Investigating Avatar Influence on Perceived Cognitive Load and Bimanual Interactions with Touchless Interfaces

In recent years, touchless-enabling technologies have been more and more adopted for providing public displays with gestural interactivity. This has led to the need for novel visual interfaces aimed at solving issues such as communicating interactivity to users, as well as supporting immediate usability and "natural" interactions. In this paper, we focus our investigation on a visual interface based only on the use of in-air direct manipulations. Our study aims at evaluating whether and how the presence of an Avatar that replays user’s movements may decrease the perceived cognitive workload during interactions. Moreover, we conducted a brief evaluation of the relationship between the presen…

Pseudo-haptic Controls for Mid-air Finger-based Menu Interaction

Virtual Reality (VR) is more accessible than ever these days. While topics like performance, motion sickness and presence are well investigated, basic topics as VR User Interfaces (UIs) for menu control are lagging far behind. A major issue is the absence of haptic feedback and naturalness, especially when considering mid-air finger-based interaction in VR, when "grabbable" controllers are not available. In this work, we present and compare the following two visual approaches to mid-air finger-based menu control in VR environments: a planar UI similar to common 2D desktop UIs, and a pseudo-haptic UI based on physical metaphors. The results show that the pseudo-haptic UI performs better in t…

A Collaborative Environment for Service Providing in Cultural Heritage Sites

Riunioni di strada

Touchless gestural interfaces for networked public displays

In the near future, we can easily imagine a significant increment in diffusion of networked public displays, as well as novel interaction modalities used in their applications. In the following, we present two of the main challenges related to networked displays we are dealing with, with a particular focus on touchless gestural interfaces: overcoming interaction blindness (i.e. enable users to immediately guess the interactivity of the display, and the gestural nature of it) and performing evaluations in-the-wild (i.e. outside any controlled environment).

Pervasive access to MRI bias artifact suppression service on a grid.

Bias artifact corrupts magnetic resonance images in such a way that the image is afflicted by illumination variations. Some of the authors proposed the Exponential Entropy Driven - Homomorphic Unsharp Masking (E2D-HUM) algorithm that corrects this artifact without any a priori hypothesis about the tissues or the Magnetic Resonance image modality. Moreover, E2D-HUM does not care about the body part under examination and does not require any particular training task. People who want to use this algorithm, which is Matlab-based, have to set their own computers in order to execute it. Furthermore, they have to be Matlab-skilled to exploit all the features of the algorithm. In our work we propos…

Exploring usability and accessibility of avatar-based touchless gestural interfaces for autistic people

Many prior works investigated the potential of pervasive technologies and interactive applications to increase access capabilities to digital content for people with disability, particularly Neuro-Developmental Disorders (NDDs). In this paper, we present an exploratory study aimed at understanding if an avatar-based touchless gestural interface is able to foster interest towards digital representations of artworks, e.g. paintings or sculptures usually exhibited in museums, and to make them more accessible for such people. In particular, the study involved three autistic people and a therapist, and allowed us to report the potential of an avatar to communicate the interactivity and stimulate…

BTSP: Bluetooth Service Profile

KIND-DAMA: A modular middleware for Kinect-like device data management

In the last decades, we have witnessed a growing interest toward touchless gestural user interfaces. Among other reasons, this is due to the large availability of different low-cost gesture acquisition hardware (the so-called “Kinect-like devices”). As a consequence, there is a growing need for solutions that allow to easily integrate such devices within actual systems. In this paper, we present KIND-DAMA, an open and modular middleware that helps in the development of interactive applications based on gestural input. We first review the existing middlewares for gestural data management. Then, we describe the proposed architecture and compare its features against the existing similar so…

Real-Time Hand Pose Recognition Based on a Neural Network Using Microsoft Kinect

The Microsoft Kinect sensor is largely used to detect and recognize body gestures and layout with enough reliability, accuracy and precision in a quite simple way. However, the pretty low resolution of the optical sensors does not allow the device to detect gestures of body parts, such as the fingers of a hand, with the same straightforwardness. Given the clear application of this technology to the field of the user interaction within immersive multimedia environments, there is the actual need to have a reliable and effective method to detect the pose of some body parts. In this paper we propose a method based on a neural network to detect in real time the hand pose, to recognize whether it…

Mobile Agents for Resource Discovery in a Distributed Computing Virtual Community

A Novel Visual Interface to Foster Innovation in Mechanical Engineering and Protect from Patent Infringement

