Death is the new sex, last great taboo in Western society and Western medicine, as Richard Smith discusses in his editorial (p 129). In the trinity of births, marriages, and deaths, only death does not have glossy magazines devoted to stylish consumption at the attendant ceremonies. On the web, of course, …

Death and dying

As computers become more pervasive in society, facilitating natural human---computer interaction (HCI) will have a positive impact on their use. Hence, there has been growing interest in the development of new approaches and technologies for bridging the human---computer barrier. The ultimate aim is to bring HCI to a regime where interactions with computers will be as natural as an interaction between humans, and to this end, incorporating gestures in HCI is an important research area. Gestures have long been considered as an interaction technique that can potentially deliver more natural, creative and intuitive methods for communicating with our computers. This paper provides an analysis of comparative surveys done in this area. The use of hand gestures as a natural interface serves as a motivating force for research in gesture taxonomies, its representations and recognition techniques, software platforms and frameworks which is discussed briefly in this paper. It focuses on the three main phases of hand gesture recognition i.e. detection, tracking and recognition. Different application which employs hand gestures for efficient interaction has been discussed under core and advanced application domains. This paper also provides an analysis of existing literature related to gesture recognition systems for human computer interaction by categorizing it under different key parameters. It further discusses the advances that are needed to further improvise the present hand gesture recognition systems for future perspective that can be widely used for efficient human computer interaction. The main goal of this survey is to provide researchers in the field of gesture based HCI with a summary of progress achieved to date and to help identify areas where further research is needed.

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Vision based hand gesture recognition for human computer interaction: a survey

The AUDIT Alcohol Consumption Questions (AUDIT-C) An Effective Brief Screening Test for Problem Drinking

A smart phone senses audio, imagery, and/or other stimulus from a user's environment, and acts autonomously to fulfill inferred or anticipated user desires. In one aspect, the detailed technology concerns phone-based cognition of a scene viewed by the phone's camera. The image processing tasks applied to the scene can be selected from among various alternatives by reference to resource costs, resource constraints, other stimulus information (e.g., audio), task substitutability, etc. The phone can apply more or less resources to an image processing task depending on how successfully the task is proceeding, or based on the user's apparent interest in the task. In some arrangements, data may be referred to the cloud for analysis, or for gleaning. Cognition, and identification of appropriate device response(s), can be aided by collateral information, such as context. A great number of other features and arrangements are also detailed.

Intuitive computing methods and systems

Recent technological advancements have led to a deluge of data from distinctive domains (e.g., health care and scientific sensors, user-generated data, Internet and financial companies, and supply chain systems) over the past two decades. The term big data was coined to capture the meaning of this emerging trend. In addition to its sheer volume, big data also exhibits other unique characteristics as compared with traditional data. For instance, big data is commonly unstructured and require more real-time analysis. This development calls for new system architectures for data acquisition, transmission, storage, and large-scale data processing mechanisms. In this paper, we present a literature survey and system tutorial for big data analytics platforms, aiming to provide an overall picture for nonexpert readers and instill a do-it-yourself spirit for advanced audiences to customize their own big-data solutions. First, we present the definition of big data and discuss big data challenges. Next, we present a systematic framework to decompose big data systems into four sequential modules, namely data generation, data acquisition, data storage, and data analytics. These four modules form a big data value chain. Following that, we present a detailed survey of numerous approaches and mechanisms from research and industry communities. In addition, we present the prevalent Hadoop framework for addressing big data challenges. Finally, we outline several evaluation benchmarks and potential research directions for big data systems.

Toward Scalable Systems for Big Data Analytics: A Technology Tutorial

In many applications today user interaction is moving away from mouse and pens and is becoming pervasive and much more physical and tangible. New emerging interaction technologies allow developing and experimenting with new interaction methods on the long way to providing intuitive human computer interaction. In this paper, we aim at recognizing gestures to interact with an application and present the design and evaluation of our sensor-based gesture recognition. As input device we employ the Wii-controller (Wiimote) which recently gained much attention world wide. We use the Wiimote's acceleration sensor independent of the gaming console for gesture recognition. The system allows the training of arbitrary gestures by users which can then be recalled for interacting with systems like photo browsing on a home TV. The developed library exploits Wii-sensor data and employs a hidden Markov model for training and recognizing user-chosen gestures. Our evaluation shows that we can already recognize gestures with a small number of training samples. In addition to the gesture recognition we also present our experiences with the Wii-controller and the implementation of the gesture recognition. The system forms the basis for our ongoing work on multimodal intuitive media browsing and are available to other researchers in the field.

/pdf/gesture-recognition-with-a-wii-controller-2l00c7gl9r.pdf

Gesture recognition with a Wii controller

Touchscreens became the dominant input device for smartphones. Users' touch behaviour has been widely studied in lab studies with a relative low number of participants. In contrast, we published a game in the Android Market that records the touch behaviour when executing a controlled task to collect large amounts of touch events. Players' task is to simply touch circles appearing on the screen. Data from 91,731 installations has been collected and players produced 120,626,225 touch events. We determined the error rates for different target sizes and screen locations. The amount of data enabled us to show that touch positions are systematically skewed. A compensation function that shifts the users' touches to reduce the amount of errors is derived from the data and evaluated by publishing an update of the game. The independent-measures experiment with data from 12,201 installations and 15,326,444 touch events shows that the function reduces the error rate by 7.79%. We argue that such a compensation function could improve the touch performance of virtually every smartphone user.

/pdf/100-000-000-taps-analysis-and-improvement-of-touch-4jul17t16a.pdf

100,000,000 taps: analysis and improvement of touch performance in the large

Digital maps and route descriptions on a PDA have become very popular for navigation, not the least with the advent of the iPhone and its Google Maps application. A visual support for wayfinding, however, is not reasonable or even possible all the time. A pedestrian must pay attention to traffic on the street, a hiker should concentrate on the narrow trail, and a blind person relies on other modalities to find her way. To overcome these limitations, we developed a non-visual support for wayfinding that guides and keeps a mobile user en route by a tactile display. We designed a belt with vibrators that indicates directions and deviations from the path in an accurate and unobtrusive way. Our first user evaluation showed that on an open field without any landmarks the participants stayed well to given test routes and that wayfinding support is possible with our Tactile Wayfinder.

Tactile wayfinder: a non-visual support system for wayfinding

Advances in Multimedia Modeling

In this paper we report on a field study comparing a commercial pedestrian navigation system to a tactile navigation system called Tactile Wayfinder. Similar to previous approaches the Tactile Wayfinder uses a tactile torso display to present the directions of a route's waypoints to the user. It advances those approaches by conveying the location of the next two waypoints rather than the next one only, so the user already knows how the route continues when reaching a waypoint. Using a within-subjects design, fourteen participants navigated along two routes in a busy city centre with the Tactile Wayfinder and a commercial pedestrian navigation system. We measured the acquisition of spatial knowledge, the level of attention the participants had to devote to the navigation task, and the navigation performance. We found that the Tactile Wayfinder freed the participants' attention but could not keep up with the navigation system in terms of navigation performance. No significant difference was found in the acquisition of spatial knowledge. Instead, a good general sense of direction was highly correlated with good spatial knowledge acquisition and a good navigation performance.

Susanne Boll

Papers

Gesture recognition with a Wii controller

100,000,000 taps: analysis and improvement of touch performance in the large

Tactile wayfinder: a non-visual support system for wayfinding

Advances in Multimedia Modeling

Tactile Wayfinder : comparison of tactile waypoint navigation with commercial pedestrian navigation systems