Tony Dunnigan

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.

The future is in the past: designing for exploratory search

Exploratory search activities tend to span multiple sessions and involve finding, analyzing and evaluating information found through many queries. Typical search systems, on the other hand, are designed to support single query, precision-oriented search tasks. We describe a search interface and system design of a multi-session exploratory search system, discuss design challenges encountered, and chronicle the evolution of our design. Our design describes novel displays for visualizing retrieval history information, and introduces ambient displays and persuasive elements to interactive information retrieval.

Looking ahead: query preview in exploratory search

Exploratory search is a complex, iterative information seeking activity that involves running multiple queries and finding and examining many documents. We designed a query preview control that visualizes the distribution of newly-retrieved and re-retrieved documents prior to running the query. When evaluating the preview control with a control condition, we found effects on both peoples information seeking behavior and improved retrieval performance. People spent more time formulating a query and were more likely to explore search results more deeply, retrieved a more diverse set of documents, and found more different relevant documents when using the preview.

SearchPanel: framing complex search needs

People often use more than one query when searching for information. They revisit search results to re-find information and build an understanding of their search need through iterative explorations of query formulation. These tasks are not well-supported by search interfaces and web browsers. We designed and built SearchPanel, a Chrome browser extension that supports people in their ongoing information seeking. This extension combines document and process metadata into an interactive representation of the retrieved documents that can be used for sense-making, navigation, and re-finding documents. In a real-world deployment spanning over two months, results show that SearchPanel appears to have been primarily used for complex information needs, in search sessions with long durations and high numbers of queries. When process metadata was present in the UI, searchers in explorative search sessions submitted more and longer queries and interacted more with the SERP. These results indicate that the process metadata features in SearchPanel seem to be of particular importance for exploratory search.

DICE: designing conference rooms for usability

One of the core challenges now facing smart rooms is supporting realistic, everyday activities. While much research has been done to push forward the frontiers of novel interaction techniques, we argue that technology geared toward widespread adoption requires a design approach that emphasizes straightforward configuration and control, as well as flexibility. We examined the work practices of users of a large, multi-purpose conference room, and designed DICE, a system to help them use the rooms capabilities. We describe the design process, and report findings about the systems usability and about peoples use of a multi-purpose conference room.

Post-bit: embodied video contents on tiny stickies

Post-Bit is a small e-paper device modeled after paper Post-Its®1. We explored and designed interfaces to handle multi-media contents with paper-like manipulations using this e-paper device. The functions of each Post-Bit combined the affordance of physical tiny sticky memos and digital handling of information. At this stage of the design, we have prototyped two features of the interface: connecting computer-based workspaces and physical workspaces (using a function called Drop-Beyond-Drag), and tangible and tactile operation of multi-media contents. In this paper, we present the integrated design and functionality of the Post-Bit systems main components as shown in the video scenario.

ThermoTouch: a New Scalable Hardware Design for Thermal Displays

ThermoTouch is a new type of thermo-haptic display device. It provides a visual display with a grid of thermal pixels that can provide hot or cold haptic feedback. Unlike previous devices, our proposed design uses liquid cooling and resistive heating to output thermal feedback. We describe the hardware and software design of ThermoTouch. Technical measurements on our prototype indicate that ThermoTouch has thermal output properties comparable to Peltier elements, which have been used extensively as thermal transducers in previous works. Our measurements of ThermoTouchs per-area power consumption and its low hardware cost per thermal pixel indicate that our technology improves scalability to large-scale thermal displays over technologies used in previous systems. As an example application of ThermoTouch, we describe an editing, automatic keyframe generation and playback system for video with an additional thermo-haptic feedback channel. Lastly, we describe technical design considerations for creating large-scale thermal displays using ThermoTouch technology.

Evolution of a Tabletop Telepresence System through Art and Technology

New technologies arise in a number of ways. They may come from advances in scientific research, through new combinations of existing technologies, or by simply imagining what might be possible in the future. This video describes the evolution of Tabletop Telepresence, a system for remote collaboration through desktop videoconferencing combined with a digital desk. Tabletop Telepresence began as a collection of camera, projector, videoconferencing and user interaction technologies. Working together; artists and research scientists combined these technologies into a means of sharing paper documents between remote desktops, interacting with those documents, requesting services (such as translation), and communicating through a videoconference.

MET: media-embedded target for connecting paper to digital media

Media-embedded target, or MET, is an iconic mark printed in a blank margin of a page. The mark indicates that a media link is associated with a nearby region of the page. It guides the user to capture a predefined larger region beyond the mark to ensure that the system can retrieve the associated link reliably with enough natural visual features in the captured region. The target also serves to indicate page regions with media. To use an MET, users align the target on paper with a sight of the same shape on the mobile phone display. When the system detects correct alignment, the image is automatically captured by the phone’s camera. Compared to related approaches, an MET provides an indication for the availability of a link without a major visual impact on the page. We compare the use of MET for guiding capture with two standard methods: one that uses a logo to indicate that media content is available and text to define the capture region and another that explicitly indicates the capture region using a visible boundary mark.

Designing an Easy-to-use Executive Conference Room Control System

The Usable Smart Environment project (USE) aims at designing easy-to-use, highly functional, next-generation conference rooms. Our first design prototype focuses on creating a “no wizards” room for an American executive; that is, a room the executive could walk into and use by himself, without help from a technologist. A key idea in the USE framework is that customization is one of the best ways to create a smooth user experience. As the system needs to fit both with the personal leadership style of the executive and the corporation’s meeting culture, we began the design process by exploring the work flow in and around meetings attended by the executive.