One of the main time and money consuming tasks in the design of industrial devices and parts is the checking of possible patent infringements. Indeed, the great number of documents to be mined and the wide variety of technical language used to describe inventions are reasons why considerable amounts of time may be needed. On the other hand, the early detection of a possible patent conflict, in addition to reducing the risk of legal disputes, could stimulate a designers' creativity to overcome similarities in overlapping patents. For this reason, there are a lot of existing patent analysis systems, each with its own features and access modes. We have designed a visual interface providing an …

Ecological Invitation to Engage with Public Displays

Interactive public displays pose several research issues, which include display blindness and interaction blindness. In this paper, we shortly introduce our idea of a sound-based system to overcome the display blindness, and some experiments that we are carrying out in order to test its effectiveness.

Conveying Audience Emotions Through Humanoid Robot Gestures to an Orchestra During a Live Musical Exhibition

In the last twenty years, robotics have been applied in many heterogeneous contexts. Among them, the use of humanoid robots during musical concerts have been proposed and investigated by many authors. In this paper, we propose a contribution in the area of robotics application in music, consisting of a system for conveying audience emotions during a live musical exhibition, by means of a humanoid robot. In particular, we provide all spectators with a mobile app, by means of which they can select a specific color while listening to a piece of music (act). Each color is mapped to an emotion, and the audience preferences are then processed in order to select the next act to be played. This dec…

Exploiting multimodality for intelligent mobile access to pervasive services in cultural heritage sites

In this chapter the role of multimodality in intelligent, mobile guides for cultural heritage environments is discussed. Multimodal access to information contents enables the creation of systems with a higher degree of accessibility and usability. A multimodal interaction may involve several human interaction modes, such as sight, touch and voice to navigate contents, or gestures to activate controls. We first start our discussion by presenting a timeline of cultural heritage system evolution, spanning from 2001 to 2008, which highlights design issues such as intelligence and context-awareness in providing information. Then, multimodal access to contents is discussed, along with problems an…

A Fuzzy Approach to Bluetooth Positioning

Exploitation of Mobile Access to Context-Based Information in Cultural Heritage Fruition

More than one billion smartphone users are estimated by 2014. With this in mind, visiting cultural heritage sites and exhibits may offer new level of engagement and entertainment just reaching down in our pockets. With orders of magnitude more computational horsepower than a five years-old desktop machine, stuffed with all sorts of sensors, these modern gizmos have a largely untapped potential to gain us access to personalized and on-demand information wherever it is needed. This paper is exactly about this, exploring with several case studies how these devices may become part of a memorable experience during a visit that one may want to share with friends and relatives. Specifically, the p…

Position-aware service provision with RFID

Human-to-human interfaces: emerging trends and challenges

We present a new research domain, human-to-human interaction (HHI) that describes how today's human interaction is largely indirect and mediated by a wide variety of technologies and devices. We show how this new and exciting field of design originates from the convergence of a few well-established research areas, such as traditional graphical user interfaces (GUIs), tangible user interfaces (TUIs), touchless gesture user interfaces (TGUIs), voice user interfaces (VUIs), and brain computer interfaces (BCIs). We analyse and describe current research in those areas and offer a first-hand view and presentation of its salient aspects for the human-to human interaction domain.

Microsoft Access

A Multimodal Guide for the Augmented Campus

The use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) with ad-hoc built-in information retrieval and auto-localization functionalities can help people navigating an environment in a more natural manner compared to traditional audio/visual pre-recorded guides. In this work we propose and discuss a user-friendly, multi-modal guide system for pervasive context-aware service provision within augmented environments. The proposed system is adaptable to the user needs of mobility within a given environment; it is usable on different mobile devices and in particular on PDAs, which are used as advanced adaptive HEI (human-environment interaction) interfaces. An information retrieval service is provided that…

Fault Tolerance

A REST-based framework to support non-invasive and early coeliac disease diagnosis

The health sector has traditionally been one of the early adopters of databases, from the most simple Electronic Health Record (formerly Computer-Based Patient Record) systems in use in general practice, hospitals and intensive care units to big data, multidata based systems used to support diagnosis and care decisions. In this paper we present a framework to support non-invasive and early diagnosis of coeliac disease. The proposed framework makes use of well-known technologies and techniques, both hardware and software, put together in a novel way. The main goals of our framework are: (1) providing users with a reliable and fast repository of a large amount of data; (2) to make such reposi…

