There are numerous ways to monitor business activities, but the most effective way is by adopting data-driven decision-making processes and technologies to enable the corporate entities to monitor and measure performance KPIs. Dashboards are commonly used as the main supporting tool for presenting analytical results. However, current approaches have some limitations. Since data sources are usually transformed and materialized during the design phase, end users of typical dashboards can only perform simple filtering and layout changes in most cases. In this work, we introduce a flexible qualitative data analytics dashboard framework called Cookbook. The main novelty of our approach is that we achieve a highly customizable dashboard framework by segregating data during design phase, and materializing data during execution phase.

Knowledge about population distribution of planning areas helps in making urban development decisions. Two important criteria are: "where do people live?" and "where do they work?" In this paper we propose methods to find home and workplaces from mobile network data. Home and work places are essential for discovery of mobility profiles of users. Validation of home and workplace prediction is not straight forward. We validate our methods using correlation with external data. Validation results show that even though a single cellular provider has only a portion of the entire population as its users, distribution of home and work places predicted using its mobile network data match that of government statistics. On the basis of this matching, we can have faith in distributions of more difficult statistics extracted from mobile network data which are difficult to obtain from external sources. We implemented an interactive system to show various distributions such as people living and working in different planning areas, and people working in different job sectors such as manufacturing. Interesting relationships are found by calculating joint distributions, e.g., Where do people, living in a planning area, work, and vice versa. Planning areas are ranked by the average distance traveled from home to work. Another interesting fact we extract is balance. Balance of a planning area is high if people live and work there, it is low if people living in a planning area work in other planning areas. We extend these statistics to regions which consist of many planning areas. The goal of this interactive system is to understand location semantics and mobility of users to aid in making urban development decisions. A video recording with subtitles is uploaded in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo-7-DsCymw.

Abstract We present a system for interacting with 3D objects in a 3D virtual environment. Using the notion that a typical head‐mounted display (HMD) does not cover the user's entire face, we use a fiducial marker placed on the HMD to locate the user's exposed facial skin. Using this information, a skin model is built and combined with the depth information obtained from a stereo camera. The information when used in tandem allows the position of the user's hands to be detected and tracked in real time. Once both hands are located, our system allows the user to manipulate the object with five degrees of freedom (translation inx‐,y‐, andz‐ axis with roll and yaw rotations) in virtual three‐dimensional space using a series of intuitive hand gestures. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper reports the design and implementation of an interactive and immersive environment (IIE) for tennis simulation. The presented design layout, named Tennis Space, provides the necessary immersive experience without overly restricting the player. To address the instability problem of real-time tracking of fast moving objects, a hybrid tracking solution integrating optical tracking and ultrasound-inertial tracking technologies is developed. An L-shaped IIE has been implemented for tennis simulation and has received positive feedback from users.

We demonstrate a method in which gesture control is enabled through use of a stereo camera. Hard to use keyboard commands are effectively emulated using positional gestures. We describe the implementation and some results from user surveys based on user's trying the application at a public exposition. Along with outlining the implementation, we report the initial findings and show evidence as to why such a gesture interface is more effective as an interface as opposed to traditional gaming interfaces.

One of the long-term goals in human-computer interaction is to utilize more intuitive and natural methods such as speech and hand gestures that a user would employ for communication. In this paper, we present a robust method of hand tracking using a probability map computed from a joint probability function derived from both depth information and skin-tone information. The depth information is provided using a commercially available stereo camera, and the color information is found using calibrated and linearized color information. The work shows the effectiveness of this technique, in terms of both the quality of the results as well as the speed at which the computations may be performed. Due to the linearization of the color information and the use of stereo vision data, the technique is demonstrated to be largely invariant to illumination changes.