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Selection in 3D games and simulations is a well-studied problem. Many techniques have been created to address many of the typical scenarios a user could experience. For any single scenario with consistent conditions, there is likely a technique which is well suited. If there isn't, then there is an opportunity for one to be created to best suit the expected conditions of that new scenario. It is critical that the user be given an appropriate technique to interact with their environment. Without it, the entire experience is at risk of becoming burdensome and not enjoyable. With all of the different possible scenarios, it can become problematic when two or more are part of the same program. If they are put closely together, or even intertwined, then the developer is often forced to pick a single technique that works so-so in both, but is likely not optimal for either, or maybe optimal in just one of them. In this case, the user is left to perform selections with a technique that is lacking in one way or another, which can increase errors and frustration. In our research, we have outlined different selection scenarios, all of which were classified by their level of object density (number of objects in scene) and object velocity. We then performed an initial study on how it impacts performance of various selection techniques, including a new selection technique that we developed just for this test, called Expand. Our results showed, among other things, that a standard Raycast technique works well in slow moving and sparse environments, while revealing that our new Expand technique works well in denser environments. With the results from our first study, we sought to develop something that would bridge the gap in performance between those selection techniques tested. Our idea was a framework that could harvest several different selection techniques and determine which was the most optimal at any time. Each selection technique would report how effective it was, given the provided scenario conditions. The framework was responsible for activating the appropriate selection technique when the user made a selection attempt. With this framework in hand, we performed two additional user studies to determine how effective it could be in actual use, and to identify its strengths and weaknesses. Each study compared several selection techniques individually against the framework which utilized them collectively, picking the most suitable. Again, the same scenarios from our first study were reused. From these studies, we gained a deeper understanding of the many challenges associated with automatic selection technique determination. The results from these two studies showed that transitioning between techniques was potentially viable, but rife with design challenges that made its optimization quite difficult. In an effort to sidestep some of the issues surrounding the switching of discrete techniques, we sought to attack the problem from the other direction, and make a single technique act similarly to two techniques, adjusting dynamically to conditions. We performed a user study to analyze the performance of such a technique, with promising results. While the qualitative differences were small, the user feedback did indicate that users preferred this technique over the others, which were static in nature. Finally, we sought to gain a deeper understanding of existing selection techniques that were dynamic in nature, and study how they were designed, and how they could be improved. We scrutinized the attributes of each technique that were already being adjusted dynamically or that could be adjusted and innovated new ways in which the technique could be improved upon. Within this analysis, we also gave thought to how each technique could be best integrated into the Auto-Select framework we proposed earlier. This overall analysis of the latest selection techniques left us with an array of new variants that warrant being created and tested against their existing versions. Our overall research goal was to perform an analysis of selection techniques that intelligently adapt to their environment. We believe that we achieved this by performing several iterative development cycles, including user studies and ultimately leading to innovation in the field of selection. We conclude our research with yet more questions left to be answered. We intend to pursue further research regarding some of these questions, as time permits.

The increasing ubiquity of networked mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs has created new opportunities for the transmission and display of multimedia content. However, any mobile device has inherent resource constraints: low network bandwidth, small screen sizes, limited input methods, and low commitment viewing. Mobile systems that provide information display and access thus need to mitigate these various constraints. Despite progress in information retrieval and content recommendation, there has been less focus on issues arising from a network-oriented and mobile perspective. This dissertation investigates a coordinated design approach to networked multimedia on mobile devices, and considers the abovementioned system perspectives. Within the context of accessing news video on mobile devices, the goal is to provide a cognitively palatable stream of videos and a seamless, low-latency user experience. Mixed-initiative---a method whereby intelligent services and users collaborate efficiently to achieve the user's goals, is the cornerstone of the system design and integrates user relevance feedback with a content recommendation engine and a content- and network-aware video buffer prefetching technique. These various components have otherwise been considered independently in other prior system designs. To overcome limited interactivity, a mixed-initiative user interface was used to present a sequence of news video clips to the user, along with operations to vote-up or vote-down a video to indicate its relevance. On-screen gesture equivalents of these operations were also implemented to reduce user interface elements occupying the screen. Semantic relevancy was then improved by extracting and indexing the content of each video clip as text features, and using a Na"ive Bayesian content recommendation strategy that harnessed the user relevance feedback to tailor the subsequent video recommendations. With the system's knowledge of relevant videos, a content-aware video buffer prefetching scheme was then integrated, using the abovementioned feedback to lower the user perceived latency on the client-end. As an information retrieval system consists of many interacting components, a client-server video streaming model is first developed for clarity and simplicity. Using a CNN news video clip database, experiments were then conducted using this model to simulate user scenarios. As the aim of improving semantic relevancy sometimes opposes user interface tools for interactivity and user perceived latency, a quantitative evaluation was done to observe the tradeoffs between bandwidth, semantic relevance, and user perceived latency. Performance tradeoffs involving semantic relevancy and user perceived latency were then predicted. In addition, complementary human user subjective tests are conducted with actual mobile phone hardware running on the Google Android platform. These experiments suggest that a mixed-initiative approach is helpful for recommending news video content on a mobile device for overcoming the mobile limitations of user interface tools for interactivity and client-end perceived latency. Users desired interactivity and responsiveness while viewing videos, and were willing to sacrifice some content relevancy in order gain lower perceived latency. Recommended future work includes expanding the content recommendation to incorporate viewing data from a large population, and the creation of a global hybrid content-based and collaborative filtering algorithm for better results. Also, based on existing user behaviour, users were reluctant to provide more input than necessary. Additional user experiments can be designed to quantify user attention and interest during video watching on a mobile device, and for better definition and incorporation of implicit user feedback.