KIND-DAMA: A modular middleware for Kinect-like device data management

Summary In the last decades, we have witnessed a growing interest toward touchless gestural user interfaces. Among other reasons, this is due to the large availability of different low-cost gesture acquisition hardware (the so-called “Kinect-like devices”). As a consequence, there is a growing need for solutions that allow to easily integrate such devices within actual systems. In this paper, we present KIND-DAMA, an open and modular middleware that helps in the development of interactive applications based on gestural input. We first review the existing middlewares for gestural data management. Then, we describe the proposed architecture and compare its features against the existing simila…

PDA -- Remote Display Interaction Framework

This paper discusses the design of a PDA-driven remote display control system which was designed for a pervasive computing scenario. Our solution enables a PDA to perform as an interaction device (such as keyboard or mouse) to operate applications which are using remote displays. Our system consists of two components: one devoted to pair users and remote display according to their relative position, and one to provide the PDA with appropriate graphical interfaces and ad-hoc communication protocols. Besides a case study on the use of remote displays during a course with in our department, this paper discusses system highlights, components, and experiments as for standard multimedia and offic…

A Multimodal Interaction Guide for Pervasive Services Access

A pervasive, multimodal virtual guide for a cultural heritage site tour is illustrated. The guide is based on the integration of different technologies such as conversational agents, commonsense reasoning knowledge bases, multimodal interfaces and self-location detection systems. The aim of the work is to offer a more natural, context sensitive access to information with respect to traditional audio/visual pre-recorded guides. A prototype has been developed and implemented on a Qtek 9090 with Windows Mobile 2003 in order to deal with the "Museo Archeologico Regionale di Agrigento" domain.

Exploiting Correlation between Body Gestures and Spoken Sentences for Real-time Emotion Recognition

Humans communicate their affective states through different media, both verbal and non-verbal, often used at the same time. The knowledge of the emotional state plays a key role to provide personalized and context-related information and services. This is the main reason why several algorithms have been proposed in the last few years for the automatic emotion recognition. In this work we exploit the correlation between one's affective state and the simultaneous body expressions in terms of speech and gestures. Here we propose a system for real-time emotion recognition from gestures. In a first step, the system builds a trusted dataset of association pairs (motion data -> emotion pattern), a…

Fast Fourier Transform Filtering for Bilateral Mammography Comparison

Bilateral Asymmetry is one of the breast abnormalities that may indicate a cancer in early stage. The computer methods for the bilateral subtraction developed up to now show the problem of large false positives number because the alignment defects. On the other hand the computer methods using FFT approach suffer of a low S/N ratio to distinguish massive lesions from background. In this paper a method (FFT-RF-BMC) is presented to enhanche the bilateral asymmetry using a FFT to detect massive lesions through a Recursive Filtering.

An Agent-based Service Network for Personal Mobile Devices

We propose the Agent Network for Bluetooth Devices, a system that uses personal mobile devices as adaptive human-environment interfaces to supply people with ad hoc information and high-level services. The ANBD system operates with a hierarchical framework of service-providing nodes, dynamically composed and managed by mobile agents.

Mobile agent application fields

Publisher Summary Mobile agents are a recent paradigm for software design, which extends object oriented programming features. An agent can perform its task autonomously; a mobile agent can carry out complex tasks that require the agent to migrate from a network place to another one. Mobile agent application fields are many. It can replace web services in other cases, mobile agents and web services can be an effective solution together. The chapter discusses the three mobile agent application fields, which are: parallel and distributed computing, data mining and information retrieval, and networking. An overview of the development platforms is also discussed. Data mining and information ret…

An Evaluation of HCI and CMC in Information Systems within Highly Crowded Large Events

Pervasive systems are composed of a large variety of networked smart devices that supposedly enrich the environment they are deployed in. The access to services provided by a pervasive system should be as natural and “unconscious” as possible. In a large number of cases, the available interaction modality seems to be more oriented towards showing off technological wonders rather than to the actual usability of the interface. In this paper we evaluate and compare two different versions of an information provision system deployed in two editions of a large fair. In particular, we will focus on the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC) points of view. The a…

Plantxel: Towards a plant-based controllable display

The use of plants as a mean for both visualization and interaction has been already explored in smart environments. In this work, we explore the possibility of constructing a controllable dynamic plant-based display using thigmonastic plants, i.e. plants that change the shape and position of their leaves as a response to external stimuli. As an initial step towards this vision, we first introduce our approach of building a plant-based pixel (plant-pixel, or plantxel), and the principles of composing a plantxel-based public display. We then present the results of a feasibility study conducted with Mimosa spegazzinii plants, showing that our approach can achieve an acceptable contrast ratio, …

