The use of airborne Mid-Wave InfraRed (MWIR) imagery for maritime applications such as ship detection is evaluated for future spaceborne missions. A flight campaign was carried out on 30 October 2020 over the Solent (UK) to provide a dataset of airborne MWIR that was acquired at the same time as a spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) product. The thermal infrared imagery is compared to SAR to determine its suitability for ship detection. Automatic Identification System (AIS) data was also acquired and used to both identify and validate the ship detections where available. The results indicate that high spatial resolution satellite thermal infrared imagery can be a useful data source for ship detection.

Automated coaching systems offer a convenient, cost-effective way to reduce stress, which can be a serious health issue. However, one concern with such systems is compliance; users fail to achieve daily stress reduction goals because goals are too easy or too difficult. To address this, we built DStress (Design for Stress), a theoretically grounded system that sets adaptive goals in three coaching dimensions: Exercise, Meditation and Accessibility. DStress modifies goal-difficulty based on the individual's immediately previous performance. In a 28-day deployment with 65 users, DStress reduced scores on one direct measure of stress almost in half, significantly more than two other non-adaptive coaching strategies. However, on a second direct stress measure, no improvement was found. There were also no improvements on other indirect stress measures. Analysis of 2842 user-generated reports suggests our findings were the result of DStress balancing compliance against the degree of challenge of the goals it would set.

People are often required to catch up on information they have missed in meetings, because of lateness or scheduling conflicts. Catching up is a complex cognitive process where people try to understand the current conversation without access to prior discussion. We develop and evaluate a novel Catchup audio player that allows time-travel. It automatically identifies the gist of what was missed, allowing people to join the meeting late and still participate effectively. In a lab study, we evaluated people's understanding of meetings they had partly missed, by asking questions about meeting content. We tested whether providing Catchup gist overcomes the potential disadvantage that people must join even later - because catching up takes time. Catchup users understood meetings 70% better than controls who simply joined late. They were more confident of their understanding and indicated a positive attitude towards the tool. We are currently exploring more general applications of the time-travel approach.

Users find it hard to delete unimportant personal information which often results in cluttered workspaces. We present a full design cycle for GrayArea, a novel interface that allows users to demote unimportant files by dragging them to a gray area at the bottom of their file folders. Demotion is an intermediate option between keeping and deleting. It combines the advantages of deletion (unimportant files don't compete for attention) and keeping (files are retrieved in their folder context). We developed the GrayArea working prototype using thorough iterative design. We evaluated it by asking 96 participants to 'clean' two folders with, and without, GrayArea. Using GrayArea reduced folder clutter by 13%. Further, 81% of participants found it easier to demote than delete files, and most indicated they would use GrayArea if provided in their operating systems. The results provide strong evidence for the demotion principle suggested by the user-subjective approach.

Multitasking during teleconferences is becoming increasingly common: participants continue their work whilst monitoring the audio for topics of interest. Our previous work has estab-lished the benefit of spatialised audio presentation on improv-ing multitasking performance. In this study, we investigate the different spatialisation strategies employed by subjects in order to aid their multitasking performance and improve their user experience. Subjects were given the freedom to place each par-ticipant at a different location in the acoustic space both in terms of azimuth and distance. Their strategies were based upon cues regarding keywords and which participant will utter them. Our findings suggest that subjects employ consistent strategies with regard to the location of target and distracter talkers. Further-more, manipulation of the acoustic space plays an important role in multitasking performance and the user experience. Index Terms: multitasking, spatialisation, teleconference 1.

We all encounter many documents on a daily basis that we do not have time to process in their entirety. Nevertheless, we lack good tools to rapidly skim and identify key information from within such documents. This paper develops and evaluates Interactive Compression (IC) techniques that allow users to dynamically configure the amount of information they view in a document, e.g. by automatically removing unimportant information from view (Excision) or by making important information more salient (Highlighting). We explore IC techniques in the context of meeting transcripts that are typically unstructured - making it difficult to isolate relevant regions and extract key information. We demonstrate the superiority of IC compared with an unmodified text control. In contrast to traditional summaries, our results show extensive use of interactive, as opposed to fixed compression level, summarization. They also show the value of word- as opposed to utterance-based compression. There are also trade-offs between different IC designs. Excision allows users to scan documents faster than Highlighting but at the expense of overlooking relevant sections of the document.

Teleconference participants often multitask: they work on a text-based ‘foreground’ task whilst listening in the ‘background’ for an item of interest to appear. Audio material should therefore be presented in a manner that has the smallest possible impact on the foreground task without affecting topic detection. Here, we ask whether dichotic or spatialised audio presentation of a meeting is less disruptive than the single-channel mixture of talkers normally used in teleconference audio. A number of talker location configurations are used, and we examine how these impact upon a text-based foreground task: finding all letter ‘e’ occurrences in a block of text. Additionally, we examine the effect of cueing the listener to direction or gender and record listener preferences for audio presentation style. Our results suggest that spatialised audio disrupts the foreground task less than single-channel audio when direction or gender is cued.

Efficient browsing of speech recordings is problematic. The linear nature of speech, coupled with the lack of abstraction that the medium affords, means that listeners have to listen to long segments of a recording to locate points of interest. We explore temporal compression algorithms that attempt to reduce the amount of time users require to listen to speech recordings, while retaining the important content. This paper implements two main approaches to temporal compression: artificial speech rate alteration (speed-up) and unimportant segment removal (excision). We evaluate the effectiveness of these approaches by having listeners rate comprehension and listening effort for different types of temporal compression. For different compression levels, we compare performance of various implementations of speed-up and excision as well as techniques based on semantic features and acoustic features. Our results indicate that listeners prefer low compression levels, excision over speed-up, and algorithms based on semantic rather than acoustic features. Finally, listeners were negative about hybrid algorithms that used speed-up to indicate missing regions in an excised recording.

Although speech is a potentially rich information source, a major barrier to exploiting speech archives is the lack of useful tools for efficiently accessing lengthy speech recordings. This paper develops and evaluates techniques for temporal compression - reducing the time people take to listen to a recording while still extracting critical information. We first describe an exploratory study that identifies novel excision techniques that remove unimportant words or utterances from the recording. We then develop a new method for evaluating how well temporal compression supports users in forming a general understanding of a recording. Applying this method, we demonstrate that excision techniques are generally more effective than standard compression techniques that simply speed up the entire recording.

We present a novel technique for time-compressing speech, semantic compression, which uses an ASR transcript to determine which elements of the speech are presented. We carried out an exploratory user study comparing semantic compression to other novel types of time-compression techniques. We found that users feel they have a greater understanding of recordings compressed using semantic techniques than those compressed using acoustic-based techniques. An approach of using high playback speeds to indicate the location of 'insignificant' speech is not favoured by listeners, who prefer to have such segments removed from recordings.