Mobile, Education and Healthcare : A Tale of Four Projects in Interaction Design (Jingtao Wang: Dec 2)

He presented a high-level overview of four ongoing HCI projects that explore how techniques in mobile interfaces and visual end-user programming can be created and leveraged to address emerging interdisciplinary problems in education and healthcare.   Examples are: 1) ScatterDice Mobile (SDM) is an interactive system to explore and navigate large scale, multi-dimensional datasets on mobile devices via one-handed motion and orientation gestures; 2) BFT Mobile is a cross-platform, end-user programming environment and runtime to allow psychology researchers to design, deploy and monitor cognitive, behavior and learning experiments with ease; 3) In the DashReview project, they design a teacher side “dashboard” to make it easy for instructors to browse, navigate, and make sense of the written artifacts collected in the iterative writing and review process in a classroom setting; 4) MARBLS (Medical Alert Rule Building System) is an end-programming environment that combines a block based visual language and direct graph manipulation for clinical alert rule building.  he illustrated the motivations behind each project and showing demonstrations of ongoing prototypes.

Advance Disclosure of Insider Trading in a Competitive Market (Stephen Lenkey: Dec 2)

He presented a noisy rational expectations equilibrium model in which agents who possess private information regarding the pro tability of a rm are required to provide advance disclosure of their trading activity. He analytically characterized an equilibrium and conducted a numerical analysis to evaluate the implications of advance disclosure relative to a market in which informed agents trade without providing advance disclosure.

Cloud Security: New Challenges, New Opportunities (Xiaofeng Wang: Nov 21)

Cloud computing is becoming a game-changer for the academia and industry that need low-cost and scalable data processing capabilities.  However, this new computing paradigm is also fraught with security and privacy risks.  Although many cloud-security issues are related to the problems that have long been studied, he strongly believes that distinctive features of the cloud actually expand the space of these seemingly old problems.  He present the outcomes of their preliminary research in this new domain, which include new security threats they discovered in the cloud and a new cloud-based solution they developed for an existing security problem. Specifically, software in the cloud is often built through integrating web APIs provided by different web service providers, and served through delivering part of its components to the user’s browser.  This Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model can easily bring in logic flaws during API integrations, due to the miscommunication between the API provider and the API user, and is fundamentally vulnerable to side-channel attacks.  As evidence to the seriousness of such problems, their research shows that high-profile web stores can be exploited to shop for free, and popular cloud-based web services are leaking out highly sensitive user information such as health records, family incomes and investment secrets.  On the other hand, they demonstrate that the special features of the cloud can actually be leveraged to build surprisingly effective solutions to some old security problems:  they developed a suite of new secure DNA alignment techniques based upon the hybrid infrastructure of today’s clouds and their immense data-processing capacity. Their new approach can support a large-scale genomic computation on the low-cost public cloud without endangering sensitive genetic information.  These preliminary studies strongly indicate great security research opportunities existing in the cloud, which can lead to high-impact discoveries and surprising technological progress.

Green Navigation Services (Hassan Karimi: Nov 18)

Users of navigation services routinely request shortest or fastest routes
for traveling from one location to another. This is because, at least for
most trips, users prefer to optimize their mobility. As navigation
services aim to address the problem of “getting lost”, especially in
unfamiliar environments, shortest and fastest routes attempt to address
the problem of “not getting there late”. The notion of “getting there
fast” provides a rationale for current navigation services to provide
shortest and fastest routes as default route choices. However, to date,
there is no study aimed at realizing the impacts of taking shortest or
fastest routes by many users in a geographic area over time on the
environment. He presented the concept of Green Navigation
Services and discussed the results of experiments conducted to address the
impacts of shortest and fastest routes commonly provided by current
navigation services on the environment.

Healthier Together: Social Approaches to Health and Wellness (Paul Resnick: Nov 18)

It’s getting a lot easier to track our health-related states (weight, blood pressure, glucose, moods, disease symptoms, etc.) and our health-related behaviors (smoking, food intake, drugs and medications, exercise, sleep, etc.) Reflecting privately on our traces can help us make good judgments (e.g., deciding whether to exercise in the morning or at night to improve sleep?). Reflecting privately on our traces can also help us make behavior changes that are hard to stick with (e.g., eating less; exercising regularly). Selectively sharing some of these traces can be even more powerful than reflecting on them individually. He offered a framework for thinking about the benefits and barriers of sharing those traces, with illustrations from his own work and other research projects and commercial practice.

Future Centered Design: Designing for Sustainable Business (Janaki Kumar: Oct 26)

She outlined the changing attitudes of business leaders towards sustainability and the opportunities this presents to product and information designers. Smart business leaders are beginning to understand the importance of sustainable practices to their success. They examined the key drivers for this mind shift.

Just as businesses have to reconsider the way they do business, designers have to re-think aspects of the way they design to participate fully in the creation of a sustainable world. They have to be prepared to rethink their design process, their materials, their product lifecycle, and their notion of customer experience.

Information designers and product designers have to work together to create the next generation of sustainability products. While product designers play a direct role, information designers play just an important role by gathering critical information across the enterprise and presenting them in a consumable way to allow decision makers to make informed sustainable choices.