A Multimodal Fruition Model for Graphical Contents in Ancient Books

One of the most common and efficient way to preserve ancient books is to digitize them, and make their content someway browsable. However, this process often does not take into account the fruition point of view. Exploiting the currently available technologies allows for new ways of content fruition, to attract more people and help them to better understand the available information. In this paper, we present a solution for an innovative and multimodal exploration of ancient books contents, using both touch and touchless gestures. This allows people for both near and far distance interaction, which results in different interaction models.

Body Gestures and Spoken Sentences: A Novel Approach for Revealing User’s Emotions

In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in emotion analysis research, which has been applied in several areas of computer science. Many authors have con- tributed to the development of emotion recognition algorithms, considering textual or non verbal data as input, such as facial expressions, gestures or, in the case of multi-modal emotion recognition, a combination of them. In this paper, we describe a method to detect emotions from gestures using the skeletal data obtained from Kinect-like devices as input, as well as a textual description of their meaning. The experimental results show that the correlation existing between body movements and spoken user sentence(s) can be u…

BTSS: Servizi Bluetooth in strutture sportive

Touchless Interfaces For Public Displays

Public displays have lately become ubiquitous thanks to the decreasing cost of such technology and public policies supporting the development of smart cities. Depending on form factor, those displays might use touchless gestural interfaces that therefore are becoming more often the subject of public and private research. In this paper, we focus on touchless interactions with situated public displays, and introduce a pilot study on comparing two interfaces: an interface based on the Microsoft Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), a de facto standard in the field, and a novel interface, designed by us. Differently from the HIG-based one, our interface displays an avatar, which does not require an…

A touchless gestural system for extended information access within a campus

In the last two decades, we have witnessed a growing spread of touchless interfaces, facilitated by higher performances of computational systems, as well as the increased availability of cheaper sensors and devices. Putting the focus on gestural input, several researchers and designers used Kinect-like devices to implement touchless gestural interfaces. The latter extends the possible deployments and usage of public interactive displays. For example, wall-sized displays may become interactive even if they are unreachable by touch. Moreover, billboard-sized displays may be placed in safe cases to avoid vandalism, while still maintaining their interactivity. Finally, people with temporary or …

Real-Time Body Gestures Recognition Using Training Set Constrained Reduction

Gesture recognition is an emerging cross-discipline research field, which aims at interpreting human gestures and associating them to a well-defined meaning. It has been used as a mean for supporting human to machine interaction in several applications of robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. In this paper, we propose a system able to recognize human body gestures which implements a constrained training set reduction technique. This allows the system for a real-time execution. The system has been tested on a publicly available dataset of 7,000 gestures, and experimental results have highlighted that at the cost of a little decrease in the maximum achievable recognition ac…

Elicitation and evaluation of zoom gestures for touchless interaction with desktop displays

Touchless gestural interaction has been widely studied and adopted in many contexts. Furthermore, the growing availability of low-cost enabling devices, such as Kinect or Leap Motion, boosted up the interest in such interaction both for commercial and scientific purposes, both for large public displays and for personal displays. The problem of choosing the right touchless gesture for the right action is thus still an open issue, depending on several aspects, such as context, purpose, users' culture, etc. In this work, we first present the results of a gesture elicitation study that allowed us to identify a set of touchless gestures for performing zoom actions while interacting with desktop …

Human-to-Human Interaction: The Killer Application of Ubiquitous Computing?

Twenty-five years past the Weiser’s vision of Ubiquitous Computing, and there is not a clear understanding of what is or is not a pervasive system. Due to the loose boundaries of such paradigm, almost any kind of remotely ac-cessible networked system is classified as a pervasive system. We think that that is mainly due to the lack of killer applications that could make this vi-sion clearer. Actually, we think that the most promising killer application is already here, but we are so used to it that we do not see it, as a perfect fitting of the Weiser’s vision: the Human-to-Human Interaction mediated by com-puters.

