Thea Turner

Bezel swipe: conflict-free scrolling and multiple selection on mobile touch screen devices

Zooming user interfaces are increasingly popular on mobile devices with touch screens. Swiping and pinching finger gestures anywhere on the screen manipulate the displayed portion of a page, and taps open objects within the page. This makes navigation easy but limits other manipulations of objects that would be supported naturally by the same gestures, notably cut and paste, multiple selection, and drag and drop. A popular device that suffers from this limitation is Apples iPhone. In this paper, we present Bezel Swipe, an interaction technique that supports multiple selection, cut, copy, paste and other operations without interfering with zooming, panning, tapping and other pre-defined gestures. Participants of our user study found Bezel Swipe to be a viable alternative to direct touch selection.

DOTS: support for effective video surveillance

DOTS (Dynamic Object Tracking System) is an indoor, real-time, multi-camera surveillance system, deployed in a real office setting. DOTS combines video analysis and user interface components to enable security personnel to effectively monitor views of interest and to perform tasks such as tracking a person. The video analysis component performs feature-level foreground segmentation with reliable results even under complex conditions. It incorporates an efficient greedy-search approach for tracking multiple people through occlusion and combines results from individual cameras into multi-camera trajectories. The user interface draws the users. attention to important events that are indexed for easy reference at a later time. Different views within the user interface provide spatial information for easier navigation. Our system, with over twenty video cameras installed in hallways and other public spaces in our office building, has been in constant use for almost a year.

Exploring the workplace communication ecology

The modern workplace is inherently collaborative, and this collaboration relies on effective communication among co-workers. Many communication tools -- email, blogs, wikis, Twitter, etc. -- have become increasingly available and accepted in workplace communications. In this paper, we report on a study of communications technologies used over a one year period in a small US corporation. We found that participants used a large number of communication tools for different purposes, and that the introduction of new tools did not impact significantly the use of previously-adopted technologies. Further, we identified distinct classes of users based on patterns of tool use. This work has implications for the design of technology in the evolving ecology of communication tools.

Vital sign estimation from passive thermal video

Conventional wired detection of vital signs limits the use of these important physiological parameters by many applications, such as airport health screening, elder care, and workplace preventive care. In this paper, we explore contact-free heart rate and respiratory rate detection through measuring infrared light modulation emitted near superficial blood vessels or a nasal area respectively. To deal with complications caused by subjectspsila movements, facial expressions, and partial occlusions of the skin, we propose a novel algorithm based on contour segmentation and tracking, clustering of informative pixels, and dominant frequency component estimation. The proposed method achieves robust subject regions-of-interest alignment and motion compensation in infrared video with low SNR. It relaxes some strong assumptions used in previous work and substantially improves on previously reported performance. Preliminary experiments on heart rate estimation for 20 subjects and respiratory rate estimation for 8 subjects exhibit promising results.

MediaGLOW: organizing photos in a graph-based workspace

We designed an interactive visual workspace, MediaGLOW, that supports users in organizing personal and shared photo collections. The system interactively places photos with a spring layout algorithm using similarity measures based on visual, temporal, and geographic features. These similarity measures are also used for the retrieval of additional photos. Unlike traditional spring-based algorithms, our approach provides users with several means to adapt the layout to their tasks. Users can group photos in stacks that in turn attract neighborhoods of similar photos. Neighborhoods partition the workspace by severing connections outside the neighborhood. By placing photos into the same stack, users can express a desired organization that the system can use to learn a neighborhood-specific combination of distances.

Effects of presenting geographic context on tracking activity between cameras

A common video surveillance task is to keep track of people moving around the space being monitored. It is often difficult to track activity between cameras because locations such as hallways in office buildings can look quite similar and do not indicate the spatial proximity of the cameras. We describe a spatial video player that orients nearby video feeds with the field of view of the main playing video to aid in tracking between cameras. This is compared with the traditional bank of cameras with and without interactive maps for identifying and selecting cameras. We additionally explore the value of static and rotating maps for tracking activity between cameras. The study results show that both the spatial video player and the map improve user performance when compared to the camera-bank interface. Also, subjects change cameras more often with the spatial player than either the camera bank or the map, when available.

