Human gait analysis with wearable sensors has been widely used in various applications, such as daily life healthcare, rehabilitation, physical therapy, and clinical diagnostics and monitoring. In particular, ground reaction force (GRF) provides critical information about how the body interacts with the ground during locomotion. Although instrumented treadmills have been widely used as the gold standard for measuring GRF during walking, their lack of portability and high cost make them impractical for many applications. As an alternative, low-cost, portable, wearable insole sensors have been utilized to measure GRF; however, these sensors are susceptible to noise and disturbance and are less accurate than treadmill measurements. Deep learning has shown potential in addressing these issues, but such methods are computationally expensive and often require extensive computing resources, limiting their feasibility for real-time and portable systems. To address these challenges, we propose a Time-aware Knowledge Distillation framework for GRF estimation from insole sensor data. This framework leverages similarity and temporal features within a mini-batch during the knowledge distillation process, effectively capturing the complementary relationships between features and the sequential properties of the target and input data. The performance of the lightweight models distilled through this framework was evaluated by comparing GRF estimations from insole sensor data against measurements from an instrumented treadmill. Various teacher-student model architectures and learning strategies were evaluated across multiple performance metrics using data collected at different walking speeds. Empirical results demonstrated that Time-aware Knowledge Distillation outperforms current baselines in GRF estimation from wearable sensor data. Moreover, our method significantly reduces the number of training parameters needed for GRF estimation, offering a data- and resource-efficient solution for human gait analysis while achieving excellent accuracy and model reliability.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is pivotal in radiology, offering non-invasive and high-quality insights into the human body. Precise segmentation of the MRIs into different organs and tissues would be very beneficial as it would allow more accurate measurements, which are essential for accurate diagnosis and effective treatment planning. Specifically, segmenting bones in MRI would allow for more quantitative assessments of musculoskeletal conditions, while such assessments are largely absent in current radiological practice. The difficulty of bone MRI segmentation is illustrated by the fact that limited algorithms are publicly available, and those contained in the literature typically address a specific anatomic area. In our study, we propose a versatile, publicly available deep learning model for bone segmentation in MRI at multiple standard MRI locations. The proposed model can operate in two modes: fully automated segmentation and prompt-based segmentation. Our contributions include (1) collecting and annotating a new MRI dataset across various MRI protocols, encompassing 320 annotated volumes and more than 10k annotated slices across diverse anatomic regions; (2) investigating several standard network architectures and strategies for automated segmentation; (3) introducing SegmentAnyBone, an innovative foundation model-based approach that extends the Segment Anything Model (SAM); (4) comparative analysis of our algorithm and previous approaches; and (5) generalization analysis of our algorithm across different anatomical locations and MRI sequences, as well as three external datasets. We publicly release our model at Github Code.

We introduce a co-designed approach for human portrait relighting that combines a physics-guided architecture with a pretraining framework. Drawing on the Cook-Torrance reflectance model, we have meticulously configured the architecture design to precisely simulate light-surface interactions. Furthermore, to overcome the limitation of scarce high-quality lightstage data, we have developed a self-supervised pretraining strategy. This novel combination of accurate physical modeling and expanded training dataset establishes a new benchmark in relighting realism.

Despite the common use of rule-based tools for online content moderation, human moderators still spend a lot of time monitoring them to ensure they work as intended. Based on surveys and interviews with Reddit moderators who use AutoModerator, we identified the main challenges in reducing false positives and false negatives of automated rules: not being able to estimate the actual effect of a rule in advance and having difficulty figuring out how the rules should be updated. To address these issues, we built ModSandbox, a novel virtual sandbox system that detects possible false positives and false negatives of a rule and visualizes which part of the rule is causing issues. We conducted a comparative, between-subject study with online content moderators to evaluate the effect of ModSandbox in improving automated rules. Results show that ModSandbox can support quickly finding possible false positives and false negatives of automated rules and guide moderators to improve them to reduce future errors.

Desirable outcomes such as health are tightly linked to behaviors, thus inspiring research on technologies that support people in changing those behaviors. Many behavior-change technologies are designed by HCI experts but this approach can make it difficult to personalize support to each user's unique goals and needs. This paper reports on the iterative design of two complementary support strategies for helping users create their own personalized behavior-change plans via self-experimentation: One emphasized the use of interactive instructional materials, and the other additionally introduced context-aware computing to enable user creation of "just in time" home-based interventions. In a formative trial with 27 users, we compared these two approaches to an unstructured sleep education control. Results suggest great promise in both strategies and provide insights on how to develop personalized behavior-change technologies.

A fundamental role of news websites is to recommend articles that are interesting to read. The key challenge of news recommendation is to recommend newly published articles. Unlike other domains, outdated items are considered to be irrelevant in the news recommendation task. Another challenge is that the recommendation candidates are not seen in the training phase. In this paper, we introduce deep neural network models to overcome these challenges. we propose a modified session-based Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model tailored to news recommendation as well as a history-based RNN model that spans the whole user's past histories. Finally, we propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model to capture user preferences and to personalize recommendation results. Experimental results on real-world news dataset shows that our model outperforms competitive baselines.

This paper presents the constructive design research (CDR) of smart domestic environments comprised of smart home infrastructure, smart domestic artifacts and digital services. CDR is an approach that focuses on imagining futures and learning through the making and testing of prototypes to construct new knowledge about how people engage with the world. While the body of research on smart domestic environments includes a wealth of human-centered research, the use of CDR is marginal. Our work demonstrates how such a process engages residents in activities to imagine why people might value smart domestic environments and how they might want to interact with them. Through goal setting activities, paper prototyping, and field-testing of resident designed technology probes, we present use cases, design principles and experiential insights. After sharing these findings, we introduce the emergence of smart domestic environments as possessing persuasive, personified and artful qualities.

For high bit rate video, it is important to acquire the video contents with high resolution, the quality of which may be degraded due to the motion blur from the movement of an object(s) or the camera. However, conventional sharpness assessments are designed to find focal blur caused either by defocusing or by compression distortion targeted for low bit rates. To overcome this limitation, we present a no-reference framework of a visual sharpness assessment (VSA) for high-resolution video based on the motion and scene classification. In the proposed framework, the accuracy of the sharpness estimation can be improved via pooling weighted by the visual perception from the object and camera movements and by the strong influence from the region with the highest sharpness. Based on the motion blur characteristics, the variance and the contrast over the spectral domain are used to quantify the perceived sharpness. Moreover, for the VSA, we extract the highly influential sharper regions and emphasize them by utilizing the scene adaptive pooling.

End-user programming tools, if properly designed, have the potential to empower end-users to create context-aware applications tailored to their own needs and lives, in order to help them break bad habits and change their behaviors. In this work, we present GALLAG Strip, an easy to use mobile and tangible tool that allows users to create context-aware applications without the need of programming experience. It enables programming by physical demonstration of envisioned interactions with the same sensors and objects that users will later encounter in their finished application. After an initial pilot to verify the usability of GALLAG Strip, we conducted a user study to evaluate the effects of tangible programming in terms of ease of use, engagement, and facilitation of the ideation process. We found that tangibility has both benefits and drawbacks, and suggest a mixed tangible and non-tangible approach for better user experience.