Continuous hand openness detection using a Kinect-like device

This paper presents a novel method to reproduce in real time the opening and closing gestures of a human hand, animating a three-dimensional model of it. In other works, this result can be achieved by mapping a set of significant points of a real hand on the corresponding points of the model to animate. We propose an alternative way to produce the same effect without mapping points, but using a level-based estimation of the degree of opening of the hand. The experiments have been executed using Microsoft KinectTM, but the method would work on any other Kinect-like devices (as defined herein). The results obtained are particularly encouraging and demonstrate real-time performance of the syst…

Embedding the Remote Application Control: Visual API for PDA Programming

PDAs are more and more used as advanced adaptive HEI (human-environment interaction) interfaces, thus enabling their users to easily operate applications remotely running in pervasive computing scenarios. Based on a previous implementation, in this paper we discuss the development of a new set of .NET-compliant Application Programming Interfaces to be used within the Visual Studio IDE. Our main goal is to provide programmers with a set of components to be used with the common drag-and-drop operation, in order to embed a remote application control within an application running on the PDA and vice-versa. The interaction relies on ad-hoc communication protocols over a framework devoted to pair…

BlueIM: Bluetooth Instant Messaging

They are looking at me! Understanding how Audience Presence Impacts on Public Display Users

It is well known from prior work, that people interacting as well as attending to a public display attract further people to interact. This behavior is commonly referred to as the honeypot effect. At the same time, there are often situations where an audience is present in the vicinity of a public display that does not actively engage or pay attention to the display or an approaching user. However, it is largely unknown how such a \textit{passive audience} impacts on users or people who intend to interact. In this paper, we investigate the influence of a passive audience on the engagement of people with a public display. In more detail, we report on the deployment of a display in a public s…

Data mining and information retrieval

Mobile agents and grid computing

Publisher Summary This chapter describes mobile agents as an effective solution for grid service provision. A short overview is first introduced on the grid paradigm and the most known research activities in the field. Then, mobile agents are discussed and a comparison with the remote procedure call (RPC) method is made as far as the most effective solution to minimize network overload and fault occurrences is concerned. The common feature of all grid architectures is a coordinated and controlled resource sharing between the members of a dynamic multi-institutional virtual community. Community members agree on a set of sharing rules and permissions, by which resources to be shared and membe…

Algebra di Boole

Investigating how user avatar in touchless interfaces affects perceived cognitive load and two-handed interactions

In recent years, touchless-enabling technologies have been more and more adopted for providing public displays with gestural interactivity. This has led to the need for novel visual interfaces aimed at solving issues such as communicating interactivity to users, as well as supporting immediate usability and "natural" interactions. In this paper, we focus our investigation on a visual interface based only on the use of in-air direct manipulations. Our study aims at evaluating whether and how the presence of an Avatar that replays user's movements may decrease the perceived cognitive workload during interactions. Moreover, we conducted a brief evaluation of the relationship between the presen…

Child–display interaction:Lessons learned on touchless avatar-based large display interfaces

AbstractDuring the last decade, touchless gestural interfaces have been widely studied as one of the most promising interaction paradigms in the context of pervasive displays. In particular, avatars and silhouettes have proved to be effective in making the touchless capacity of displays self-evident. In this paper, we focus on a child–display interaction approach to avatar-based touchless gestural interfaces. We believe that large displays offer an opportunity to stimulate children’s experiences and engagement; for instance, learning about art is very engaging for children but can bring a number of challenges. Our study aims to contribute to the literature on both pervasive displays and chi…

An Augmented Campus Design for Context-aware Service Provision

This paper deals with the design of a multi-modal system for pervasive context-aware service provision and human-environment interaction in augmented environments by the use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) or SmartPhones. The system enables mobile devices and remote displays to perform as interaction devices with pervasive applications which run on a dynamically composed server network. Visual interaction for service setup and provision are driven by appropriate graphical interfaces and XML-based protocols, which are dynamically composed according to the type of service and to the user current position by means of a mobile agent-based framework. The paper discusses both protocols, hard…

A method to reduce the FP/imm number through CC and MLO views comparison in mammographic images

In this paper we propose a method to reduce the FP/imm number through CC and MLO mammographic views comparison of the same patient. The proposed solution uses the symmetry properties of the breast to compute a geometric transformation that permits to represent the two images in comparable coordinates systems. Through this method, potential pathological ROIs of one of the projections are correlated with the ROIs in the second view. To show the effectiveness of the result we apply the method on a dataset composed of 112 couples of pathological images. Experiments shows that method enables a reduction by up to 700/0 of the FP/imm number detected after the classification step

