We describe a new set of interaction techniques that allow users to interact with physical objects through augmented reality (AR). Previously, to operate a smart device, physical touch is generally needed and a graphical interface is normally involved. These become limitations and prevent the user from operating a device out of reach or operating multiple devices at once. Ubii (Ubiquitous interface and interaction) is an integrated interface system that connects a network of smart devices together, and allows users to interact with the physical objects using hand gestures. The user wears a smart glass which displays the user interface in an augmented reality view. Hand gestures are captured by the smart glass, and upon recognizing the right gesture input, Ubii will communicate with the connected smart devices to complete the designated operations. Ubii supports common inter-device operations such as file transfer, printing, projecting, as well as device pairing. To improve the overall performance of the system, we implement computation offloading to perform the image processing computation. Our user test shows that Ubii is easy to use and more intuitive than traditional user interfaces. Ubii shortens the operation time on various tasks involving operating physical devices. The novel interaction paradigm attains a seamless interaction between the physical and digital worlds.

We present Ubii (Ubiquitous interface and interaction), an interface system that aims to expand people's perception and interaction from the digital space to the physical world. The centralized user interface is broken into pieces woven in the domain environment. Augmented user interface is paired to the physical objects, where physical and digital presentations are displayed in the same context. The augmented interface and physical affordance respond as one control to provide seamless interaction. By connecting digital interface with physical objects, the system presents a nearby embodiment to afford users sense of awareness to interact with domain objects. Integrated on wearable devices as Google Glass, a less intrusive and more convenient interaction is afforded. Our research illustrates the great potential of direct mapping of interaction between digital interfaces and physical affordance by converging wearable devices and augmented reality (AR) technology.

The recent surge in popularity of crowdsourcing has brought with it a new opportunity for engaging human intelligence in the process of data analysis. Crowdsourcing provides a fundamental mechanism for enabling online workers to participate in tasks that are either too difficult to be solved solely by a computer or too expensive to employ experts to perform. In the field of social science, four elements are required to form a wise crowd - Diversity of Opinion, Independence, Decentralization and Aggregation. However, while the other three elements are already studied and implemented in current crowdsourcing platforms, the 'Diversity of Opinion' has not been functionally enabled. In this paper, we address the algorithmic optimizations towards the diversity of opinion of crowdsourcing marketplaces. From a computational perspective, in order to build a wise crowd, we need to quantitatively modeling the diversity, and take it into consideration for constructing the crowd. In a crowdsourcing marketplace, we usually encounter two basic paradigms for worker selection: building a crowd to wait for tasks to come and selecting workers for a given task. Therefore, we propose our Similarity-driven Model (S-Model) and Task-driven Model (T-Model) for both of the paradigms. Under both of the models, we propose efficient and effective algorithms to enlist a budgeted number of workers, which have the optimal diversity. We have verified our solutions with extensive experiments on both synthetic datasets and real data sets.