Head worn augmented reality devices present new opportunities for creating assistive devices. This work investigates possible locations for captions for one-on-one conversations from a visibility and usability standpoint. Even in a one-on-one conversation there are interesting design challenges. We investigate 3 main factors: 1) Reference frame for captions (viewport or world coordinates); 2) Relation to the viewer (track the viewer's view, or track the speaker); and 3) Relation to speaker's face (most desirable vertical offset for captions). In this preliminary work, we argue that world coordinates are preferable (for reference frame), and then present our work in progress on the other factors.

Have you used the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct in your teaching? Would you like to? Recent events are leading to increased interest in the Code: 1) The AP CS curriculum now includes "computing in context" as one of the six course topics. 2) The ACM has initiated an update of the Code, to be completed in early 2018. 3) There have been several court cases (Oracle v. Google is a recent example) and stories in the popular press (including in the New York Times) that have cited the Code. It is therefore increasingly important that students and teachers become aware of and comfortable with the Code. This BoF invites college and high school teachers to share assignments (or assignment ideas) that incorporate the Code, particularly outside of "the ethics class." We will also discuss proposed updates to the Code, and any items that are missing or anachronistic in the current Code. Representatives of the ACM Committee on Professional Ethics will collect this feedback and provide it to the Code 2018 Task Force.

This session is intended as a fun and highly interactive way for college and high school teachers to increase their familiarity with the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. Using a quiz show format, participants will be asked to provide solutions to knotty (and sometimes humorous) ethical challenges. This will be followed by think-pair-share (so that everyone gets involved), and then a presentation of the relevant sections of the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. Members of the ACM's Committee on Professional Ethics will be on hand to collect feedback and questions about the Code, for use by the Code 2018 task force, and for the "Ask an Ethicist" feature at http://ethics.acm.org.

Many universities either have offered or are starting to offer computer science courses taught in a compressed time scale, often where students take only one course at a time. The pace of these classes can differ but often move at a speed where a day of an accelerated class is equivalent to a week of a typical semester class. This format has several advantages-more flexibility for collaborative work, better visibility into how students are spending their time (knowing that if a student is struggling it is not because of work in a different class), and less need for students to multitask between different courses. It also has many challenges. From the student perspective, there's the need to stay on top of things and not fall behind, having to catch up if there are absences due to illness or extra-curricular activities, and staying focused on one subject while working under constant time pressure (which often results in a tendency to rush through assignments to meet deadlines). Participants in this BoF will share their knowledge about teaching in this format. What kinds of assignments and assessments work and don't work during accelerated courses? How can we keep the workload reasonable for the students and for ourselves? What interesting pedagogy does this format facilitate? We invite participation both from faculty who are already teaching in this format and also from those considering an accelerated course who want to learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of this format.

The lack of diversity in the tech industry is a widely remarked phenomenon. The majority of workers in tech roles are either white or Asian men, with all other groups being under-represented.

Our primary motivation in this work is creating head-worn virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) systems that substantially improve human task performance, particularly in searching, counting, and navigation tasks. We focus on both widening the user's field of view, and also providing the user with options for seeing around occluding objects.

In this poster we describe pilot work on a new visualization technique, Color-via-Pattern (CvP), to help individuals with color deficiency distinguish between colors of confusion, as well as correctly determine relative perceived brightness among all colors. Existing assistive technologies tend to distort the hue and brightness of colors. CvP is designed to address this flaw while being just as effective. Human subject testing was performed to evaluate our approach.

Libraries use call numbers to organize their books and enable patrons to locate them. To keep the books in order, library workers conduct a time-consuming and tedious task called “shelf-reading.” Workers look at the call numbers on the spines of each book in the library, one at a time, to make sure they are in the correct places. ShelvAR is an augmented reality shelf-reading system for smart phones that reduces time spent, increases accuracy, and produces an inventory of the books on their shelves as a byproduct. Shelf-reading requires rapid acquisition of many targets (books). Unlike many target acquisition tasks considered in the AR literature, the user is not trying to select a single target from among many. Instead, the user is trying to scan all of the targets, and must be able to easily double-check that none were missed. Our goal is to explore the usability of augmented reality applications for this type of “multiple target acquisition” task. We present the results of a pilot study on the effectiveness of ShelvAR. We demonstrate that individuals with no library experience are just as fast and accurate, when using ShelvAR, as experienced library workers at the shelf-reading task.

I describe a simple game for use in starting a class discussion about corporate decision-making and whistle-blowing. The game allows students to experience the power of managers to influence (for good or bad) the decisions of their underlings, and the counter-balancing powers held by workers.

We consider questions about vertex cuts in graphs, random walks in metric spaces, and dimension reduction in L1 and L2; these topics are intimately connected because they can each be reduced to the existence ofvarious families of real-valued Lipschitz maps on certain metric spaces. We view these issues through the lens of shortest-path metricson series-parallel graphs, and we discussthe implications for a variety of well-known open problems. Our main results follow.

The Johnson--Lindenstrauss lemma shows that any n points in Euclidean space (i.e., ℝ n with distances measured under the ℓ 2 norm) may be mapped down to O ((log n )/ϵ 2 ) dimensions such that no pairwise distance is distorted by more than a (1 + ϵ) factor. Determining whether such dimension reduction is possible in ℓ 1 has been an intriguing open question. We show strong lower bounds for general dimension reduction in ℓ 1 . We give an explicit family of n points in ℓ 1 such that any embedding with constant distortion D requires n Ω(1/ D 2 ) dimensions. This proves that there is no analog of the Johnson--Lindenstrauss lemma for ℓ 1 ; in fact, embedding with any constant distortion requires n Ω(1) dimensions. Further, embedding the points into ℓ 1 with (1+ϵ) distortion requires n ½− O (ϵ log(1/ϵ)) dimensions. Our proof establishes this lower bound for shortest path metrics of series-parallel graphs. We make extensive use of linear programming and duality in devising our bounds. We expect that the tools and techniques we develop will be useful for future investigations of embeddings into ℓ 1 .

The Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma shows that any n points in Euclidean space (with distances measured by the /spl lscr//sub 2/ norm) may be mapped down to O((log n)//spl epsiv//sup 2/) dimensions such that no pairwise distance is distorted by more than a (1+ /spl epsiv/) factor. Determining whether such dimension reduction is possible in /spl lscr//sub 1/ has been an intriguing open question. We show strong lower bounds for general dimension reduction in /spl lscr//sub 1/. We give an explicit family of n points in /spl lscr//sub 1/ such that any embedding with distortion /spl delta/ requires n/sup /spl Omega/(1//spl delta/2)/ dimensions. This proves that there is no analog of the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma for /spl lscr//sub 1/; in fact embedding with any constant distortion requires n/sup /spl Omega/(1)/ dimensions. Further, embedding the points into /spl lscr//sub 1/ with 1 + /spl epsiv/ distortion requires n/sup 1/2 -O(/spl epsiv/log(1//spl epsiv/))/ dimensions. Our proof establishes this lower bound for shortest path metrics of series-parallel graphs. We make extensive use of linear programming and duality in devising our bounds. We expect that the tools and techniques we develop will be useful for future investigations of embeddings into /spl lscr//sub 1/.