Designing Touchless Gestural Interactions for Public Displays In-the-Wild

Public displays, typically equipped with touchscreens, are used for interactions in public spaces, such as streets or fairs. Currently low-cost visual sensing technologies, such as Kinect-like devices and high quality cameras, allow to easily implement touchless interfaces. Nevertheless, the arising interactions have not yet been fully investigated for public displays in-the-wild (i.e. in appropriate social contexts where public displays are typically deployed). Different audiences, cultures and social settings strongly affect users and their interactions. Besides gestures for public displays must be guessable to be easy to use for a wide audience. Issues like these could be solved with use…

MAGA: A Mobile Archaeological Guide at Agrigento

Virtual Trainer

A mobile agent tool for resource discovery

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses a mobile agent based tool for arranging communities whose members want to share computing resources. Such a tool enables community members to arrange their own parallel virtual machine, using resources available within the community. Mobile agents are used to search among available addresses inside the community, and are instructed to select the ones which correspond to the users' requirements. The agent is the key component of the system, because it takes care of the server availability test and of the decision on whether to include them into the virtual machine, according to the user's requirements. The database acts as an intermediary between the …

Pervasive Items for Factory Security

Design for invention: a framework for identifying emerging design–prior art conflict

The increasing complexity of patented mechanical designs means that their novelty and inventive steps increasingly rely on interacting geometric features and how they contribute to device functions. These features and interactions are normally incorporated in patents through clear patent claims. However, patents can be difficult to interpret and understand for designers due to their legal terminologies. This suggests there is a need for greater awareness of relevant prior art amongst designers in terms of avoiding potential conflict. This paper presents a framework that helps designers obtain insight on relevant prior art and enables emerging design–prior art comparison. The framework mainl…

Interacting with Augmented Environments

Pervasive systems augment environments by integrating information processing into everyday objects and activities. They consist of two parts: a visible part populated by animate (visitors, operators) or inanimate (AI) entities interacting with the environment through digital devices, and an invisible part composed of software objects performing specific tasks in an underlying framework. This paper shows an ongoing work from the University of Palermo''s Department of Computer Science and Engineering that addresses two issues related to simplifying and broadening augmented environment access.

Internet of things: why we are not there yet

Twenty-one years past since Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) has been written, and it is yet to be fully fulfilled despite of almost all the needed technologies already available. Still, the widespread interest in UbiComp and the results in some of its fields pose a question: why we are not there yet? It seems we miss the 'octopus' head. In this paper, we will try to depict the reasons why we are not there yet, from three different points of view: interaction media, device integration and applications.

A Dynamic System for Personal Communications: The Opportunistic Chat

most of currently available inter-personal instant messaging systems are client-server based. Users of such systems need to be connected to some centralized entity which goal is to supply them with information needed to make the communication possible, such as the list of connected users, their status, and the address of their devices. Our proposed system for an “Opportunistic Chat” allows people to exchange written messages over Bluetooth and (if necessary) TCP/IP connections, with no need of any kind of centralized entity, by using ad-hoc procedures, automatically selected and operated. Such system can be accessed almost from any kind of device, either mobile or not, ranging from personal…

Evaluation of a Visual Tool for Early Patent Infringement Detection During Design

Patent infringement detection usually implies research among documents in different forms, in both natural and unstructured language, often involving a lot of human resources and time. In order to ease this patent check process, we previously presented a visual tool to be used by designers themselves at any stage of the design process, providing them with useful and reliable information for deciding whether to steer their design away from potential patent infringements. In this work, we report on a usability study carried out on such a tool with 21 professional designers from industry in the field of mechanical engineering. The outcome of our study shows that our tool is very well accepted …

A Collaborative Environment for Service Providing in Cultural Heritage Sites

We present a model which can be used to describe hybrid entities in an augmented reality environment. An architectural description of the model is firstly given. Next, a FIPA-compliant agent description of the model is proposed. Finally the paper discusses an overview and some implementation details of a project dealing with Augmented Reality context aware services in a cultural heritage site. These services are provided based on visitors customized profiles and current position in the site, as revealed by a positioning site implemented with low cost Bluetooth devices (cellular phones, PDAs, USB terminals).

Recognizing the Emergent and Submerged Iceberg of the Celiac Disease: ITAMA Project-Global Strategy Protocol.

