Many tasks call for efficient user interaction under time delay-controlling space instruments, piloting remote aircraft and operating search and rescue robots. In this paper we identify an underexplored design opportunity for building robotic teleoperation user interfaces following an evaluation of operator performance during a time-delayed robotic arm block-stacking task in twenty-two participants. More delay resulted in greater operator hesitation and a decreased ratio of active to inactive input. This ratio can serve as a useful proxy for measuring an operator's ability to anticipate the outcome of their control inputs before receiving delayed visual feedback. High anticipatory input ratio (AIR) scores indicate times when robot operators enter commands before waiting for visual feedback. Low AIR scores highlight when operators must wait for visual feedback before continuing. We used this measurement to help us identify particular sub-tasks where operators would likely benefit from additional support.

A child's failure to respond to his or her name being called is an early warning sign for autism and response to name is currently assessed as a part of standard autism screening and diagnostic tools. In this paper, we explore markerless child head tracking as an unobtrusive approach for automatically predicting child response to name. Head turns are used as a proxy for visual attention. We analyzed 50 recorded response to name sessions with the goal of predicting if children, ages 15 to 30 months, responded to name calls by turning to look at an examiner within a defined time interval. The child's head turn angles and hand annotated child name call intervals were extracted from each session. Human assisted tracking was employed using an overhead Kinect camera, and automated tracking was later employed using an additional forward facing camera as a proof-of-concept. We explore two distinct analytical approaches for predicting child responses, one relying on rule-based approached and another on random forest classification. In addition, we derive child response latency as a new measurement that could provide researchers and clinicians with finer grain quantitative information currently unavailable in the field due to human limitations. Finally we reflect on steps for adapting our system to work in less constrained natural settings.

We introduce a new problem domain for activity recognition: the analysis of children's social and communicative behaviors based on video and audio data. We specifically target interactions between children aged 1-2 years and an adult. Such interactions arise naturally in the diagnosis and treatment of developmental disorders such as autism. We introduce a new publicly-available dataset containing over 160 sessions of a 3-5 minute child-adult interaction. In each session, the adult examiner followed a semi-structured play interaction protocol which was designed to elicit a broad range of social behaviors. We identify the key technical challenges in analyzing these behaviors, and describe methods for decoding the interactions. We present experimental results that demonstrate the potential of the dataset to drive interesting research questions, and show preliminary results for multi-modal activity recognition.

First-person point-of-view (FPPOV) images taken by wearable cameras can be used to better understand people's eating habits. Human computation is a way to provide effective analysis of FPPOV images in cases where algorithmic approaches currently fail. However, privacy is a serious concern. We provide a framework, the privacy-saliency matrix, for understanding the balance between the eating information in an image and its potential privacy concerns. Using data gathered by 5 participants wearing a lanyard-mounted smartphone, we show how the framework can be used to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of four automated techniques (face detection, image cropping, location filtering and motion filtering) at reducing the privacy-infringing content of images while still maintaining evidence of eating behaviors throughout the day.