Left Field

Implied Dynamics in Information Visualization

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:29:00 +0000

Information visualisation may be a left field topic to most accessibility researchers, however this month I found the proceedings of a conference called the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces which was held in Roma, Italy. The proceedings is full of interesting papers but one particularly has grabbed my attention called Implied dynamics in information visualization. This paper shows that even minor properties of visualisation such as borders, background areas, and the connectedness of parts, may affect how people perceive semantic aspects of data by suggesting different potential dynamics between data points.

Implied dynamics in information visualization

Information visualization is a powerful method for understanding and working with data. However, we still have an incomplete understanding of how people use visualization to think about information. We propose that people use visualization to support comprehension and reasoning by viewing abstract visual representations as physical scenes with a set of implied dynamics between objects. Inferences based on these implied dynamics are metaphorically extended to form inferences about the represented information. This view predicts that even seemingly meaningless properties of a visualization, including such minor design elements as borders, background areas, and the connectedness of parts, may affect how people perceive semantic aspects of data by suggesting different potential dynamics between data points. We present a study that supports this claim and discuss the design implications of this theory of information visualization.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1842993.1843031
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, Roma, Italy, 2010.

What Are the Most Eye-Catching and Ear-Catching Features in the Video?: Implications for Video Summarization

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:29:00 +0000

Video summarisation is not a left field topic for accessibility research, but I thought the following paper could still be an interest to people working on video accessibility research - What are the most eye-catching and ear-catching features in the video?: implications for video summarization which was published at the 19th international conference on World wide web.

What Are the Most Eye-Catching and Ear-Catching Features in the Video?: Implications for Video Summarization

Video summarization is a mechanism for generating short summaries of the video to help people quickly make sense of the content of the video before downloading or seeking more detailed information. To produce reliable automatic video summarization algorithms, it is essential to first understand how human beings create video summaries with manual efforts. This paper focuses on a corpus of instructional documentary video, and seeks to improve automatic video summaries by understanding what features in the video catch the eyes and ears of human assessors, and using these findings to inform automatic summarization algorithms. The paper contributes a thorough and valuable methodology for performing automatic video summarization, and the methodology can be extended to inform summarization of other video corpuses.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1772690.1772783
Full Proceedings: 19th international conference on World wide web, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, 2010.

Monitoring Smartphones for Anomaly Detection

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Wed, 28 Jun 2010 09:11:00 +0000

I am a member of the ACM Member Technical Interest Service and I receive a monthly email from this service. In the June edition, they were suggesting a paper which was among the top three downloaded articles - "Monitoring smartphones for anomaly detection". It is an interesting paper that shows how to monitor a smartphone running Symbian OS in order to extract features that describe the state of the device and can be used for anomaly detection. I think this paper is a left-field paper for most of the SIGACCESS members but I wonder if such applications can be reused/repurposed for better customisation for supporting better accessibility.

Monitoring smartphones for anomaly detection

In this paper we demonstrate how to monitor a smartphone running Symbian OS in order to extract features that describe the state of the device and can be used for anomaly detection. These features are sent to a remote server, because running a complex intrusion detection system (IDS) on this kind of mobile device still is not feasible, due to capability and hardware limitations. We give examples on how to compute some of the features and introduce the top ten applications used by mobile phone users basing on a study in 2005. The usage of these applications is recorded and visualized and for a first comparison, data results of the monitoring of a simple malware are given.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1165387.30864
Full Proceedings: MOBILWARE '08: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on MOBILe Wireless MiddleWARE, Operating Systems, and Applications, Austria, 2008.

The robustness of a new CAPTCHA

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 09:11:00 +0000

I guess "CAPTCHA" research is not a left field topic for accessibility researchers, but while I was browsing the ACM DL, I came across a workshop called "EUROSEC: Third European Workshop on System Security" which was held this month in Paris, France. A paper published in this workshop caught my attention called "The robustness of a new CAPTCHA". Even though this paper examines the security of a new CAPTCHA, I though people who work on making CAPTCHAs accessible would find this paper interesting.

The robustness of a new CAPTCHA

"CAPTCHA is a standard security technology that presents tests to tell computers and humans apart. In this paper, we examine the security of a new CAPTCHA that was deployed until very recently by Megaupload, a leading online storage and delivery website. The security of this scheme relies on a novel segmentation resistance mechanism. However, we show that this CAPTCHA can be segmented using a simple but new automated attack with a success rate of 78%. It takes about 120 ms on average to segment each challenge on a standard desktop computer."

