Ubiquitous computing offers a compelling vision, in which computers vanish into the environment, using sensors to infer their context, and then using dynamically available actuators to influence their environment. This vision has proven as difficult as it is compelling. In this paper, we first outline the vision, then highlight what we believe are the main hurdles preventing its realization, and then present a new paradigm to help overcome these hurdles within a particular subset of inferencing, inferring the activity of humans in their environment. Existing prototypes indicate that the paradigm is a fruitful one - the issues and challenges inherent in going beyond these first steps are described.

We analyze whether radio frequency identification (RFID) technology can be used to improve the localization of mobile robots and persons in their environment. In particular we study the problem of localizing RFID tags with a mobile platform that is equipped with a pair of RFID antennas. We present a probabilistic measurement model for RFID readers that allow us to accurately localize RFID tags in the environment. We also demonstrate how such maps can be used to localize a robot and persons in their environment. Finally, we present experiments illustrating that the computational requirements for global robot localization can be reduced strongly by fusing RFID information with laser data.

The ability to determine what day-to-day activity (such as cooking pasta, taking a pill, or watching a video) a person is performing is of interest in many application domains. A system that can do this requires models of the activities of interest, but model construction does not scale well: humans must specify low-level details, such as segmentation and feature selection of sensor data, and high-level structure, such as spatio-temporal relations between states of the model, for each and every activity. As a result, previous practical activity recognition systems have been content to model a tiny fraction of the thousands of human activities that are potentially useful to detect. In this paper, we present an approach to sensing and modeling activities that scales to a much larger class of activities than before. We show how a new class of sensors, based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, can directly yield semantic terms that describe the state of the physical world. These sensors allow us to formulate activity models by translating labeled activities, such as 'cooking pasta', into probabilistic collections of object terms, such as 'pot'. Given this view of activity models as text translations, we show how to mine definitions of activities in an unsupervised manner from the web. We have used our technique to mine definitions for over 20,000 activities. We experimentally validate our approach using data gathered from actual human activity as well as simulated data.

The role of computers in the modern office has divided our activities between virtual interactions in the realm of the computer and physical interactions with real objects within the traditional office infrastructure. This paper extends previous work that has attempted to bridge this gap, to connect physical objects with virtual representations or computational functionality, via various types of tags. We discuss a variety of scenarios we have implemented using a novel combination of inexpensive, unobtrusive and easy to use RFID tags, tag readers, portable computers and wireless networking. This novel combination demonstrates the utility of invisibly, seamlessly and portably linking physical objects to networked electronic services and actions that are naturally associated with their form.

This paper describes a novel physical icon [3] (“phicon”) based system that can be programmed to issue a range of commands about what the user wishes to do with handdrawn whiteboard content. Through the phicon's UI, a command to process whiteboard context is issued using infrared signaling in combination with image processing and a ceiling-mounted camera system. We leverage camera systems that are already used for capturing whiteboard content [4] by further augmenting these systems to detect the presence and location of IR beacons within an image. An HDLC-based protocol and a built-in IR transmitter are used to send these signals.

A Collaborage is a collaborative collage of physically represented information on a surface that is connected with electronic information, such as a physical In/Out board connected to a people-locator database. The physical surface (board) contains items that are tracked by camera and computer vision technology. Events on the board trigger electronic services. This paper motivates this concept, presents three different applications, describes the system architecture and component technologies, and discusses several design issues.

This paper reports on the design and use of tactile user interfaces embedded within or wrapped around the devices that they control. We discuss three different interaction prototypes that we built These interfaces were embedded onto two handheld devices of dramatically different form factors. We describe the design and implementation challenges, and user feedback and reactions to these prototypes. Implications for future design in the area of manipulative or haptic user interfaces are highlighted.

Traditional database query systems allow users to construct complicated database queries from specialized database language primitives.While powerful and expressive, such systems are not easy to use, especially for browsing or exploring the data.Information visualization systems address this problem by providing graphical presentations of the data and direct manipulation tools for exploring the data.Recent work has reported the value of dynamic queries coupled with twodimensional data representations for progressive refinement of user queries.However, the queries generated by these systems are limited to conjunctions of global ranges of parameter values.In this paper, we extend dynamic queries by encoding each operand of the query as a Magic Lens filter.Compound queries can be constructed by overlapping the lenses.Each lens includes a slider and a set of buttons to control the value of the filter function and to define the composition operation generated by overlapping the lenses.We demonstrate a system that supports multiple, simultaneous, general, real-valued queries on databases with incomplete data, while maintaining the simple visual interface of dynamic query systems.

Rendering systems can produce images that include the entire range of visible colors. Imaging hardware, however, can reproduce only a subset of these colors: the device gamut. An image can only be correctly displayed if all of its colors lie inside of the gamut of the target device. Current solutions to this problem are either to correct the scene colors by hand, or to apply gamut mapping techniques to the final image. We propose a methodology called device-directed rendering that performs scene color adjustments automatically. Device-directed rendering applies classic minimization techniques to a symbolic representation of the image that describes the relationship of the scene lights and surfaces to the pixel colors. This representation can then be evaluated to produce an image that is guaranteed to be in gamut. Although our primary application has been correcting out-of-gamut colors, this methodology can be generally applied to the problem of adjusting a scene description to accommodate constraints on the output image pixel values.

Article A taxonomy of see-through tools Share on Authors: Eric A. Bier Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Maureen C. Stone Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Ken Fishkin Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , William Buxton University of Toronto, CSRI, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 1A4 University of Toronto, CSRI, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 1A4View Profile , Thomas Baudel Université de Paris-Sud, LRI, 91 405 Orsay Cedex, France Université de Paris-Sud, LRI, 91 405 Orsay Cedex, FranceView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '94: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 1994 Pages 358–364https://doi.org/10.1145/191666.191786Online:24 April 1994Publication History 83citation1,192DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations83Total Downloads1,192Last 12 Months17Last 6 weeks5 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

MagicLensT'l filters area new user interface tool that combine an arbitrarily-shaped region with an operator that changes the view of objects viewed through that region.These tools can be interactively positioned over on-screen applications much as a magnifying glass is moved over a newspaper.They can be used to help the user understand various types of information, from text documents to scientific visualizations.Because these filters are movable and apply to only part of the screen, they have a number of advantages over traditional windowwide viewing modes: they employ an attractive metaphor based on physical lenses, show a modified view in the context of the original view, limit clutter to a small region, allow easy construction of visual macros and provide a uniform paradigm that can be extended across different types of infomlation and applications.This paper describes these advantages in more detail and illustrates them with examples of magic lens filters in use over a variety of applications.

Soft filling algorithms change the color of an anti-aliased region, maintaining the anti-aliasing of the region. The two published algorithms for soft filling work only if the foreground region is anti-aliased against a black background. This paper presents three new algorithms. The first fills against a region consisting of any two distinct colors, and is faster than the published algorithms on a pixel-by-pixel basis for an RGB frame buffer; the second fills against a region composed of three distinct colors; and the third fills against a region composed of four distinct colors. As the power of the algorithms increases, so do the number of assumptions they make, and the computational cost.