Motivated by reasons related to data security and privacy, we propose a method to limit meaningful visual contents of a display from being captured by screenshots. Traditional methods take a system architectural approach to protect against screenshots. We depart from this framework, and instead exploit image processing techniques to distort visual data of a display and present the distorted data to the viewer. Given that a screenshot captures distorted visual contents, it yields limited useful data. We exploit the human visual system to empower viewers to automatically and mentally recover the distorted contents into a meaningful form in real-time. Towards this end, we leverage on findings from psychological studies which show that blending of visual information from recent and current fixations enables human to form meaningful representation of a scene. We model this blending of information by an additive process, and exploit this to design a visual contents distortion algorithm that supports real-time contents recovery by the human visual system. Our experiments and user study demonstrate the feasibility of our method to allow viewers to readily interpret visual contents of a display, while limiting meaningful contents from being captured by screenshots.

Over the last few years, the conventional brick and mortar business model has been challenged by the proliferation of smartphone-based shopping apps, which exploit the weaknesses of this conventional model. As an alternative to these apps, we have developed Ubira [1], a patent-pending service platform that allows healthy online/offline competition rather than merely exploiting the weaknesses. This business model provides brick and mortar shops a fair chance to compete with online stores while creating a seamless shopping experience for in-store customers based on an online/offline partnership. The main design challenge in Ubira has been to promote serendipity in shopping rather than bargain hunting, and integrate the legacy inventory systems of brick and mortar businesses into the platform. To overcome these challenges, we have made some critical design choices based on context awareness and seamful design methods.

The rapid advancements in the smartphone domain has made WiFi, Bluetooth and 3G commonplace in most devices, as well as accelerometers, gyros, fast CPUs and large amounts of memory. During these advancements the IR transmitter was eventually dropped, starting perhaps most importantly with the release of the Apple iPhone. It has since been observed a need for directional transmission functionality. The system described herein propose a way to to achieve short range directional data-communication on a smartphone without adding external hardware. The outcome of this project is intended to be open-sourced, enabling any application developer or phone-manufacturer to include the technology into their products.

Recently, mobile applications focusing on barcode scanning and price comparison are gaining popularity among users. The users of these applications are drawn away from participating in the business model of the brick-and-mortar stores. Ubira is a novel mobile platform that allows the brick-and-mortar stores to compete against online stores by turning an application user into a customer while creating better value for the customers compared to typical barcode scanning applications.

We have designed and implemented a compact and simple network oriented device, a NetSpeaker, which mainly consists of a DA converter, an amplifier and buffers, in order to enable setting many terminals and realize ubiquitous computing environment. It receives WAV formatted data via IP packets and simply plays it by DA converting. All the sound outputs of Windows XP/2000 applications can be played on remote NetSpeakers, since we implemented the sound forwarding function as a virtual sound device, which generates WAV data of sound outputs of applications and sends them to a selected NetSpeaker. In this paper, we show design of this NetSpeaker system and its application in a service mobility environment.