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1752046.1752052
Full Proceedings:

Software Aging

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 18:42:00 +0000

One of my colleagues was asking me the other day "does software decay over time?". He asked me this question because I am a Computer Scientist but to be honest I didn't know how to answer this. To me the answer can be both yes and no, but to further investigate this I turned to the ACM DL. I found a very interesting paper published in 1994 at the 16th international conference on Software engineering. The author says "Programs, like people, get old", but was this convincing as being a scientists means you look for how? why? what? in which sense? and does this depend on the hardware? If you are also interested in these questions, then this paper provides an interesting discussion about the topic. Reading this paper also made me think "does accessibility software decay faster or slower over time compared to other kinds of software?"

Software aging

"Programs, like people, get old. We can't prevent aging, but we can understand its causes, take steps to limits its effects, temporarily reverse some of the damage it has caused, and prepare for the day when the software is no longer viable. A sign that the Software Engineering profession has matured will be that we lose our preoccupation with the first release and focus on the long term health of our products. Researchers and practitioners must change their perception of the problems of software development. Only then will Software Engineering deserve to be called Engineering."

Full Paper: Software aging
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Software engineering, Italy, 1994.

Compensated Signature Embedding for Multimedia Content Authentication

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:47:00 +0000

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.

The Invisible User

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 14:10:00 +0000

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.

ASSETS 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:19:00 +0000

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.

Using tagging to identify and organize concerns during pre-requirements analysis

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:22:00 +0000

This month I would like to talk about a paper published on a topic which I personally don't know a great deal about: aspect-oriented software design and development. To some of you this might not be a left-field topic, but unfortunately it is to me. This year at the International Conference on Software Engineering, a workshop was held about aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design. I found a paper presented in this workshop that talks about how tagging can be used to identify and organise concerns during pre-requirements analysis. I thought that this was really related to accessibility. For example, how can we use tagging to highlight accessibility issues at the requirements gathering stage of software design? Would this be useful? Would it be a way to explain to people what kind of accessibility issues can potentially occur based on the requirements?, etc.

Using tagging to identify and organize concerns during pre-requirements analysis

Before requirements analysis takes place in a business context, business analysis is usually performed. Important concerns emerge during this analysis that need to be captured and communicated to requirements engineers. In this paper, we take the position that tagging is a promising approach for identifying and organizing these concerns. The fact that tags can be attached freely to entities, often with multiple tags attached to the same entity and the same tag attached to multiple entities, leads to multi-dimensional structures that are suitable for representing crosscutting concerns and exploring their relationships. The resulting tag structures can be hardened into classifications that capture and communicate important concerns.

Full Paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/EA.2009.5071580
Full Proceedings: International Conference on Software Engineering, Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design, 25-30, 2009.

An online blog reading system by topic clustering and personalized ranking

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 06:01:00 +0000

Have you read any paper published in the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT) journal? This month, while I was browsing through the ACM DL, I came across a very interesting paper published in this journal, entitled "An online blog reading system by topic clustering and personalized ranking. This paper proposes an online Personalized Blog Reader (PBR) system that supports readers browsing the latest posts of blogs that match their interests by automatically clustering the most relevant stories. Even though the proposed reader is not directly related to accessibility, I guess you will agree with me that sometimes it becomes difficult to find interesting blog posts. Therefore such systems that learn people's personalized reading preferences and present a user with a final reading list would be useful. Furthermore, their algorithm could also be generalised and used for improving the browsing experience of disabled Web users.

An online blog reading system by topic clustering and personalized ranking

There is an increasing number of people reading, writing, and commenting on blogs. According to a recent survey made by Technorati, there are about 75,000 new blogs and 1.2 million new posts everyday. However, it is difficult and time consuming for a blog reader to find the most interesting posts in the huge and dynamic blog world. In this article, an online Personalized Blog Reader (PBR) system is proposed, which facilitates blog readers in browsing the coolest and newest blog posts of their interests by automatically clustering the most relevant stories. PBR aims to make a user's potential favorite topics always ranked higher than those nonfavorite ones. This is accomplished in the following steps. First, the system collects and provides a unified incremental index of posts coming from different blogs. Then, an incremental clustering algorithm with a flexible half-bounded window of observation is proposed to satisfy the requirements of online processing. It learns people's personalized reading preferences to present a user with a final reading list. The experimental results show that the proposed incremental clustering algorithm is effective and efficient, and the personalization of the PBR performs well.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1552291.1552292 Full Proceedings: Li, X., Yan, J., Fan, W., Liu, N., Yan, S., and Chen, Z. 2009. An online blog reading system by topic clustering and personalized ranking. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), 9, 3, Article 9 (July 2009).

