enter people's spaces and environments, it will be increasingly important to have effective interfaces for interaction and communication. One such aspect of this communication is people's awareness of the robot's actions and state. We believe that using high-level state representations, as a peripheral awareness channel, will help people to be aware of the robotic states in an easy to understand way. For example, when a robot is boxed in a small area, it can suggest a negative robot state (e.g., not willing to work in a small area as it cannot clean the entire room) by appearing unhappy to people. To investigate this, we built a robotic dog tail prototype and conducted a study to investigate how different tail motions (based on several motion parameters, e.g., speed) influence people’s perceptions of the robot. The results from this study formed design guidelines that Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) designers can leverage to convey robotic states. Further, we evaluated our overall approach and tested these guidelines by conducting a design workshop with interaction designers where we asked them to use the guidelines to design tail behaviors for various robotic states (e.g., looking for dirt) for robots working in different environments (e.g., domestic service). Results from this workshop helped in improving the confusing parts in our guidelines and making them easy to use by the designers. In conclusion, this thesis presents a set of solidified design guidelines that can be leveraged by HRI designers to convey the states of robots in a way that people can readily understand when and how to interact with them.