Purpose: The purpose of the study was to compare two visually opposite design techniques: skeuomorphic design, recognizable for its realistic presentation, and flat design, an abstract design option that has gained popularity in the last years. The two designs were compared using two generations of Internet users to find out what the preferences were for each generation. A knowledge gap was found in which design that would be the most beneficial to use for each generation. Methodology: To fulfill the purpose of the study, two methods were used; a literature study and an empirical study. The empirical study included experiments, interviews and questionnaires. The participants were contacted personally or via social media. All participants were in the age of 20-30 or 65+. Findings: Based on the collected literature and empirical evidence, it was concluded that the older generation of users might tend to prefer the skeuomorphic, realistic design online. Bright colors and a pedagogical style creates a good visual for elderly eyes and inexpert of using internet. The younger generation might tend to prefer the flat and abstract way of design online. A modern appeal with less clutter compared to the skeuomorphic style is considered beneficial. This opens up for further investigation. Implications: The empirical study included 20 people, who all participated in the experiment, interviews and answered questionnaires. The study groups consisted of 10 persons at the age span 20-30 years and 10 persons at the age span of 65+ years. Limitations: The study was only focused on two specific age groups with a small population found through convenient sampling. This means that in the future, the research could be conducted in a broader matter including more age groups and a larger population with a more specific sampling. The study's extent was affected by the time period in which it was executed. A longer period of time could have contributed to a more extensive study, perhaps with additional age groups and more participants in each group.

Ka Keung Caramon Lee. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-105). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Contents --- p.iii / List of Figures --- p.vi / List of Tables --- p.ix / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Motivation --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Related Work --- p.3 / Chapter 1.2.1 --- Empirical Psychophysical Equations --- p.3 / Chapter 1.2.2 --- Industry Standards --- p.4 / Chapter 1.2.3 --- Fuzzy Logic --- p.4 / Chapter 1.2.4 --- Neural Networks --- p.5 / Chapter 1.3 --- Organization of Thesis --- p.7 / Chapter 2 --- Experimental Design --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1 --- Human Motion Sense --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2 --- Full-Body Motion Virtual Reality System --- p.12 / Chapter 2.3 --- Human Sensation Measure --- p.15 / Chapter 2.4 --- Trajectory Segmentation --- p.16 / Chapter 3 --- Learning and Validation of Human Sensation Models --- p.22 / Chapter 3.1 --- Cascade Neural Networks --- p.23 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Dynamic Mapping --- p.26 / Chapter 3.2 --- Experimental Trajectory Data --- p.26 / Chapter 3.3 --- Effect of Trajectory Segmentation --- p.31 / Chapter 3.4 --- Model Validation --- p.32 / Chapter 3.5 --- Similarity Measure --- p.33 / Chapter 3.6 --- Similarity Measure Results --- p.38 / Chapter 4 --- Input Reduction for Human Sensation Modeling --- p.40 / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.40 / Chapter 4.2 --- Input Reduction --- p.41 / Chapter 4.3 --- Feature Extraction and Input Selection --- p.42 / Chapter 4.4 --- Feature Extraction Using Principal Component Analysis --- p.44 / Chapter 4.5 --- Independent Component Analysis --- p.48 / Chapter 4.5.1 --- Measure of Gaussianity --- p.50 / Chapter 4.5.2 --- The Fixed Point ICA Algorithm --- p.51 / Chapter 4.6 --- Input Reduction Using Independent Component Analysis --- p.52 / Chapter 4.6.1 --- ICA Without Dimension Reduction --- p.52 / Chapter 4.6.2 --- Feature Extraction Using ICA --- p.55 / Chapter 4.6.3 --- Input Selection Using ICA --- p.57 / Chapter 4.6.4 --- Applying Input Selection by ICA on the Furnace Data --- p.58 / Chapter 4.6.5 --- Applying Input Selection by ICA to Sensation Modeling --- p.65 / Chapter 4.6.6 --- Cross Verification of Selected Inputs --- p.70 / Chapter 4.7 --- Summary on Input Reduction for Human Sensation Modeling --- p.72 / Chapter 5 --- Stimulus Modification Based on Human Sensation --- p.74 / Chapter 5.1 --- Need for Stimulus Modification --- p.74 / Chapter 5.2 --- Sensation Grades --- p.75 / Chapter 5.3 --- Trajectory Modification Scheme --- p.77 / Chapter 5.4 --- Experiments --- p.80 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusion --- p.86 / Chapter 6.1 --- Contributions --- p.86 / Chapter 6.2 --- Future Work --- p.87 / Chapter A --- Platform Model --- p.88 / Chapter A.1 --- Inverse Kinematics --- p.90 / Chapter A.2 --- Forward Kinematics --- p.93 / Chapter A.3 --- Platform Dynamics --- p.99 / Bibliography --- p.100