A Feature-Based Algorithm for Detecting and Classifying Scene Breaks

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:41:00 +0000

Have you ever used myacm.org? If you are an ACM member, myacm.org includes a number of personalised services, for example e-mail forwarding, filtering, e-alerts, etc. It also lists the most popular articles in the ACM Digital library and also the most popular searches. According to their data, the most popular article is A feature-based algorithm for detecting and classifying scene breaks and was downloaded 2402 times. This paper describes an approach to detecting and classifying scene breaks. I think the work in this paper could be useful to people working on video accessibility.

A Feature-Based Algorithm for Detecting and Classifying Scene Breaks

We describe a new approach to the detection and classification of production effects in video sequences. Our method can detect and classify a variety of effects, including cuts, fades, dissolves, wipes and captions, even in sequences involving significant motion. We detect the appearance of intensity edges that are distant from edges in the previous frame. A global motion computation is used to handle camera or object motion. The algorithm we propose withstands JPEG and MPEG artifacts, even at high compression rates. Experimental evidence demonstrates that our method can detect and classify production effects that are difficult to detect with previous approaches.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/217279.215266
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Multimedia, San Francisco, California, 1995.

Computing as Social Science

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:51:00 +0000

Can accessibility be a crucial use case to get students interested in Computer Science (CS)? I think we are all aware that there is a decline in Computer Science enrolments. In April's issue of the Communications of ACM, I saw an article in the ViewPoint column that discusses this issue and shows how working with disabled people can motivate students to study Computer Science. I think people who teach Computer Science courses would find this article interesting as it shows how accessibility can be a good use case for teaching.

Computing as Social Science

And so the message is just not getting out there. Students' firsthand experience with computers - their music and their phones - is accepted and reinforced by the image we portray in school - one of unrelenting banality and geekdom - and potential computer science students do not see themselves as having a greater impact.

At the University of Buffalo we have two senior-level courses that require teams to create real systems for real clients. They are introduced to the wider community of people with disabilities and told to make a difference. That's it. Those are the instructions. Improve the quality of life of someone less able than you. If you can't figure it out, you fail. So don't fail.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1498765.1498779
Full Proceedings: Communications of the ACM, Volume 52, Issue 4, April 2009.

A User Interface for Deaf-Blind People (Preliminary Report)

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:52:00 +0000

In this column, I always try to discuss papers that have recently been published, but this time I want to discuss a paper that was published 22 years ago. I wanted to discover early papers published on accessibility in the ACM DL so I searched for the term "accessibility" and received 4,651 results. When I sorted these by date, the paper entitled "A User Interface for Deaf-Blind People (Preliminary Report)" by Richard Ladner, Randy Day, Dennis Gentry, Karin Meyer and Scott Rose appeared to be one of the earliest papers published on accessibility. It is definitely an interesting paper and I always think we have a lot to learn from the papers like this one.

A user interface for deaf-blind people (preliminary report)

A user interface suitable for deaf-blind users is presented and justified. The interface is designed for small paperless Braille displays, large font visual displays, or other low-bandwidth displays. Some of the key properties of the interface are that it uses a hierarchical approach to structure both commands and data, has a small universal command set, and has pervasive editing capability. DBNet, a system employing the user interface, has been built and tested with deaf-blind users. DBNet will provide various communication services to the deaf-blind community including electronic news, mail, and bulletin boards.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1165387.30864
Full Proceedings: ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, Volume 18, Issue 4 (April 1987), pages 81-92, 1987.

W4A 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Thu, 14 May 2009 07:40:00 +0000

The W4A 2009 conference was co-located with the Eighteenth International World Wide Web Conference, in Madrid, Spain. The two days of the conference were full of great presentations and discussions. The theme this year was "Web Accessibility for Older Users Are We There Yet?". If you do research related to this area, I am sure that you will find lots of interesting papers in the proceedings. The full proceedings is now available in the ACM DL and the papers that won the best paper awards are as follows:

2009 Best Paper Award: About the relevance of accessibility barriers in the everyday interactions of older people with the web

