Texting relies on screen-centric prompts designed for sighted users, still posing significant barriers to people who are blind and visually impaired (BVI). Can we re-imagine texting untethered from a visual display? In an interview study, 20 BVI adults shared situations surrounding their texting practices, recurrent topics of conversations, and challenges. Informed by these insights, we introduce TextFlow , a mixed-initiative context-aware system that generates entirely auditory message options relevant to the users’ location, activity, and time of the day. Users can browse and select suggested aural messages using finger-taps supported by an off-the-shelf finger-worn device without having to hold or attend to a mobile screen. In an evaluative study, 10 BVI participants successfully interacted with TextFlow to browse and send messages in screen-free mode. The experiential response of the users shed light on the importance of bypassing the phone and accessing rapidly controllable messages at their fingertips while preserving privacy and accuracy with respect to speech or screen-based input. We discuss how non-visual access to proactive, contextual messaging can support the blind in a variety of daily scenarios.

Texting relies on screen-centric prompts designed for sighted users, still posing significant barriers to people who are blind and visually impaired (BVI). Can we re-imagine texting untethered from a visual display? In an interview study, 20 BVI adults shared situations surrounding their texting practices, recurrent topics of conversations, and challenges. Informed by these insights, we introduce TextFlow: a mixed-initiative context-aware system that generates entirely auditory message options relevant to the users’ location, activity, and time of the day. Users can browse and select suggested aural messages using finger-taps supported by an off-the-shelf finger-worn device, without having to hold or attend to a mobile screen. In an evaluative study, 10 BVI participants successfully interacted with TextFlow to browse and send messages in screen-free mode. The experiential response of the users shed light on the importance of bypassing the phone and accessing rapidly controllable messages at their fingertips while preserving privacy and accuracy with respect to speech or screen-based input. We discuss how non-visual access to proactive, contextual messaging can support the blind in a variety of daily scenarios.

In an era of complex networked parallel heterogeneous systems, simulating independently only parts, components, or attributes of a system-under-design is a cumbersome, inaccurate, and inefficient approach. Moreover, by considering each part of a system in an isolated manner, and due to the numerous and highly complicated interactions between the different components, the system optimization capabilities are severely limited. The presented fully-distributed simulation framework (called as COSSIM) is the first known open-source, high-performance simulator that can handle holistically system-of-systems including processors, peripherals and networks; such an approach is very appealing to both Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and Highly Parallel Heterogeneous Systems designers and application developers. Our highly integrated approach is further augmented with accurate power estimation and security sub-tools that can tap on all system components and perform security and robustness analysis of the overall system under design—something that was unfeasible up to now. Additionally, a sophisticated Eclipse-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed to provide easy simulation setup, execution, and visualization of results. COSSIM has been evaluated when executing the widely used Netperf benchmark suite as well as a number of real-world applications. Final results demonstrate that the presented approach has up to 99% accuracy (when compared with the performance of the real system), while the overall simulation time can be accelerated almost linearly with the number of CPUs utilized by the simulator.

In this paper, for the first time the design of a HW module to eliminate the effect of the gravity acceleration from data acquired from inertial sensors is presented. A new “hardware friendly” algorithm has been derived from the Rodrigues' rotation formula, which can be implemented in a more compact iterative structure. By exploiting 32-bit floating-point arithmetic, the design is able to combine high accuracy and low power requirements needed by any intelligent Human Activity Recognition system, based on artificial neural networks. Synthesis with 65 nm CMOS std _cells returns a power dissipation below 2 μ W and an area of about 0.05 mm2, Results are the current state-of-the-art for this kind of system and they are very promising for the future integration in smart sensors for wearable applications.

In an era of complex networked heterogeneous systems, simulating independently only parts, components or attributes of a system under design is not a viable, accurate or efficient option. The interactions are too many and too complicated to produce meaningful results and the optimization opportunities are severely limited when considering each part of a system in an isolated manner. The presented COSSIM simulation framework is the first known open-source, high-performance simulator that can handle holistically system-of-systems including processors, peripherals and networks; such an approach is very appealing to both CPS/IoT and Highly Parallel Heterogeneous Systems designers and application developers. Our highly integrated approach is further augmented with accurate power estimation and security sub-tools that can tap on all system components and perform security and robustness analysis of the overall networked system. Additionally, a GUI has been developed to provide easy simulation set-up, execution and visualization of results. COSSIM has been evaluated using real-world applications representing cloud (mobile visual search) and CPS systems (building management) demonstrating high accuracy and performance that scales almost linearly with the number of CPUs dedicated to the simulator.

As integration of depth sensing into mobile devices is likely forthcoming, we investigate on merging appearance and shape information for mobile visual search. Accordingly, we propose an RGB-D search engine architecture that can attain high recognition rates with peculiarly moderate bandwidth requirements. Our experiments include a comparison to the CDVS (Compact Descriptors for Visual Search) pipeline, candidate to become part of the MPEG-7 standard, and contribute to elucidate on the merits and limitations of joint deployment of depth and color in mobile visual search.