Understanding a target audience's emotional responses to a video advertisement is crucial to evaluate the advertisement's effectiveness. However, traditional methods for collecting such information are slow, expensive, and coarse grained. We propose ...

This article introduces Cartograph, a visualization system that harnesses the vast world knowledge encoded within Wikipedia to create thematic maps of almost any data. Cartograph extends previous systems that visualize non-spatial data using geographic approaches. Although these systems required data with an existing semantic structure, Cartograph unlocks spatial visualization for a much larger variety of datasets by enhancing input datasets with semantic information extracted from Wikipedia. Cartograph’s map embeddings use neural networks trained on Wikipedia article content and user navigation behavior. Using these embeddings, the system can reveal connections between points that are unrelated in the original datasets but are related in meaning and therefore embedded close together on the map. We describe the design of the system and key challenges we encountered. We present findings from two user studies exploring design choices and use of the system.

Recent research has shown that reliable recognition of sign language words and phrases using user-friendly and noninvasive armbands is feasible and desirable. This work provides an analysis and implementation of including fingerspelling recognition (FR) in such systems, which is a much harder problem due to lack of distinctive hand movements. A novel algorithm called DyFAV (Dynamic Feature Selection and Voting) is proposed for this purpose that exploits the fact that fingerspelling has a finite corpus (26 alphabets for the American Sign Language (ASL)). Detailed analysis of the algorithm used as well as comparisons with other traditional machine-learning algorithms is provided. The system uses an independent multiple-agent voting approach to identify letters with high accuracy. The independent voting of the agents ensures that the algorithm is highly parallelizable and thus recognition times can be kept low to suit real-time mobile applications. A thorough explanation and analysis is presented on results obtained on the ASL alphabet corpus for nine people with limited training. An average recognition accuracy of 95.36% is reported and compared with recognition results from other machine-learning techniques. This result is extended by including six additional validation users with data collected under similar settings as the previous dataset. Furthermore, a feature selection schema using a subset of the sensors is proposed and the results are evaluated. The mobile, noninvasive, and real-time nature of the technology is demonstrated by evaluating performance on various types of Android phones and remote server configurations. A brief discussion of the user interface is provided along with guidelines for best practices.

Personalized learning environments have the potential to improve learning outcomes for children in a variety of educational domains, as they can tailor instruction based on the unique learning needs of individuals. Robot tutoring systems can further engage users by leveraging their potential for embodied social interaction and take into account crucial aspects of a learner, such as a student’s motivation in learning. In this article, we demonstrate that motivation in young learners corresponds to observable behaviors when interacting with a robot tutoring system, which, in turn, impact learning outcomes. We first detail a user study involving children interacting one on one with a robot tutoring system over multiple sessions. Based on empirical data, we show that academic motivation stemming from one’s own values or goals as assessed by the Academic Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SRQ-A) correlates to observed suboptimal help-seeking behavior during the initial tutoring session. We then show how an interactive robot that responds intelligently to these observed behaviors in subsequent tutoring sessions can positively impact both student behavior and learning outcomes over time. These results provide empirical evidence for the link between internal motivation, observable behavior, and learning outcomes in the context of robot--child tutoring. We also identified an additional suboptimal behavioral feature within our tutoring environment and demonstrated its relationship to internal factors of motivation, suggesting further opportunities to design robot intervention to enhance learning. We provide insights on the design of robot tutoring systems aimed to deliver effective behavioral intervention during learning interactions for children and present a discussion on the broader challenges currently faced by robot--child tutoring systems.

<?tight?>Discovering the correlations among variables of air quality data is challenging, because the correlation time series are long-lasting, multi-faceted, and information-sparse. In this article, we propose a novel visual representation, called Time-correlation-partitioning (TCP) tree, that compactly characterizes correlations of multiple air quality variables and their evolutions. A TCP tree is generated by partitioning the information-theoretic correlation time series into pieces with respect to the variable hierarchy and temporal variations, and reorganizing these pieces into a hierarchically nested structure. The visual exploration of a TCP tree provides a sparse data traversal of the correlation variations and a situation-aware analysis of correlations among variables. This can help meteorologists understand the correlations among air quality variables better. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach in a real-world air quality investigation scenario.

Convergent lines of evidence indicate that anthropomorphic robots are represented using neurocognitive mechanisms typically employed in social reasoning about other people. Relatedly, a growing literature documents that contexts of threat can exacerbate coalitional biases in social perceptions. Integrating these research programs, the present studies test whether cues of violent intergroup conflict modulate perceptions of the intelligence, emotional experience, or overall personhood of robots. In Studies 1 and 2, participants evaluated a large, bipedal all-terrain robot; in Study 3, participants evaluated a small, social robot with humanlike facial and vocal characteristics. Across all studies, cues of violent conflict caused significant decreases in perceived robotic personhood, and these shifts were mediated by parallel reductions in emotional connection with the robot (with no significant effects of threat on attributions of intelligence/skill). In addition, in Study 2, participants in the conflict condition estimated the large bipedal robot to be less effective in military combat, and this difference was mediated by the reduction in perceived robotic personhood. These results are discussed as they motivate future investigation into the links among threat, coalitional bias and human–robot interaction.