This paper reports key findings of a 3-year ethnographical study of the everyday interactions of older people with the web. The data consisted of in-situ observations and conversations with 388 older people while using myriads of web and computer technologies daily. The results revealed that the accessibility barriers that had a more negative effect on the daily interactions of older people with the web were due to their difficulties in remembering steps, understanding web and computer jargon and using the mouse, despite their willingness to use it. These obstacles were much more important than those caused by their difficulties perceiving visual information, understanding icons and using the keyboard. The prioritization of barriers was explained by two key aspects in ageing with new technologies, independency and inclusiveness, and a desired condition of web (user) interfaces, consistency in terminology. These results suggest that these three aspects should be considered carefully in enhancing web accessibility for older people, as well as allowing us to grasp older people's everyday web accessibility barriers. The paper discusses possible ways of making use of these findings to make the web more accessible to older people.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1535654.1535682

2009 John M Slatin Award for Best Communication Paper: Prosumers and accessibility: how to ensure a productive interaction

User-generated content (UGC) has become prevalent on the Web. It is not created by professional developers, but by prosumers: basic web users that also produce their own content. Thus, they lack any background, training, wherewithal, awareness and accountability regarding accessibility. We have extracted from top-used UGC sites a set of best practices to improve accessibility of UGC, focusing on the role the community itself plays in ensuring it. As we have merely compiled best practices, authoring tools and web content guidelines have not been redefined, but rather referenced and instantiated by UGC-specific recommendations.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1535654.1535665
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A) 2009, Madrid, Spain, April 20 - 21, 2009.

Location and the Web

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:08:00 +0000

Have you heard about the workshop called "Location and the Web"? This year it was run in conjunction with CHI 2009 so some of you may have already attended this workshop. Location and the Web aims to "to bring together researchers to discuss the ways in which location as a first-class concept in Web services and Web applications will transform the Web into a location-aware information system". The proceedings this year include a number of discussion papers or papers about on-going work. One of them is called "Exploring future challenges for haptic, audio and visual interfaces for mobile maps and location based services". This paper is very interesting and it's good at showing how everybody can benefit from the research on accessibility.

Exploring future challenges for haptic, audio and visual interfaces for mobile maps and location based services

In this article we give an overview of some challenges in how to make geospatial information more useable and accessible. We also suggest a roadmap for dealing with these challenges -- and introduce a new EU project HaptiMap.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1507136.1507144
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Location and the Web 2009, Boston, Massachusetts, April 04 - 04, 2009.

On Technology and Cultural Change

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:03:00 +0000

ACM SIGSOFT, the ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering, publishes a newsletter six times a year. If you are interested in software engineering it is definitely an interesting publication. In the latest issue, they have a short note on Technology and culture change. The author argues that all great software affects the culture. I strongly agree with that. If we look at the accessibility community, that is also a valid point. Successful assistive technologies change the culture as is the case with other successful software.

On technology and cultural change

"A reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw Maybe not. A good friend of mine writes software that analyzes loan portfolios for banks. He says that there are 2 kinds of bankers. Some bankers use analysis to better understand what is actually going on, and they adjust their actions accordingly. These “reasonable” bankers are still in business, today.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1507195.1507197
Full Proceedings: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Volume 34, Issue 2, February 2009.

Classifying pretended and evoked facial expressions of positive and negative affective states using infrared measurement of skin temperature

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 12:44:00 +0000

The ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP) might not be a left field journal for researchers from the accessibility community, but I came across a very interesting article from their latest issue. This article is called Classifying pretended and evoked facial expressions of positive and negative affective states using infrared measurement of skin temperature. It's always exciting to see an investigation of novel HCI techniques. This paper presents a user study that shows that emotion-specific transient facial skin temperature measurements could help distinguish between; neutral and happy and sad faces, multiple positive and negative facial expressions, neutral and six basic facial expressions. I think this work can be useful for designing assistive technologies with novel HCI techniques.

Classifying pretended and evoked facial expressions of positive and negative affective states using infrared measurement of skin temperature

Earlier researchers were able to extract the transient facial thermal features from thermal infrared images (TIRIs) to make binary distinctions between the expressions of affective states. However, effective human-computer interaction would require machines to distinguish between the subtle facial expressions of affective states. This work, for the first time, attempts to use the transient facial thermal features for recognizing a much wider range of facial expressions. A database of 324 time-sequential, visible-spectrum, and thermal facial images was developed representing different facial expressions from 23 participants in different situations. A novel facial thermal feature extraction, selection, and classification approach was developed and invoked on various Gaussian mixture models constructed using: neutral and pretended happy and sad faces, faces with multiple positive and negative facial expressions, faces with neutral and six (pretended) basic facial expressions, and faces with evoked happiness, sadness, disgust, and anger. This work demonstrates that (1) infrared imaging can be used to observe the affective-state-specific facial thermal variations, (2) pixel-grey level analysis of TIRIs can help localise significant facial thermal feature points along the major facial muscles, and (3) cluster-analytic classification of transient thermal features can help distinguish between the facial expressions of affective states in an optimized eigenspace of input thermal feature vectors. The observed classification results exhibited influence of a Gaussian mixture model's structure on classifier-performance. The work also unveiled some pertinent aspects of future research on the use of facial thermal features in automated facial expression classification and affect recognition.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1462055.1462061
Full Proceedings: ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP), Volume: 6, Issue:1, February 2009.