Facilitating communication in software development

ABSTRACT Effective communication is critical to the success of a softwaredevelopment project. It factors into the productivity of individualsand organizations, and has particular impact when change occurs.Yet communication is generally left unsupported by the softwaredevelopment process and by the communication infrastructure. Weaddress this issue in the context of two software developmentprojects at N YNEX through a conceptual framework called DesignIntent. There are three innovations in our approach. Design Intentencourages stakeholders to engage in active listening, enablesstakeholders to collaboratively construct a consistent understand-ing of the development effort, and provides a communicationinfrastructure for stakeholders to share ideas and participate in dis-cussions. INTRODUCTION Effective communication among the stakeholders of a softwaredevelopment project is crucial to its success. The importance ofthis communication has been well documented by Curtis, Krasner,and Iscoe [8], who noted frequent, recurring problems related tothe lack of adequate communication among those involved in thedevelopment effort. In order to improve the communication amongmembers of a software development team, an effective process andthe infrastructure to support it must be provided.As designers, we have a new role of “designing experiences” orways for people within our corporation to appreciate new ideas.This role is “designing the boundary objects that facilitate commu-nication and the interpretative moves [leaping] of overlappingcommunities of practice”[18]. We need to build not only “proto-types of need or use” and “prototype systems” [2] — but also theinfrastructures that support relationships, work practices, andsocial intercourse in communities of learners and knowledgeworkers.We feel that three main activities are essential for producing goodsoftware systems:1. Active listening andinterpretive leaping: understanding theproblem and how to solve it in a significant way — offering amodel of transcendence.2. Designing boundary objects that help peopleexperiencethepower and possibilities of new ideas.3. Facilitating the communication of ideas and innovations bybuilding the infrastructures.We refer to them as the three dimensions of Design Intent. We willdiscuss our experiences along these dimensions using two projectsat

Support for effective use of multiple video streams in security

Video surveillance systems have become common across a wide number of environments. While these installations have included more video streams, they have been also placed in contexts with limited personnel for monitoring the video feeds. In such settings, limited human attention in combination with the quantity of video makes it difficult for security personnel to identify activities of interest. Furthermore, interrelationships among activities in different video streams are difficult to ascertain. We have developed applications to support security personnel both in analyzing recorded video and in monitoring live video streams. We use a variety of analysis techniques to determine unusual events and to highlight them in video images. Our main focus has been on visualization techniques and user interfaces that direct the attention of security personnel to the most important activities within recorded video or among several live video streams.

Beyond 'yesterday's tomorrow': towards the design of awareness technologies for the contemporary worker

Modern office work practices increasingly breach traditional boundaries of time and place, increasing breakdowns workers encounter when coordinating interactions with colleagues. We conducted interviews with 12 workers and identified key problems introduced by these practices. To address these problems we developed myUnity, a fully functional platform enabling rich workplace awareness and coordination. myUnity is one of the first integrated platforms to span mobile and desktop environments, both in terms of access and sensing. It uses multiple sources to report user location, availability, tasks, and communication channels. A pilot field study of myUnity demonstrated the significant value of pervasive access to workplace awareness and communication facilities, as well as positive behavioral change in day-to-day communication practices for most users. We present resulting insights about the utility of awareness technology in flexible work environments.

Flexible access to photo libraries via time, place, tags, and visual features

Photo libraries are growing in quantity and size, requiring better support for locating desired photographs. MediaGLOW is an interactive visual workspace designed to address this concern. It uses attributes such as visual appearance, GPS locations, user-assigned tags, and dates to filter and group photos. An automatic layout algorithm positions photos with similar attributes near each other to support users in serendipitously finding multiple relevant photos. In addition, the system can explicitly select photos similar to specified photos. We conducted a user evaluation to determine the benefit provided by similarity layout and the relative advantages offered by the different layout similarity criteria and attribute filters. Study participants had to locate photos matching probe statements. In some tasks, participants were restricted to a single layout similarity criterion and filter option. Participants used multiple attributes to filter photos. Layout by similarity without additional filters turned out to be one of the most used strategies and was especially beneficial for geographical similarity. Lastly, the relative appropriateness of the single similarity criterion to the probe significantly affected retrieval performance.