This month we have an article from a left field journal; "Journal of Data and Information Quality (JDIQ)". The latest issue has an article entitled "Compensated Signature Embedding for Multimedia Content Authentication" which proposes a new watermarking-based framework to conduct multimedia content authentication. The aim of this proposed authentication framework is to ensure the originality and quality of online multimedia contents. It is an interesting article and I wonder how such technological developments would affect the accessibility of such multimedia content.

Compensated Signature Embedding for Multimedia Content Authentication

One of the main goals of digital content authentication and preservation techniques is to guarantee the originality and quality of the information. In this article, robust watermarking is used to embed content-based fragile signatures in multimedia signals to achieve efficient authentication without requiring any third-party reference or side information. To overcome the signature alteration caused by the embedding perturbation and other possible encoding operations, a closed-form compensation technique is proposed for ensuring signature consistency by employing a Lagrangian-based approach. A minimum distortion criterion is used to ensure signal quality. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is investigated with simulations of examples of image authentication in which signatures are designed to reveal tamper localization. Results using quantitative performance criteria show successful authentication over a range of robustness in embedding watermarks using both QIM-DM and spread-spectrum techniques. A comparison with two iterative compensation schemes is also presented.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1659225.1659230
Full Proceedings: Journal of Data and Information Quality (JDIQ), Volume 1, Issue 3, December 2009.

Labels: data quality, information quality, multimedia

The Interactions magazine always includes interesting articles for HCI scientists. This month while I was browsing through ACM DL, I came across a very interesting article called "The invisible User" in the last issue of this magazine. Two scientists from Trinity College Dublin talk about their research on technology for mental health care. It is a good article and shows how technology can make difference in people's life. In brief, it presents a number of applications that are developed to support particularly teenagers with mental health disorders and discusses the lessons learnt throughout these projects. I strongly recommend this article.

The Invisible User

The World Health Organization estimates that approximately one million people per year commit suicide. Mental disorders such as depression are responsible for more than 90 percent of these deaths. In fact, depression is the leading cause of disability in the developed world, and the human and economic cost of mental illness is reaching crisis proportions. The stigma surrounding mental health issues exacerbates the problem, and many people are unable or reluctant to engage in and access effective treatment. Technology can help address these key problems of access and engagement, particularly for younger people. Interaction design has an important role in developing innovative and worthwhile applications that support the user in an effective way. Given the scale of the problem, even small changes in the effectiveness of mental health services could have a big impact.......

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1620693.1620697
Full Proceedings: Interactions, Volume 16, Issue 6 (November + December 2009), 2009.

Labels: HCI, interaction, Mental health

Not a left-field topic this month...Unfortunately, I could not attend the ASSETS conference this year, but I heard that it was again an excellent conference with great papers and presentations. The Full proceedings is available in ACM DL, but here I just wanted to highlight best papers:

BEST PAPER: Collaborative web accessibility improvement: challenges and possibilities

Collaborative accessibility improvement has great potential to make the Web more adaptive in a timely manner by inviting users into the improvement process. The Social Accessibility Project is an experimental service for a new needs-driven improvement model based on collaborative metadata authoring technologies. In 10 months, about 18,000 pieces of metadata were created for 2,930 webpages through collaboration. We encountered many challenges as we sought to create a new mainstream approach. The productivity of the volunteer activities exceeded our expectation, but we found large and important problems in the screen reader users' lack of awareness of their own accessibility problems. In this paper, we first introduce examples, analyze some statistics from the pilot service and then discuss our findings and challenges. Three future directions including site-wide authoring are considered.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1639642.1639677
BEST STUDENT PAPER: ClassInFocus: enabling improved visual attention strategies for deaf and hard of hearing students

Deaf and hard of hearing students must juggle their visual attention in current classroom settings. Managing many visual sources of information (instructor, interpreter or captions, slides or whiteboard, classmates, and personal notes) can be a challenge. ClassInFocus automatically notifies students of classroom changes, such as slide changes or new speakers, helping them employ more beneficial observing strategies. A user study of notification techniques shows that students who liked the notifications were more likely to visually utilize them to improve performance.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1639642.1639656
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 11th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-60558-558-1.

Labels: accessibility, ASSETS2009, conference