This thesis focuses on the design and evaluation of interactive music systems that enable non-experts to experience collaborative music-making in public set- tings, such as museums, galleries and festivals. Although there has been previous research into music systems for non-experts, there is very limited research on how participants engage with collaborative music environments in public set- tings. Informed by a detailed assessment of related research, an interactive, multi-person music system is developed, which serves as a vehicle to conduct practice-based research in real-world settings. A central focus of the design is supporting each player's individual sense of control, in order to examine how this relates to their overall playing experience. Drawing on approaches from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and interac- tive art research, a series of user studies is conducted in public settings such as art exhibitions and festivals. Taking into account that the user experience and social dynamics around such new forms of interaction are considerably in u- enced by the context of use, this systematic assessment in real-world contexts contributes to a richer understanding of how people interact and behave in such new creative spaces. This research makes a number of contributions to the elds of HCI, interactive art and New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). It provides a set of de- sign implications to aid designers of future collaborative music systems. These are based on a number of empirical ndings that describe and explain aspects of audience behaviour, engagement and mutual interaction around public, in- teractive multi-person systems. It provides empirical evidence that there is a correlation between participants' perceived level of control and their sense of cre- ative participation and enjoyment. This thesis also develops and demonstrates the application of a mixed-method approach for studying technology-mediated collaborative creativity with live audiences.

Gaze tracking technology is widely used in Human Computer Interaction applications such as in interfaces for assisting people with disabilities and for driver attention monitoring. However, commercially available gaze trackers are expensive and their performance deteriorates if the user is not positioned in front of the camera and facing it. Also, head motion or being far from the device degrades their accuracy. This thesis focuses on the development of real-time time appearance based gaze tracking algorithms using low cost devices, such as a webcam or Kinect. The proposed algorithms are developed by considering accuracy, robustness to head pose variation and the ability to generalise to different persons. In order to deal with head pose variation, we propose to estimate the head pose and then compensate for the appearance change and the bias to a gaze estimator that it introduces. Head pose is estimated by a novel method that utilizes tensor-based regressors at the leaf nodes of a random forest. For a baseline gaze estimator we use an SVM-based appearance-based regressor. For compensating the appearance variation introduced by the head pose, we use a geometric model, and for compensating for the bias we use a regression function that has been trained on a training set. Our methods are evaluated on publicly available datasets.

by Tsang Kwok Hang Elton. / Thesis submitted in: December 1998. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-83). / Abstract also in Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Virtual-hand Recognition --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- Hand model --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Hand structure --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Motions of the hand joints --- p.8 / Chapter 2.2 --- Hand-tracking technologies --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Glove-based tracking --- p.10 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- Image-based tracking --- p.12 / Chapter 2.3 --- Problems in virtual-hand recognition --- p.13 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Hand complexity --- p.13 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Human variations --- p.13 / Chapter 2.3.3 --- Immature hand-tracking technologies --- p.14 / Chapter 2.3.4 --- Time-varying signal --- p.14 / Chapter 2.3.5 --- Efficiency --- p.14 / Chapter 3 --- Previous Work --- p.16 / Chapter 3.1 --- Posture and gesture recognition algorithms --- p.16 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Template Matching --- p.17 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Neural networks --- p.18 / Chapter 3.1.3 --- Statistical classification --- p.20 / Chapter 3.1.4 --- Discontinuity matching --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1.5 --- Model-based analysis --- p.23 / Chapter 3.1.6 --- Hidden Markov Models --- p.23 / Chapter 3.2 --- Hand-input systems --- p.24 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Gesture languages --- p.25 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- 3D modeling --- p.25 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Medical visualization --- p.26 / Chapter 4 --- Posture Recognition --- p.28 / Chapter 4.1 --- Fuzzy concepts --- p.28 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- Degree of membership --- p.29 / Chapter 4.1.2 --- Certainty factor --- p.30 / Chapter 4.1.3 --- Evidence combination --- p.30 / Chapter 4.2 --- Fuzzy posture recognition system --- p.31 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Objectives --- p.32 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- System overview --- p.32 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- Input parameters --- p.33 / Chapter 4.2.4 --- Posture database --- p.36 / Chapter 4.2.5 --- Classifier --- p.37 / Chapter 4.2.6 --- Identifier --- p.40 / Chapter 5 --- Performance Evaluation --- p.42 / Chapter 5.1 --- Experiments --- p.42 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- Accuracy analysis --- p.43 / Chapter 5.1.2 --- Efficiency analysis --- p.46 / Chapter 5.2 --- Discussion --- p.48 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- Strengths and weaknesses --- p.48 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- Summary --- p.50 / Chapter 6 --- Posture Database Editor --- p.51 / Chapter 6.1 --- System architecture --- p.51 / Chapter 6.1.1 --- Hardware configuration --- p.51 / Chapter 6.1.2 --- Software tools --- p.53 / Chapter 6.2 --- User interface --- p.54 / Chapter 6.2.1 --- Menu bar --- p.55 / Chapter 6.2.2 --- Working frame and data frame --- p.56 / Chapter 6.2.3 --- Control panel --- p.56 / Chapter 7 --- An Application: 3D Virtual World Modeler --- p.59 / Chapter 7.1 --- System Design --- p.60 / Chapter 7.2 --- Common operations --- p.62 / Chapter 7.3 --- Virtual VRML Worlds --- p.65 / Chapter 8 --- Conclusion --- p.70 / Chapter 8.1 --- Summaries on previous work --- p.70 / Chapter 8.2 --- Contributions --- p.73 / Chapter 9 --- Future Work --- p.75 / Bibliography --- p.78

Kwok, Tsz Ho. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 161-175). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts also in Chinese.