PointAssist: helping four year olds point with ease

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:03:00 +0000

This is the first left-field of 2009, I hope you all had a great holiday. This month, as I was browsing the ACM DL, I found out that there is a very interesting annual conference on children and interaction called the international conference on Interaction design and children. In 2008, they had the seventh international conference in Chicago. I found a paper in their 2008 proceedings entitled PointAssist: helping four year olds point with ease. This paper mainly presents the design and motivation of a tool called PointAssist. This tool helps children in pointing tasks by detecting the type of motion that occurs when children have difficulty in pointing at a target, and triggering a precision mode that slows the speed of the mouse cursor in those cases. When I read this paper I thought it could be useful for people who work on improving the input usability for disabled people.

PointAssist: helping four year olds point with ease

Children's difficulty in point-and-click tasks using indirect pointing devices such as the mouse has been documented in several studies. This difficulty is manifested in a lack of control near the target, which often results in children clicking inaccurately. This paper presents and evaluates PointAssist, a tool that helps children in pointing tasks by detecting the type of motion that occurs when children have difficulty pointing at a target, and triggering a precision mode that slows the speed of the mouse cursor in those cases. We conducted a study with 30 four year old participants who completed point-and-click tasks with and without PointAssist. PointAssist provided participants with significant advantages in terms of click accuracy, enabling them to be as accurate as 18 to 22 year olds in a previous study with a very similar setup.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1463689.1463757
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Interaction design and children, Pages 202-209, 2008.

Event detection for video surveillance using an expert system

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:34:00 +0000

This is the last left-field column of 2008 and I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy New Year and a happy holidays, looking forward to meeting again in 2009 with a lot of interesting left-field articles! A new workshop grabbed my attention in the ACM DL - "Proceeding of the 1st ACM workshop on Analysis and retrieval of events/actions and workflows in video streams AREA '08". I think all the papers in this proceeding would be interesting to people working on video accessibility, however I wanted to highlight one which is called "Event detection for video surveillance using an expert system". This paper presents an expert system that encodes seven rules to represent and detect seven predefined events. These events represent dangerous situations in a subway station such as someone being trapped by the door of a moving train. I wonder if such systems would be used to inform blind users about the dangerous situations in the environment.

Event detection for video surveillance using an expert system

Video Surveillance is in the center of research due to high importance of safety and security issues. Usually, humans have to monitor an area and often they have to do this for 24 hours a day. Thus, it would be desirable to have automatic surveillance systems that support this job automatically. The system described in this paper is such an automatic surveillance system that has been developed to detect several dangerous situations in a subway station. This paper discusses the high-level module of the system. Herein, an expert system is used to detect events.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1463542.1463551
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Analysis and retrieval of events/actions and workflows in video streams, 2008.

Why Does Time Go Faster As We Get Older?

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:03:00 +0000

This month I have two left-field articles to discuss. One is a very technical paper and the other is from an ACM Web-based publication called Ubiquity. The first article introduces a technique to derive a GUI model for automated testing. It is a very well written paper published in the highly influential ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodologies. As the authors highlighted in the synopsis, this article "attempts to systematically generate potentially problematic sequences by empirically understanding event sequences that lead lead to successful fault detection". After I read this article, I wondered if the authors had considered disabled users and what would have been the generated problematic sequences? Would they be different? Would they identify more problematic sequences?

The second article, entitled as titled as "Why Does Time Go Faster As We Get Older?", is not as technically rich as the first article. I have been thinking about this question for a while and I thought other SIGACCESS members might also feel the same way and would be interested to read this short note.