Enticing groups of passers-by to focused interaction with a public display requires the display system to take appropriate action that depends on how much attention the group is already paying to the display. In the design of such a system, we might want to present the content so that it indicates that a part of the group that is looking head-on at the display has already been registered and is addressed individually, whereas it simultaneously emits a strong audio signal that makes the inattentive rest of the group turn toward it. The challenge here is to define and delimit adequate mixed attention states for groups of people, allowing for classifying collective attention based on inhomogeneous variants of individual attention, i.e., where some group members might be highly attentive, others even interacting with the public display, and some unperceptive. In this article, we present a model for estimating collective human attention toward a public display and investigate technical methods for practical implementation that employs measurement of physical expressive features of people appearing within the display's field of view (i.e., the basis for deriving a person's attention). We delineate strengths and weaknesses and prove the potentials of our model by experimentally exerting influence on the attention of groups of passers-by in a public gaming scenario.

User grouping in asynchronous online forums is a common phenomenon nowadays. People with similar backgrounds or shared interests like to get together in group discussions. As tens of thousands of archived conversational posts accumulate, challenges emerge for forum administrators and analysts to effectively explore user groups in large-volume threads and gain meaningful insights into the hierarchical discussions. Identifying and comparing groups in discussion threads are nontrivial, since the number of users and posts increases with time and noises may hamper the detection of user groups. Researchers in data mining fields have proposed a large body of algorithms to explore user grouping. However, the mining result is not intuitive to understand and difficult for users to explore the details. To address these issues, we present VisForum, a visual analytic system allowing people to interactively explore user groups in a forum. We work closely with two educators who have released courses in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) platforms to compile a list of design goals to guide our design. Then, we design and implement a multi-coordinated interface as well as several novel glyphs, i.e., group glyph, user glyph, and set glyph, with different granularities. Accordingly, we propose the group Detecting 8 Sorting Algorithm to reduce noises in a collection of posts, and employ the concept of “forum-index” for users to identify high-impact forum members. Two case studies using real-world datasets demonstrate the usefulness of the system and the effectiveness of novel glyph designs. Furthermore, we conduct an in-lab user study to present the usability of VisForum.

Neuroscience studies have shown that incorporating gaze view with third view perspective has a great influence to correctly infer human behaviors. Given the importance of both first and third person observations for the recognition of human behaviors, we propose a method that incorporates these observations in a technical system to enhance the recognition of human behaviors, thus improving beyond third person observations in a more robust human activity recognition system. First, we present the extension of our proposed semantic reasoning method by including gaze data and external observations as inputs to segment and infer human behaviors in complex real-world scenarios. Then, from the obtained results we demonstrate that the combination of gaze and external input sources greatly enhance the recognition of human behaviors. Our findings have been applied to a humanoid robot to online segment and recognize the observed human activities with better accuracy when using both input sources; for example, the activity recognition increases from 77% to 82% in our proposed pancake-making dataset. To provide completeness of our system, we have evaluated our approach with another dataset with a similar setup as the one proposed in this work, that is, the CMU-MMAC dataset. In this case, we improved the recognition of the activities for the egg scrambling scenario from 54% to 86% by combining the external views with the gaze information, thus showing the benefit of incorporating gaze information to infer human behaviors across different datasets.

Visualizations have a distinctive advantage when dealing with the information overload problem: Because they are grounded in basic visual cognition, many people understand them. However, creating proper visualizations requires specific expertise of the domain and underlying data. Our quest in this article is to study methods to suggest appropriate visualizations autonomously. To be appropriate, a visualization has to follow known guidelines to find and distinguish patterns visually and encode data therein. A visualization tells a story of the underlying data; yet, to be appropriate, it has to clearly represent those aspects of the data the viewer is interested in. Which aspects of a visualization are important to the viewer? Can we capture and use those aspects to recommend visualizations? This article investigates strategies to recommend visualizations considering different aspects of user preferences. A multi-dimensional scale is used to estimate aspects of quality for visualizations for collaborative filtering. Alternatively, tag vectors describing visualizations are used to recommend potentially interesting visualizations based on content. Finally, a hybrid approach combines information on what a visualization is about (tags) and how good it is (ratings). We present the design principles behind VizRec , our visual recommender. We describe its architecture, the data acquisition approach with a crowd sourced study, and the analysis of strategies for visualization recommendation.