The Next Generation of Facial Expression Recognition Systems (Michel Valstar: Oct 18)

The previous decade has seen a large number of publications on Automatic Facial Expression Recognition systems (AFERS). Also, recently the first AFERS programmes have been made available, either publicly by academics, or for sale by companies, making it clear for everyone what works and what doesn't. The first facial expression recognition challenge (FERA2011) further serves to shed a light on the efforts in this field, comparing many state of the art approaches on the same challenging dataset. What we now see is the advent of a second generation of AFERS. Building upon the successes of the first generation, these new systems attempt to tackle all the open challenges in this field by combining different approaches, as well as integrating sources of information other than the face (e.g. head actions). He described two recent developments towards such a second generation of AFERS, to wit the novel facial point detection algorithm Local Evidence Aggregation Regressors (LEAR) and a novel dynamic appearance descriptor called LPQ-TOP.

IP & Optical Transport Network Synergetic Protection & Dual Link Failure (Victor Yu Liu: 30 Sep)

The spare capacity allocation (SCA) problem pre-plans traffic flows with mutually disjoint one working and two backup paths using the shared backup path protection (SBPP) scheme. The aggregated spare provision matrix (SPM) is used to capture the spare capacity sharing for dual link failures. Comparing to a previous work by He and Somani, this method has better scalability and flexibility. The SCA problem is formulated in a non-linear integer programming model and partitioned into two sequential linear sub-models: one finds all primary backup paths first, and the other finds all secondary backup paths next. The results on five networks show that the network redundancy using dedicated 1+1+1 is in the range of 313-400%. It drops to 96-181% in 1:1:1 without loss of dual-link resiliency, but with the trade-off of using the complicated share capacity sharing among backup paths. The hybrid 1+1:1 provides intermediate redundancy ratio at 187-310% with a moderate complexity. They also compare the passive/active approaches which consider spare capacity sharing after/during the backup path routing process. The active sharing approaches always achieve lower redundancy values than the passive ones. These reduction percentages are about 12% for 1+1:1 and 25% for 1:1:1 respectively.

Learning Classification With Auxiliary Probabilistic Information (Quang Nguyen: Sep 23)

Finding ways of incorporating auxiliary information or auxiliary data into the learning process has been the topic of active data mining and machine learning research in recent years. In this work they studied and developed a new framework for classification learning problem in which, in addition to class labels, the learner is provided with an auxiliary (probabilistic) information that reflects how strong the expert feels about the class label. This approach can be extremely useful for many practical classification tasks that rely on subjective label assessment and where the cost of acquiring additional auxiliary information is negligible when compared to the cost of the example analysis and labeling. They developed classification algorithms capable of using the auxiliary information to make the learning process more efficient in terms of the sample complexity. He demonstrated the benefit of the approach on a number of synthetic and real world data sets by comparing it to the learning with class labels only.

Smart Grid Technologies (David Tipper: Sep 16)

As Energy Secretary Steven Chu has noted, “America cannot build a 21st Century energy economy with a mid-20th Century electricity system.” Transforming the current grid into a dynamic, resilient, and adaptable Smart Grid will be one of the biggest technological challenges of our times. The rewards, however, may be dramatic, enabling consumers to better control their electricity use, integrating the next generation of plug-in electric vehicles, increasing efficiency, and better harnessing renewable energy. The Smart Grid will be able to revolutionize electricity generation, delivery, and use in this nation by combining the two-way flow of electricity with the two-way flow of information. It will leverage the benefits of modern computing capabilities to process information about electricity usage more dynamically and enable adjustments in electricity usage to make our use of electricity more efficient and reliable. Key to achieving these potential benefits is ensuring that the foundational technological needs of the Smart Grid are in place. Because the Smart Grid relies on the increased use of communications and information technology, sufficient access to communications facilities is critically important.

Human-computer Interaction in Healthcare (Titus Schleyer: Sep 14)

Forty years of computerization in healthcare have yielded significant, albeit highly uneven, progress. Computer systems provide value to many clinics and physician offices day by day, but many benefits of computerization remain yet to be realized. A recent report of the National Research Council entitled “Computational Technology for Effective Health Care: Immediate Steps and Strategic Directions” singled out human-computer interaction (HCI) as one of the most important improvements for electronic health records. As several recent studies have shown, information technology applications in healthcare can cause significant clinical errors, for instance in the prescription and administration of medications. Addressing the sources of these errors, and improving the support for the cognitive tasks and workflow of clinicians, is a critical need for the ongoing national implementation of health information technology. He highlighted current electronic health record implementations, as well as present HCI studies conducted by the Center for Dental Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Energy Efficient Networks (Gee Rittenhouse: Sep 9)

Gee Rittenhouse is Vice President, Bell Labs Research, overseeing all Bell Labs research centres and research activities for Alcatel-Lucent.
In this role, Gee is responsible for creating new growth opportunities by inventing technologies with disruptive impact. These responsibilities include the overall research portfolio from project inception through transfer to all parts of the Alcatel-Lucent business including the Solutions and Marketing organization, Product/Services groups, Applications Business Group, and internal ventures or technology licensing.
Gee is also actively engaged in green technology research and in generating innovations that promote environmental sustainability and he is the current Chairman of GreenTouchTM, an industry wide consortium whose goal is to improve the energy efficiency of ICT networks by a factor of 1000 from current levels.
Gee also fosters an open innovation model by developing research partnerships to effectively leverage Alcatel-Lucent’s knowledge with external partners. Prior to this, Gee headed the Bell Labs' Technology Integration Group, with the primary mission of taking Bell Labs research assets and innovations and driving them, through development activities and project management, into Alcatel-Lucent products and services. In this position, he was closely connected with all of Alcatel-Lucent's business divisions, interlocking their needs and strategies with Bell Labs' research activities, priorities, and innovations areas.