Marco Gaudina

Pervasive services and mobile devices may support human memory and enhance daily efficiency

A service capable of supporting human memory requires complex computational tasks that are still unavailable in mobile devices; however, broadband connectivity allows weaving together server side computational power with client side rich content delivery. In this paper, we provide a complete description of the 4W (what-where-when-who) project and its current prototype. The system aims at providing a service that mitigates the negative effects of stress or aging on the memorisation capability of humans leveraging both client side and server side state of the art solutions. The prototype is capable of capturing user needs/to-dos, reasoning to identify where those needs/tasks can be fulfilled/performed efficiently and providing timely and localised hints about the identified sweet-spots. We have tested with real users both the general efficacy of the system and the different level of efficiency of several hint-notification modes: we present our results and we provide a discussion of our findings.

Enhancing Personal Efficiency with Pervasive Services and Wearable Devices

The recent developments in pervasive services offer incredible opportunities to provide a host of efficiency enhancement to human users. In fact, although complex computational tasks still require server side resources, combination of rich content delivering devices, such as smart phones, together with wearable I/O devices and wireless broadband networking, can be used to seamlessly weave a mesh of client side and server side services. In this paper we describe how we leveraged such a set up to design and build a system capable of mitigating the negative effects of stress on the memorization capability of humans. Our system is able to capture user needs and to-dos, to infer where those needs and tasks can be efficiently fulfilled/performed and to provide timely and localized hints about the identified sweet-spots. Furthermore we evaluated innovative ways to drive the user to the most convenient site. We describe our system and a modular design both on the client and on the server sides, illustrating preliminary experiments performed both in laboratory and with real users, and we analyze the results.

Active Personal Information Manager: A System for Human Memory Support

Several studies both in the field of psychology and in the field of physiology relate stress to the difficulty of transferring information from short term memory to medium term memory. This difficulty causes a reduction in personal efficiency and generates heavy frustration as things to do tend to come to mind with no relation to the user current environment, thus further increasing the stress level of the subjects. We claim that the provision to subjects of timely information about the activities that could be efficiently performed in their current environment could reduce this phenomenon and thus increase personal efficiency and remove the related sense of frustration. In this paper we describe the prototype of a system capable of gathering user needs from verbal commands, translate those needs into queries to a GIS, build a map of locations of interest for the user expressed needs and provide timely prompts as soon as the user current environment guarantees the possibility to efficiently perform an action that satisfies one of the identified needs.

The 4W (What-Where-When-Who) Project Goes Social

The 4W (What-Where-When-Who)project has demonstrated that the combination of rich content delivering devices, such as smart phones, together wireless broadband networking and server side computational power can be used to seamlessly weave a mesh of smart services and intelligent environments providing support to human memory capabilities. Our system is capable of capturing user needs and to-dos, infer where those needs and tasks can be efficiently fulfilled/performed and provide timely and localized hints about the identified sweet spots. However, to perform this task an efficient way of classifying user provided needs and to-dos is necessary. In this paper we describe how we leveraged a social-network like approach to populate and enrich our classification engine in a user-controlled, cooperative way.

Virtual sequencing with a tactile feedback device

Since the beginning of Virtual Reality many artistic applications were developed, showing how this technology could be exploited not only from a technical point of view, but also in the field of feelings and emotions. Nowadays music is one of the most interesting field of application for Virtual Reality, and many environments provide the user with means to express her/himself; our work follows this direction, aiming at developing a set of multimodal musical interfaces. In this paper we present a first simple virtual sequencer combined with a low cost tactile feedback device: some preliminary experiments were done to analyze how skilled musicians approach this unusual way of making music.

Distributed multimodal interaction driven framework: Conceptual model and game example

Since technology started to be large scale distributed, gaming experience has changed radically. After years of graphical details challenges, the attention has been shifted on how users can interact with games. Users nowadays can play and interact much more than before, considering himself/herself the chief character of the entire game scene with his physical actions. Possibilities have been increased by modern game controllers and multimodal devices. Our work follows this direction, aiming to develop an unifying interactions framework to distribute user interactions. This could enhance user possibilities, feelings and emotions, over different devices with heterogeneous different possibilities. Hence, we present a conceptual model where the type of interaction between users is subordinated not only to the available technology but primarily to their main purpose for that specific interaction. The architecture is applied to a preliminary crossplatform, multiplayer musical game.

Memory Support Through Pervasive and Mobile Systems

Memory is one of the most important components of human self-consciousness. As such, it has always been the subject of scientific studies and is one of the human functionalities with the most ancient examples of prosthetic devices. In this chapter we will describe the evolution of memory prosthetic devices from the paper agenda to the modern context-aware and mobile systems, and we will describe how our system, with its capability to autonomously recognize locations where a user may efficiently perform a previously defined task, represents a significant innovation with respect to the state of the art. Finally, we will describe our experimental results and we will provide some concluding remarks.

Irradiating heat in virtual environments: algorithm and implementation

Human-computer interactive systems focused mostly on graphical rendering, implementation of haptic feedback sensation or delivery of auditory information. Human senses are not limited to those information and other physical characteristics, like thermal sensation, are under research and development. In Virtual Reality, not so many algorithms and implementation have been exploited to simulate thermal characteristics of the environment. This physical characteristic can be used to dramatically improve the overall realism. Our approach is to establish a preliminary way of modelling an irradiating thermal environment taking into account the physical characteristics of the heat source. We defined an algorithm where the irradiating heat surface is analysed for its physical characteristic, material and orientation with respect to a point of interest. To test the algorithm consistency some experiments were carried out and the results have been analysed. We implemented the algorithm in a basic virtual reality application using a simple and low cost thermo-feedback device to allow the user to perceive the temperature in the 3D space of the environment.