Using a pilot study to derive a GUI model for automated testing

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are one of the most commonly used parts of today's software. Despite their ubiquity, testing GUIs for functional correctness remains an understudied area. A typical GUI gives many degrees of freedom to an end-user, leading to an enormous input event interaction space that needs to be tested. GUI test designers generate and execute test cases (modeled as sequences of user events) to traverse its parts; targeting a subspace in order to maximize fault detection is a nontrivial task. In this vein, in previous work, we used informal GUI code examination and personal intuition to develop an event-interaction graph (EIG). In this article we empirically derive the EIG model via a pilot study, and the resulting EIG validates our intuition used in previous work; the empirical derivation process also allows for model evolution as our understanding of GUI faults improves. Results of the pilot study show that events interact in complex ways; a GUI's response to an event may vary depending on the context established by preceding events and their execution order. The EIG model helps testers to understand the nature of interactions between GUI events when executed in test cases and why certain events detect faults, so that they can better traverse the event space. New test adequacy criteria are defined for the EIG; new algorithms use these criteria and EIG to systematically generate test cases that are shown to be effective on four fielded open-source applications.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1416563.1416567
Full Proceedings: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), Volume 18, Issue 2, 2008.
Why Does Time Go Faster As We Get Older?

...Finally, I decided to sit quietly and ponder the matter myself. This turned about to be a wise decision, because I think I found the solution. It's really quite simple. It all has to do with "anticipation" and "retrospection"...

Full Proceedings: Volume 9, Issue 39 (October 28 - November 3, 2008).

ASSETS 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:23:00 +0000

ASSETS was a great conference again this year. There were a lot of great presentations and lots of good discussion. This month, I just wanted to highlight the papers that won the best paper awards, but I also want to note that the proceedings of ASSETS 2008 is full of great papers.

SIGACCESS Best Paper Award: Computer usage by young individuals with down syndrome: an exploratory study

In this paper, we discuss the results of an online survey that investigates how children and young adults with Down syndrome use computers and computer-related devices. The survey responses cover 561 individuals with Down syndrome between the age of four to 21. The survey results suggest that the majority of the children and young adults with Down syndrome can use the mouse to interact with computers, which requires spatial, cognitive, and fine motor skills that were previously believed to be quite challenging for individuals with Down syndrome. The results show great difficulty in text entry using keyboards. Young individuals with Down syndrome are using a variety of computer applications and computer related devices, and computers and computer-related devices play important roles in the life of individuals with Down syndrome. There appears to be great potential in computer-related education and training to broaden existing career opportunities for individuals with Down syndrome, and there needs to be further research on this topic.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1414471.1414480
Full Proceedings: ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Assistive Technologies, (October 2008)
SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award: What's new?: making web page updates accessible

Web applications facilitated by technologies such as JavaScript, DHTML, AJAX, and Flash use a considerable amount of dynamic web content that is either inaccessible or unusable by blind people. Server side changes to web content cause whole page refreshes, but only small sections of the page update, causing blind web users to search linearly through the page to find new content. The connecting theme is the need to quickly and unobtrusively identify the segments of a web page that have changed and notify the user of them. In this paper we propose Dynamo, a system designed to unify different types of dynamic content and make dynamic content accessible to blind web users. Dynamo treats web page updates uniformly and its methods encompass both web updates enabled through dynamic content and scripting, and updates resulting from static page refreshes, form submissions, and template-based web sites. From an algorithmic and interaction perspective Dynamo detects underlying changes and provides users with a single and intuitive interface for reviewing the changes that have occurred. We report on the quantitative and qualitative results of an evaluation conducted with blind users. These results suggest that Dynamo makes access to dynamic content faster, and that blind web users like it better than existing interfaces.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1414471.1414499
Full Proceedings: ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Assistive Technologies, (October 2008)

Access for All and Web Science

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:06:00 +0000

Communications of the ACM (CACM) is not really a left-field magazine for us, but I would like to bring your attention to the following two articles published recently at CACM:

Access for All: I strongly recommend you this article. Probably you already know the content but it's good to see that such an article will reach the wide audience of CACM.
Abstract: Accessible technologies are improving the lives of millions of physically impaired people around the world.
Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1378704.1378709
Full Proceedings: Communications of the ACM, Volume 51, Issue 8 (August 2008)
Web science: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the web: If you are not sure what Web science is, this is a good article to start with.
Abstract: The Web must be studied as an entity in its own right to ensure it keeps flourishing and prevent unanticipated social effects.
Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1364782.1364798
Full Proceedings: Communications of the ACM, Volume 51, Issue 7 (July 2008)

The Impact of Research on Development of Middleware Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 07:14:00 +0000

An interesting article titled "The Impact of Research on Development of Middleware Technology" which is really out of left field. It was published in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. Probably, many of us don't know much about Middleware technology, but that's not the main reason I wanted to talk about this article here. This paper explains Middleware as follows "Middleware is commonly defined as a software layer between applications and operating systems that provides programmers with higher level of abstractions, such as remote procedure invocation, reliable message exchange and transactions". This paper aims to address the question whether research had any involvement in the creation of Middleware technology that is being sold in the market. With a scientific methodology, the authors show that research in different Computer Science disciplines had an important influence on the development of Middleware standards and products implementing these standards. I just wonder if we would come up with similar results, if we follow their methodology and investigate whether accessibility research had any influence in the development of assistive technologies.

