In this paper, we present a recommendation system for the automatic design of magazine covers. Our users are non-designer designers: individuals or small and medium businesses who want to design without hiring a professional designer while still wanting to create aesthetically compelling designs. Because a design should have a purpose, we suggest a number of semantic features to the user, e.g., "clean and clear," "dynamic and active," or "formal," to describe the color mood for the purpose of his/her design. Based on these high level features and a number of low level features, such as the complexity of the visual balance in a photo, our system selects the best photos from the user's album for his/her design. Our system then generates several alternative designs that can be rated by the user. Consequently, our system generates future designs based on the user's style. In this fashion, our system personalizes the designs of a user based on his/her preferences.

With the proliferation of image acquisition and consumption, there is an increasing need for solutions that help ordinary people create high quality image composites. In most solutions today, image layouts are provided as fixed templates, which offer the potential of visually diverse layout sets. However, the layout choices are limited to those selected in advance by the template designer; and the library may not support a particular image count, aspect ratio set or spatial distribution. To ameliorate these shortcomings, we propose an image layout framework called Templated Recursive Image Composition. TRIC is template-based in that every layout is based on a template specification. However, TRIC is also generative in that virtually any image set can be accommodated as long as there is at least one image for every region in the template specification. Constraints ensure respect for image aspect ratios; for spacing in the layout interior; and for proportions and placement of sublayouts corresponding to regions in the template specification. We present a description of TRIC, results that demonstrate its versatility, and a user study that supports its acceptability.

The amount of photo that is captured and stored with mobile devices is growing rapidly. We regularly see traditional desktop multimedia applications being ported to mobile devices. However, less often do we see novel interaction mechanism being developed to effectively deal with the physical limitations of the display and input of such devices. We built a mobile application called iPhotobook that enables users to create and edit photo books on iPhones. The application leveraged image analysis algorithms to automate user tasks of photo selection, grouping, editing and layout that would be difficult to accomplish without a large screen input. In this paper, we present these technologies and more importantly illustrate how they work together seamlessly with a gesture based user interface that creates a fun photo book authoring experience. Although the iPhone is our platform of choice and photo book creation is our target application, our innovations on UI design and automation algorithms may well be generalized to other small screen devices and applied to other mobile media applications.

In this paper we describe an exploratory study of a mobile cosmetic advisory system that enables women to select appropriate colors of cosmetics. This system is intended for commercial use to address the problem of foundation color selection. Although women are primarily responsible for making most purchasing decisions in the US, we found very few studies to assess the adoption of retail related mobile services by women. Based on surveys, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups, we have identified a number of design factors that should be considered when designing mobile services for women consumers. The results of our study indicate that while usefulness is an important factor, other design aspects such as mobile vs. kiosk, installed vs. existing software, technical comfort vs. social comfort, social vs. individual, privacy and trust should also be accounted for.

The unification of Semantic Web query languages under the SPARQL standard and the development of commercial-quality implementations are encouraging industries to use semantic technologies for managing information. Current implementations, however, lack the performance monitoring and management services that the industry expects. In this paper, we present a performance and management framework interface to a generic SPARQL web server. We leverage existing standards for instrumentation to make the system ready-to-manage through existing monitoring applications, and we provide a performance framework which has the distinct feature of providing measurement results through the same SPARQL interface used to query data, eliminating the need for special interfaces.