This book provides an in-depth description of event-based systems, covering topics ranging from local event matching and distributed event forwarding algorithms, through a practical discussion of software engineering issues raised by the event-based style, to state-of-the-art research in event-based systems like composite event detection and security. The authors offer a comprehensive overview, and show the power of event-based architectures in modern system design, encouraging professionals to exploit this technique in next generation large-scale distributed applications like information dissemination, network monitoring, enterprise application integration, or mobile systems.

/pdf/distributed-event-based-systems-33fttbtql7.pdf

Distributed event-based systems

Smartphones with touchscreen-based interfaces are increasingly used by non-technical groups including the elderly. However, application developers have little understanding of how senior users interact with their products and of how to design senior-friendly interfaces. As an initial study to assess standard mobile touchscreen interfaces for the elderly, we conducted performance measurements and observational evaluations of 20 elderly participants. The tasks included performing basic gestures such as taps, drags, and pinching motions and using basic interactive components such as software keyboards and photo viewers. We found that mobile touchscreens were generally easy for the elderly to use and a week's experience generally improved their proficiency. However, careful observations identified several typical problems that should be addressed in future interfaces. We discuss the implications of our experiments, seeking to provide informal guidelines for application developers to design better interfaces for elderly people.

/pdf/elderly-user-evaluation-of-mobile-touchscreen-interactions-59bwynjvss.pdf

Elderly user evaluation of mobile touchscreen interactions

The lack of tactile feedback on touch screens makes typing difficult, a challenge exacerbated when situational impairments like walking vibration and divided attention arise in mobile settings. We introduce WalkType, an adaptive text entry system that leverages the mobile device's built-in tri-axis accelerometer to compensate for extraneous movement while walking. WalkType's classification model uses the displacement and acceleration of the device, and inference about the user's footsteps. Additionally, WalkType models finger-touch location and finger distance traveled on the screen, features that increase overall accuracy regardless of movement. The final model was built on typing data collected from 16 participants. In a study comparing WalkType to a control condition, WalkType reduced uncorrected errors by 45.2% and increased typing speed by 12.9% for walking participants.

https://faculty.washington.edu/wobbrock/pubs/chi-12.02.pdf

WalkType: using accelerometer data to accomodate situational impairments in mobile touch screen text entry

This paper presents an open-source diarization toolkit which is mostly dedicated to speaker and developed by the LIUM This toolkit includes hierarchical agglomerative clustering methods using well-known measures such as BIC and CLR Two applications for which the toolkit has been used are presented: one is for broadcast news using the ESTER 2 data and the other is for telephone conversations using the MEDIA corpus

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01433518/document

Lium spkdiarization: an open source toolkit for diarization

This paper presents the results and conclusions of a thorough study on automatic phonetic segmentation. It starts with a review of the state of the art in this field. Then, it analyzes the most frequently used approach-based on a modified Hidden Markov Model (HMM) phonetic recognizer. For this approach, a statistical correction procedure is proposed to compensate for the systematic errors produced by context-dependent HMMs, and the use of speaker adaptation techniques is considered to increase segmentation precision. Finally, this paper explores the possibility of locally refining the boundaries obtained with the former techniques. A general framework is proposed for the local refinement of boundaries, and the performance of several pattern classification approaches (fuzzy logic, neural networks and Gaussian mixture models) is compared within this framework. The resulting phonetic segmentation scheme was able to increase the performance of a baseline HMM segmentation tool from 27.12%, 79.27%, and 97.75% of automatic boundary marks with errors smaller than 5, 20, and 50 ms, respectively, to 65.86%, 96.01%, and 99.31% in speaker-dependent mode, which is a reasonably good approximation to manual segmentation.

Automatic phonetic segmentation

Several studies investigated different interaction techniques and input devices for older adults using touchscreen. This literature review analyses the population involved, the kind of tasks that were executed, the apparatus, the input techniques, the provided feedback, the collected data and author's findings and their recommendations. As conclusion, this review shows that age-related changes, previous experience with technologies, characteristics of handheld devices and use situations need to be studied.

/pdf/interaction-techniques-for-older-adults-using-touchscreen-3efyd5jxck.pdf

Interaction techniques for older adults using touchscreen devices: a literature review

This paper describes BigKey virtual keyboard for mobile devices, designed to make the keys of virtual keyboard easier to acquire The tiny size of keys makes efficient selection difficult To overcome this drawback, we propose to expand key size that corresponds to next character entry The proposed solution helps to facilitate the selection task by expanding the next entry Moreover the prediction system reduces the visual scanning time to find letters that one is looking for Users' performance study showed that they were 2514% faster and more accurate with BigKey virtual keyboard than with normal virtual keyboard

/pdf/bigkey-a-virtual-keyboard-for-mobile-devices-3lvs9220uj.pdf

BigKey: A Virtual Keyboard for Mobile Devices

The aim of the MEDIA project is to design and test a methodology for the evaluat ion of context-dependent and independent spoken dialogue systems. We propose an evaluation paradigm based on the use of test suites from real-world corpora and a common semantic representation and common metrics. This paradigm should allow us to diagnose the context-sensitive understanding capability of dialogue system s. This paradigm will be used within an evaluation campaign involving several si tes all of which will carry out the task of querying information from a database .

/pdf/the-french-media-evalda-project-the-evaluation-of-the-17fje9yn8i.pdf

The French MEDIA/EVALDA Project: the Evaluation of the Understanding Capability of Spoken Language Dialogue Systems.

In this paper, we propose a genetic algorithm formal framework to optimize character location on a soft keyboard. This method is described regardless of the language and layout used and can then easily be adapted to any language and layout. In this scope, we present a measure, based on Mackenzie's model, to estimate the performances of the best characters in a given layout. We apply our method to common English language and two different layouts (hexagonal and rectangular layout) in order to compare with FITALY, OPTI or Metropolis keyboards. In all configurations, our method has the best performance.

Genetic algorithm to generate optimized soft keyboard

Soft keyboards are one of the most popular methods to input text for mobile pen-based computing. They allow text input to be performed through an onscreen graphical representation of a standard desk keyboard. Besides standard QWERTY keyboard layout, some researchers have proposed optimized alternative key organizations to improve user performances with soft keyboards. In this paper we propose and evaluate a solution using visual clues to facilitate the acceptance of these optimized layouts by novices.

Nadine Vigouroux

Papers

Interaction techniques for older adults using touchscreen devices: a literature review

BigKey: A Virtual Keyboard for Mobile Devices

The French MEDIA/EVALDA Project: the Evaluation of the Understanding Capability of Spoken Language Dialogue Systems.

Genetic algorithm to generate optimized soft keyboard

Mobile Text Input with Soft Keyboards: Optimization by Means of Visual Clues