The impact of research on the development of middleware technology

The middleware market represents a sizable segment of the overall Information and Communication Technology market. In 2005, the annual middleware license revenue was reported by Gartner to be in the region of $8.5 billion. In this article we address the question whether research had any involvement in the creation of the technology that is being sold in this market? We attempt a scholarly discourse. We present the research method that we have applied to answer this question. We then present a brief introduction into the key middleware concepts that provide the foundation for this market. It would not be feasible to investigate any possible impact that research might have had. Instead we select a few very successful technologies that are representative for the middleware market as a whole and show the existence of impact of research results in the creation of these technologies. We investigate the origins of Web services middleware, distributed transaction processing middleware, message-oriented middleware, distributed object middleware and remote procedure call systems. For each of these technologies we are able to show ample influence of research and conclude that without the research conducted by PhD students and researchers in university computer science labs at Brown, CMU, Cambridge, Newcastle, MIT, Vrije, and University of Washington as well as research in industrial labs at APM, AT&T Bell Labs, DEC Systems Research, HP Labs, IBM Research, and Xerox PARC we would not have middleware technology in its current form. We summarise the article by distilling lessons that can be learnt from this evidenced impact for future technology transfer undertakings.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/13487689.13487692 Full Proceedings: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), Volume 17, Issue 4 (August 2008)

History of computers can raise student's interest

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 05:50:00 +0000

SIGSOFT is an ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering and has a monthly informal publication called Software Engineering Notes (SEN). This month, when I was browsing in the ACM DL, an article from the latest issue of SEN grabbed my attention: History of computers can raise student's interest. According to this short note, if well-known personalities speak about the old times, students get more interested in computer history. Apparently this idea is also supported by another article titled as The design of a history of computing course with a unique perspective. I am just wondering, why don't we do this for accessibility? Why don't we have well-known personalities in the accessibility community telling us about the old times to increase students' interest in accessibility?

History of computers can raise student's interest

What was software development back in the 1960's and how did it evolve?

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1384139.1384152
Full Proceedings: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Volume 33, Issue 4 (July 2008) The design of a history of computing course with a unique perspective

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a new history of computing course that includes personal and historical perspectives from faculty members to supplement the course material. Despite decreasing enrollments in our computer science courses, this new course has achieved significantly large enrollments and a wide audience due to this unique faculty perspective in addition to the approval of this course as a general education requirement that addresses the implications of science and technology on society.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1121341.1121366
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, 2006, Houston, Texas, USA.

Organic User Interfaces

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:25:00 +0000

Communications of the ACM is not really out of left field, but June 2008 issue has a special section that I found very interesting. This section is about "Organic User Interfaces (OUI)" which are described as "user interfaces with non-planar displays that may actively or passively change shape via analog physical inputs". This special section is organised under three themes:

The input device is the output device: Computer displays that are curved, flexible, or in another form, printed on paper, etc. [see Organic Interaction Technologies: From Stone to Skin and What Makes an Interface feel Organic?].
The form of the display equals its function: When any object, from a credit card to a building, no matter how large, complex, dynamic or flexible will be wrapped with high resolution, full-color interactive graphics [Organic User Interfaces: Designing computers in any Way, Shape and Form].
The physical shape of computing devices is no longer static: Will be able to fold, bend, twist, pull and tear apart digital devices [Designing Kinetic Interactions for Organic User Interfaces].