Coeliac disease (CD) is frequently underdiagnosed with a consequent heavy burden in terms of morbidity and health care costs. Diagnosis of CD is based on the evaluation of symptoms and anti-transglutaminase antibodies IgA (TGA-IgA) levels, with values above a tenfold increase being the basis of the biopsy-free diagnostic approach suggested by present guidelines. This study showcased the largest screening project for CD carried out to date in school children (n=20,000) aimed at assessing the diagnostic accuracy of minimally invasive finger prick point-of-care tests (POCT) which, combined with conventional celiac serology and the aid of an artificial intelligence-based system, may eliminate t…

Bluetooth Base Station Minimal Deployment for High Definition Positioning

This paper discusses our approach to the problem of arranging a Bluetooth based positioning system capable of providing people coordinates in a given area with an accuracy as high as possible. Our strategy focuses on optimizing the disposition of a minimal number of available Bluetooth base stations in a subset of locations which are the only ones permitted by site characteristics and constraints. We used a genetic algorithm to this purpose and a layout chromosome whose best evolution suggested us how to deploy a minimal set of Bluetooth base stations. As a case study, we discuss our experiments and results which deal with a late middle age castle in Sicily where we carried out many trials.

Modular Middleware for Gestural Data and Devices Management

In the last few years, the use of gestural data has become a key enabler for human-computer interaction (HCI) applications. The growing diffusion of low-cost acquisition devices has thus led to the development of a class of middleware aimed at ensuring a fast and easy integration of such devices within the actual HCI applications. The purpose of this paper is to present a modular middleware for gestural data and devices management. First, we describe a brief review of the state of the art of similar middleware. Then, we discuss the proposed architecture and the motivation behind its design choices. Finally, we present a use case aimed at demonstrating the potential uses as well as the limit…

Supporting tourism with public interactive displays

Interactive displays are common in public and semi-public areas, such as museums, shopping malls, train stations, and even on streets. Especially with the emergence of new ways of interaction, interactive displays could be introduced to popular tourist attractions to support tourism. The aim of this tutorial is to prepare its participants for designing such interactive public displays. The tutorial will first introduce participants to state of the art in interactive public displays. This will be followed by a city tour where a number of local attractions are visited. Finally, the participants will brainstorm and create concepts for novel interactive public displays that aim to improve the e…

An RFID framework for multimodal service provision

In recent years there has been a growing interest toward the development of pervasive and context-aware services, and RFID technology played a relevant role in the context sensing task. We propose the use of RFID technology together with a conversational agent in order to implement a multimodal information retrieval service we call SensorMesh. The information acquired from RFID tags about the nearest point of interest is processed by the conversational agent that carries a more natural interaction with the user, also exploiting a common sense ontology. The service is accessible using a multimodal browser on Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs); the browser allows the user to interact with the…

Data Mining and Information Retrival

Predicting mid-air gestural interaction with public displays based on audience behaviour

Abstract Knowledge about the expected interaction duration and expected distance from which users will interact with public displays can be useful in many ways. For example, knowing upfront that a certain setup will lead to shorter interactions can nudge space owners to alter the setup. If a system can predict that incoming users will interact at a long distance for a short amount of time, it can accordingly show shorter versions of content (e.g., videos/advertisements) and employ at-a-distance interaction modalities (e.g., mid-air gestures). In this work, we propose a method to build models for predicting users’ interaction duration and distance in public display environments, focusing on …

Security in mobile agent systems

Mobile agents, globus and resource discovery

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses grid technology and some related problem. The overview of grids, in terms of application fields and needed protocols is given. The common feature of all grid architectures is a coordinated and controlled resource sharing between the members of a dynamic multi-institutional virtual community. The members of such a community agree on which resources will be shared and which members of the community will be enabled to access these resources, thus defining a set of sharing rules and permissions. The Globus project is discussed, which is nowadays the de facto standard for grid environments, with emphasis on its resource discovery components. Finally, the …

A Virtual Shopper Customer Assistant in Pervasive Environments

In this work we propose a smart, human-like PDA-based personal shopper assistant. The system is able to understand the user needs through a spoken natural language interaction and then stores the preferences of the potential customer. Subsequently the personal shopper suggests the most suitable items and shops that match the user profile. The interaction is given by automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies; localization is allowed by the use of Wireless technologies, while the interaction is performed by an Alice-based chat-bot endowed with reasoning capabilities. Besides, being implemented on a PDA, the personal shopper satisfies the user needs of mobility and it is als…

Novel Human-to-Human Interactions from the Evolution of HCI

The interaction ways made available by the evolution of the human-computer interfaces, led to novel Human-to-Human Interaction (HHI) modes, enabling people to cooperate for almost any task any time and any where. HHI nowadays is largely indirect and mediated by a wide variety of technologies and devices. This new and exciting field of design originates from the convergence of a few well-established research fields within the HCI area, such as traditional Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), Tangible User Interfaces (TUI), Touchless Gesture User Interface (TGUI), Voice User Interfaces (VUI), and Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI). We analyze and describe the evolution of the HCI in those fields, an…

Sicurezza nei sistemi ad agenti mobili

A Genetic Approach to Bluetooth Positioning Optimization

A Virtual Shopper Customer Assistant in Pervasive Environments.