Users of social networking services such as Facebook often want to manage the sharing of information and content with different groups of people based on their differing relationships. The growing popularity of such services has meant that users are increasingly faced with the copresence of different groups associated with different aspects of their lives, within their network of contacts. However, few users are utilising the group-based privacy controls provided to them by the SNS provider. In this thesis we examine the reasons behind the lack of use of group-based privacy controls, finding that it can be largely attributed to the significant burden associated with group configuration. We aim to overcome this burden by developing automated mechanisms to assist users with many aspects of group-based privacy control, including initial group configuration, labeling, adjustment and selection of groups for sharing privacy sensitive content. We use a mixed methods approach in order to understand: how automated mechanisms should be designed in order to support users with their privacy control, how well these mechanisms can be expected to work, what the limitations are, and how such mechanisms affect users’ experiences with social networking services and content sharing. Our results reveal the criteria that SNS users employ in order to configure their groups for privacy control and illustrate that off-the-shelf algorithms and techniques which are analogous to these criteria can be used to support users. We show that structural network clustering algorithms provide benefits for initial group configuration and that clustering threshold adjustments and detection of hubs and outliers with the network are necessary for group adjustment. We demonstrate that public profile data can be extracted from the network in order to help users to comprehend their groups, and that contextual information relating to context, contacts, and content can be used to make recommendations about which groups might be useful for disclosure in a given situation. We also show that all of these mechanisms can be used to significantly reduce the burden of privacy control and that users react positively to such features.

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Entrainment (sometimes called adaptation or alignment) is the tendency of human speakers to adapt to or imitate characteristics of their interlocutors' behavior. This work focuses on entrainment on acoustic-prosodic features. Acoustic-prosodic entrainment has been extensively studied but is not well understood. In particular, it is difficult to compare the results of different studies, since entrainment is usually measured in different ways, reflect- ing disparate conceptualizations of the phenomenon. In the first part of this thesis, we look for evidence of entrainment on a variety of acoustic-prosodic features according to various conceptualizations, and show that human speakers of both Standard American English and Mandarin Chinese entrain to each other globally and locally, in synchrony, and that this entrainment can be constant or convergent. We explore the relationship between entrainment and gender and show that entrainment on some acoustic-prosodic features is related to social behavior and dialogue coordination. In addition, we show that humans entrain in a novel domain, backchannel-inviting cues, and propose and test a novel hypothesis: that entrainment will be stronger in the case of an outlier feature value. In the second part of the thesis, we describe a method for flexibly and dynamically entraining a TTS voice to multiple acoustic-prosodic features of a user's input utterances, and show in an exploratory study that users prefer an entraining avatar to one that does not entrain, are more likely to ask its advice, and choose more positive adjectives to describe its voice. This work introduces a coherent view of entrainment in both familiar and novel domains. Our results add to the body of knowledge of entrainment in human-human conversations and propose new directions for making use of that knowledge to enhance human-computer interactions.

At least 360 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss that frequently causes difficulties in day-to-day conversations. Hearing aids often fail to offer enough benefits and have low adoption rates. However, people with hearing loss find that speechreading can improve their understanding during conversation. Speechreading (often called lipreading) refers to using visual information about the movements of a speaker's lips, teeth, and tongue to help understand what they are saying. Speechreading is commonly used by people with all severities of hearing loss to understand speech, and people with typical hearing also speechread (albeit subconsciously) to help them understand others. However, speechreading is a skill that takes considerable practice to acquire. Publicly-funded speechreading classes are sometimes provided, and have been shown to improve speechreading acquisition. However, classes are only provided in a handful of countries around the world and students can only practice effectively when attending class. Existing tools have been designed to help improve speechreading acquisition, but are often not effective because they have not been designed within the context of contemporary speechreading lessons or practice. To address this, in this thesis I present a novel speechreading acquisition framework that can be used to design Speechreading Acquisition Tools (SATs) - a new type of technology to improve speechreading acquisition. I interviewed seven speechreading tutors and used thematic analysis to identify and organise the key elements of the framework. I evaluated the framework by using it to: 1) categorise every tutor-identified speechreading teaching technique, 2) critically evaluate existing Conversation Aids and SATs, and 3) design three new SATs. I then conducted a postal survey with 59 speechreading students to understand students' perspectives on speechreading, and how their thoughts could influence future SATs. To further evaluate the framework's effectiveness I then developed and evaluated two new SATs (PhonemeViz and MirrorMirror) designed using the framework. The findings from the evaluation of these two new SATs demonstrates that using the framework can help design effective tools to improve speechreading acquisition.