This thesis is an attempt to improve visual object retrieval by allowing users to interact with the system. Our solution lies in constructing an interactive system that allows users to define their own visual concept from a concise set of visual patches given as input. These patches, which represent the most informative clues of a given visual category, are trained beforehand with a supervised learning algorithm in a discriminative manner. Then, and in order to specialize their models, users have the possibility to send their feedback on the model itself by choosing and weighting the patches they are confident of. The real challenge consists in how to generate concise and visually interpretable models. Our contribution relies on two points. First, in contrast to the state-of-the-art approaches that use bag-of-words, we propose embedding local visual features without any quantization, which means that each component of the high-dimensional feature vectors used to describe an image is associated to a unique and precisely localized image patch. Second, we suggest using regularization constraints in the loss function of our classifier to favor sparsity in the models produced. Sparsity is indeed preferable for concision (a reduced number of patches in the model) as well as for decreasing prediction time. To meet these objectives, we developed a multiple-instance learning scheme using a modified version of the BLasso algorithm. BLasso is a boosting-like procedure that behaves in the same way as Lasso (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator). It efficiently regularizes the loss function with an additive L1-constraint by alternating between forward and backward steps at each iteration. The method we propose here is generic in the sense that it can be used with any local features or feature sets representing the content of an image region.

Project file archives are becoming increasingly large. The number of files, information and data that need to be created, accessed and modified throughout a project can be overwhelming. It is critical for project participants or contributors to find relevant information in project archives quickly. In this thesis, I present VisArchive, an interactive visualization tool that provides users with better awareness of search results within project archives. VisArchive visualizes the relevance-ranked search results with a color-coded stacked bar chart and interactive timelines and provides supporting visual cues to help differentiate search results based on searched keywords. It aims to allow users to interactively search, browse, and explore information in project archives, including access history, effectively and efficiently. I will present two case studies to illustrate how VisArchive can be used to support searching, browsing, and exploring information in building construction and open source software projects. In addition, I discuss how VisArchive can be improved to address information retrieval problems and work across different domains. VisArchive demonstrates the combination and application of several visualization techniques to the problem of searching and navigating project archives. / Graduate / 0984

Project file archives are becoming increasingly large. The number of files, information and data that need to be created, accessed and modified throughout a project can be overwhelming. It is critical for project participants or contributors to find relevant information in project archives quickly. In this thesis, I present VisArchive, an interactive visualization tool that provides users with better awareness of search results within project archives. VisArchive visualizes the relevance-ranked search results with a color-coded stacked bar chart and interactive timelines and provides supporting visual cues to help differentiate search results based on searched keywords. It aims to allow users to interactively search, browse, and explore information in project archives, including access history, effectively and efficiently. I will present two case studies to illustrate how VisArchive can be used to support searching, browsing, and exploring information in building construction and open source software projects. In addition, I discuss how VisArchive can be improved to address information retrieval problems and work across different domains. VisArchive demonstrates the combination and application of several visualization techniques to the problem of searching and navigating project archives. / Graduate / 0984