Basi di Dati

Combined People Position and Compass Detection for Context-aware Service Provision

A novel technique is discussed for people identification and position sensing in augmented reality by the use of two cooperating technologies. People are provided with RFID tags for localization and context definition, and then visually investigated for identity checking and compass detection. The two technologies are discussed within an implementation of a case study dealing with context aware service provision for students in a campus.

Problems and solutions in setting up a low-cost Bluetooth positioning system

Touch or touchless?:Evaluating usability of interactive displays for persons with autistic spectrum disorders

Interactive public displays have been exploited and studied for engaging interaction in several previous studies. In this context, applications have been focused on supporting learning or entertainment activities, specifically designed for people with special needs. This includes, for example, those with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). In this paper, we present a comparison study aimed at understanding the difference in terms of usability, effectiveness, and enjoyment perceived by users with ASD between two interaction modalities usually supported by interactive displays: touch-based and touchless gestural interaction. We present the outcomes of a within-subject setup involving 8 ASD users…

A Java-based Wrapper for Wireless Communications

The increasing number of new applications for mobile devices in pervasive environments, do not cope with changes in the wireless communications. Developers of such applications have to deal with problems arising from the available wireless connections in the given environment. A middleware is a solution that allows to overcome some of these problems. It provides to the applications a set of functions that facilitate their development. In this paper we present a Java-based communication wrapper, called SmartTraffic, which allows programmers to seamlessly use TCP or UDP protocols over Bluetooth or any IP-based wireless network. Developers can use SmartTraffic within their Java applications, t…

QRouteMe: A Multichannel Information System to Ensure Rich User-Experience in Exhibits and Museums

In this article the QRouteMe system is presented. QRouteMe is a multichannel information system built to ensure rich user experiences in exhibits and museums. The system starts from basic information about a particular exhibit or museum while delivering a wide user experience based on different distribution channels. The organization of the systems’ components allow to build different solutions that can be simultaneously delivered on different media. A wide range of media from touch-screen installations to portable devices like smartphones have been used. The used devices can communicate each others to increase the usability and the user experience for the visitors. Another important featur…

A Multichannel Information System to Build and Deliver Rich User-Experiences in Exhibits and Museums

In this article a multichannel information system to build and deliver rich user experiences in exhibits and museums is presented. The system was designed to use information about a particular exhibit or museum while delivering a wide user experience based on different distribution channels. The overall information is used to build different solutions that can be delivered simultaneously on different media from touch-screen installations to portable devices like smart phones. Moreover, all the devices signed in the environment are able to communicate to each others to increase the level of the usability of the system. A case study and analysis of experimental results are also provided.

Fault Tolerance

Mobile Interface for Content-Based Image Management

People make more and more use of digital image acquisition devices to capture screenshots of their everyday life. The growing number of personal pictures raise the problem of their classification. Some of the authors proposed an automatic technique for personal photo album management dealing with multiple aspects (i. e., people, time and background) in a homogenous way. In this paper we discuss a solution that allows mobile users to remotely access such technique by means of their mobile phones, almost from everywhere, in a pervasive fashion. This allows users to classify pictures they store on their devices. The whole solution is presented, with particular regard to the user interface impl…

Child-display interaction: Exploring avatar-based touchless gestural interfaces

During the last decade, touchless gestural interfaces have been widely studied as one of the most promising interaction paradigms in the context of pervasive displays. In particular, avatars and silhouettes have been proved to be effective in communicating the touchless gestural interactivity supported by displays. In the paper, we take a child-display interaction perspective by exploring avatar-based touchless gestural interfaces. We believe that large displays offer an opportunity to stimulate child experience and engagement, for instance when learning about art, as well as bringing a number of challenges. The purpose of this study is twofold: 1) identifying the relevant aspects of childr…

A Resource Look up Strategy for Distributed Computing