These are all very interesting articles and give us an idea about what might be our user interfaces like in the future. However, I wonder if these OUIs will bring solutions to problems that the accessibility community have been addressing, or will they bring new set of challenges. Maybe it will be both but I thought it would be interesting to see which of these technologies will take off. Organic user interfaces

Throughout the history of computing, developments in human-computer interaction (HCI) have often been preceded by breakthroughs in display and input technologies. The first use of a cathode ray tube (CRT) to display computer-generated (radar) data, in the Canadian DATAR [6] and MIT's Whirlwind projects of the early 1950s, led to the development of the trackball and light pen. That development, in turn, influenced Sutherland's and Engelbart's work on interactive computer graphics, the mouse, and the graphical user interface (GUI) during the early 1960s. According to Alan Kay [3], seeing the first liquid crystal display (LCD) had a similar disruptive effect on his thinking about interactivity at Xerox PARC during the early 1970s. His vision of Dynabook led to the development of Smalltalk, the Alto GUI (1973), and eventually, the Tablet PC [2]…

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1349026.1349033
Full Proceedings: Communications of the ACM, June 2008, Volume 51, Number 6.

The Web4All (W4A) 2008 Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:01:00 +0000

This year was the fifth time that the Web4All (W4A) was running and was co-located with the World Wide Web Conference (WWW) in Beijing, China. The theme this year was "One World, One Web: Surfers become Designers?". There were a lot of discussions and great presentations. There were two keynote presentations: T. V. Raman (Google Research, USA) - "Cloud computing and equal access for all" and Shadi Abou-Zahra (W3C) - "Towards bridging the accessibility needs of people with disabilities and the ageing community". Just to give you an idea about the papers, here is the paper which won the best paper award: The impact of accessibility assessment in macro scale universal usability studies of the web

This paper presents a modelling framework, Web Interaction Environments, to express the synergies and differences of audiences, in order to study universal usability of the Web. Based on this framework, we have expressed the implicit model of WCAG and developed an experimental study to assess the Web accessibility quality of Wikipedia at a macro scale. This has resulted on finding out that template mechanisms such as those provided by Wikipedia lower the burden of producing accessible contents, but provide no guarantee that hyperlinking to external websites maintain accessibility quality. We discuss the black-boxed nature of guidelines such as WCAG and how formalising audiences helps leveraging universal usability studies of the Web at macro scales.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1368044.1368048
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 2008 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility (W4A), 2008, Beijing, China.

Video abstraction: A systematic review and classification

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:36:00 +0000

A paper that can be extremely useful for people working on video accessibility. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the research in video abstraction. Although the focus is on the importance of abstraction for effective and efficient access of large volumes of video content, video abstraction can also be very useful for disabled users. Video abstraction: A systematic review and classification
The demand for various multimedia applications is rapidly increasing due to the recent advance in the computing and network infrastructure, together with the widespread use of digital video technology. Among the key elements for the success of these applications is how to effectively and efficiently manage and store a huge amount of audio visual information, while at the same time providing user-friendly access to the stored data. This has fueled a quickly evolving research area known as video abstraction. As the name implies, video abstraction is a mechanism for generating a short summary of a video, which can either be a sequence of stationary images (keyframes) or moving images (video skims). In terms of browsing and navigation, a good video abstract will enable the user to gain maximum information about the target video sequence in a specified time constraint or sufficient information in the minimum time. Over past years, various ideas and techniques have been proposed towards the effective abstraction of video contents. The purpose of this article is to provide a systematic classification of these works. We identify and detail, for each approach, the underlying components and how they are addressed in specific works. Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1198302.1198305 Full Proceedings: ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMCCAP), Vol. 3, No. 1, Article 3, February 2007.

Beyond dirty, dangerous and dull: what everyday people think robots should do

noreply@blogger.com (Yeliz Yesilada) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:33:00 +0000

An interesting paper from the 3rd International Conference on Human Robot Interaction investigating people's attitudes toward robot workers to identify the characteristics of occupations for which robots are qualified and desired. I really like the motivation of this paper; the authors say “the opinions of everyday people … are critical to the field of human-robot interactions because popular sentiment shapes technology adoption and because technologies are more usable if they take people's expectations into account”. Although this paper doesn't directly address accessibility, it does raise some interesting issues. Beyond dirty, dangerous and dull: what everyday people think robots should do We present a study of people's attitudes toward robot workers, identifying the characteristics of occupations for which people believe robots are qualified and desired. We deployed a web-based public-opinion survey that asked respondents (n=250) about their attitudes regarding robots' suitability for a variety of jobs (n=812) from the U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET occupational information database. We found that public opinion favors robots for jobs that require memorization, keen perceptual abilities, and service-orientation. People are preferred for occupations that require artistry, evaluation, judgment and diplomacy. In addition, we found that people will feel more positively toward robots doing jobs with people rather than in place of people. Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1349822.1349827 Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Human robot interaction, Netherlands, March 12-15 2008.