Room layout generation is the problem of generating a drawing or a digital model of an existing room from a set of measurements such as laser data or images. The generation of floor plans can find application in the building industry to assess the quality and the correctness of an ongoing construction w.r.t. the initial model, or to quickly sketch the renovation of an apartment. Real estate industry can rely on automatic generation of floor plans to ease the process of checking the livable surface and to propose virtual visits to prospective customers. As for the general public, the room layout can be integrated into mixed reality games to provide a better immersiveness experience, or used in other related augmented reality applications such room redecoration. The goal of this industrial thesis (CIFRE) is to investigate and take advantage of the state-of-the art mobile devices in order to automate the process of generating room layouts. Nowadays, modern mobile devices usually come a wide range of sensors, such as inertial motion unit (IMU), RGB cameras and, more recently, depth cameras. Moreover, tactile touchscreens offer a natural and simple way to interact with the user, thus favoring the development of interactive applications, in which the user can be part of the processing loop. This work aims at exploiting the richness of such devices to address the room layout generation problem. The thesis has three major contributions. We first show how the classic problem of detecting vanishing points in an image can benefit from an a-priori given by the IMU sensor. We propose a simple and effective algorithm for detecting vanishing points relying on the gravity vector estimated by the IMU. A new public dataset containing images and the relevant IMU data is introduced to help assessing vanishing point algorithms and foster further studies in the field. As a second contribution, we explored the state of-the-art of real-time localization and map optimization algorithms for RGB-D sensors. Real-time localization is a fundamental task to enable augmented reality applications, and thus it is a critical component when designing interactive applications. We propose an evaluation of existing algorithms for the common desktop set-up in order to be employed on a mobile device. For each considered method, we assess the accuracy of the localization as well as the computational performances when ported on a mobile device. Finally, we present a proof of concept of application able to generate the room layout relying on a Project Tango tablet equipped with an RGB-D sensor. In particular, we propose an algorithm that incrementally processes and fuses the 3D data provided by the sensor in order to obtain the layout of the room. We show how our algorithm can rely on the user interactions in order to correct the generated 3D model during the acquisition process.

Using the internet for watching videos or online shopping keeps growing, along with video advertisement to increase online sales. To know if the video actually increases the online sales, the owner of a video ad wants to do follow ups on how the video is doing, and get statistics. A different solution from the original video ads is Smart Video. It is an interactive video player with a clickable slideshow of products. This video can get even more types of statistics than a normal video, and today that statistic is not accessible for the Smart Video clients, without the help of someone from the Smart Video team that can create a report for them. The purpose of this thesis was to relieve the workload of the Smart Video team and to create a dashboard that shows all information that the clients find relevant about their videos. This paper is about the process of developing a design for a marketing dashboard, that follows the guidelines of information dashboard design by Stephen Few. The process included interviews, multiple designs, prototypes, and evaluations, before ending up with a prototype of a desktop solution that follows the aesthetics of Smart Video and can be realizable with the current technology.

Submitted by Haroudo Xavier Filho (haroudo.xavierfo@ufpe.br) on 2016-03-01T14:13:14Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Sandra Chacon Dissertação Mestrado.pdf: 7070042 bytes, checksum: 60fe7ecc17946cd79d4d9e6e1cb4fa96 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-01T14:13:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Sandra Chacon Dissertação Mestrado.pdf: 7070042 bytes, checksum: 60fe7ecc17946cd79d4d9e6e1cb4fa96 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-02-24 / O principal problema desta pesquisa - como a interface com o software está interferindo na interface com o hardware no uso de aparelhos celulares - é abordado através de uma metodologia de detalhamento dos diferentes estilos de interação dos aparelhos, seguindo alguns passos, que foram: o estudo da usabilidade de software e hardware, em que se verifica a importância da aplicação prática da ergonomia, o desenvolvimento da tecnologia e como ela influenciou a comunicação através de dispositivos móveis, a intervenção do software na mudança brusca do formato dos aparelhos, interrompendo a tendência de miniaturização dos aparelhos que permaneceu até final da década de noventa, compreensão do contexto de uso dos celulares e interpretação das expectativas geradas nos usuários com relação ao lançamento de cada novo modelo. Esses passos foram decisivos para compreender como a usabilidade de software e hardware se interpõem uma a outra, alterando o tamanho e formato dos aparelhos, percepção, expectativas e a interação com os usuários. / The main problem of this research - how the interface with the software is interfering in the interface with the hardware in the use of mobile phones - is approached through a methodology of detailing of different styles of interaction of the cellphones, following some steps: the study on the usability of software and hardware, where the importance of the practical application of ergonomics is perceived, the development of technology and how it influenced the communication through mobile devices, the intervention of software in the sudden change of the format of the appliances, interrupting the trend of miniaturization of devices that remained until the late 1990s, understanding the context of use of cellphones, interpretation of the expectations generated on users with respect to the release of each new model. These steps were crucial to understand how the usability of software and hardware stand each other , changing the size and shape of the devices , perception, expectations and interaction with users.

This research paper presents a study exploring if using the Conversational Analysis (CA) method in design research could result in designing more socioculturally contextual conversational agents. The research specifically focused on understanding the 1) effect on the design outcome and 2) the role in the design process. This was studied through practice-based design research, participant evaluation of the design outcome, and expert interviews on the design method. The findings were analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively and showed, that socioculturally contextual design could potentially be a data-rich field of study with connections to design concepts such as inclusive design, affective design, design ethics, increased user experience, and further studies are therefore recommended. Furthermore, the study provided an understanding of the contexts in which the CA method may be useful in design, how it can potentially impact the design, and how to apply it to the design process and showed a positive effect on the design outcome in terms of socioculturally contextual design.