Sequence motifs play essential roles in intermolecular interactions such as DNA-protein interactions. The discovery of novel sequence motifs is therefore crucial for revealing gene functions. Various bioinformatics tools have been developed for finding sequence motifs, but until now there has been no software based on statistical hypothesis testing with statistically sound multiple testing correction. Existing software therefore could not control for the type-l error rates. This is because, in the sequence motif discovery problem, conventional multiple testing correction methods produce very low statistical power due to overly-strict correction. We developed MotiMul, which comprehensively finds significant sequence motifs using statistically sound multiple testing correction. Our key idea is the application of Tarone's correction, which improves the statistical power of the hypothesis test by ignoring hypotheses that never become statistically significant. For the efficient enumeration of the significant sequence motifs, we integrated a variant of the PrefixSpan algorithm with Tarone's correction. Simulation and empirical dataset analysis showed that MotiMul is a powerful method for finding biologically meaningful sequence motifs. The source code of MotiMul is freely available at https://github.com/ko-ichimo-ri/MotiMul.

Electric Agents is a multi-player game that uses augmented reality on mobile phones to facilitate in-room collaboration and promote joint media engagement around interactive educational television content in the home. Joint media engagement describes 'collaborative' consumption of media and has potential learning benefits. Our research examines whether technology can support joint media engagement, through the use of a series of prototypes that combine handheld augmented reality with web-based video. In pilot testing, sibling play patterns showed evidence of the kind of in-room collaboration and joint media engagement that previous research has shown to facilitate children in making sense of media content.

Electric Agents is a cross-media game that presents new ways for children to actively engage with television content. In the game Manny, a member of the Pranksters, steals words out of the mouth of Hector, a member of The Electric Company team, and hides them to prevent the story from progressing. Children collaborate through a mobile augmented reality experience to find and collect the missing vocabulary words relevant to the show narrative. The players return the stolen words back to the show by "throwing" the words towards the television using their mobile devices. This blend of a narrative and a game strives to make educational television content more engaging and participatory while fostering collaborative play and use of specific vocabulary words.

This paper outlines a series of experiments to develop asynchronous messaging systems for preschool aged children. Three unique systems build on a foundational design called Toaster, a jack-in-the box toy with embedded mobile phone that allows children to playfully take and share electronic media. Orange Toaster allows children to create and share self-portraits; Family Toast allows children to browse family photos with physical tokens, and shares their self-portrait reactions with remote family members; Play with Elmo allows children and distant adults to asynchronously share playful video messages. Observations with over 30 children suggest that asynchronous photographic or video messaging with very young children is possible. The results of these studies indicate specific guidelines including (1) children's UI's need to be playful and immediate (2) UI designs for children should create the "here and now" feel of real-time interaction, and (3) adults' UI's must provide emotionally meaningful feedback from children to engage adult users.

How might we build on the physical interactivity of children's play to help children communicate over a distance? Pokaboo is a networked toy for children ages 2--5 to physically play even when they are far apart. Envisioned almost like a low-frame rate video chat, the system combines physically-linked buttons with photo and audio communication. A child will press a button down to take their own photo, and their self-portrait will pop up on their partner's device. The device was tested with both photo sharing and video chat. Children were most engaged when the buttons were part of a mobile video chat, where one child could press a button down and see their partner's button pop up in front of their far-away playmate. When the playmate responded with a button press, their button would magically pop up in front of them, in a form of physical call-and-response. Pokaboo shows how networked toys can help children to form engaging connections through physical play over a distance.

StoryVisit allows children and long-distance adults to experience a sense of togetherness by reading children's story books together over a distance. StoryVisit combines video conferencing and connected books: remote grown-up and child readers can see and hear each other, and can also see and control the same e-book. We report on research with 61 families - over 200 users including parents, children and long-distance readers - who used StoryVisit in their homes with a long-distance reader for at least one reading session. In addition, we report qualitative findings regarding nineteen of the families who participated in telephone interviews and four families who were monitored and interviewed by researchers at home. Results show that connected e-book video chat sessions last about five times as long as the typical video chats reported in previous research on families with young children. Moreover, the addition of an animated character increased session lengths by another 50%. StoryVisit usage peaked for families with three year olds, showing that sustained distance interactions with very young children are possible if communication technologies incorporate joint activities that engage children and adults.

Users often engage in tasks that span multiple personal devices. Although many current solutions exist to provide ubiquitous access to one's data, users continue to struggle with cross-device tasks. These solutions often require them to plan ahead for their information needs. In this paper, we present Myngle, a device-agnostic system that lets users quickly find the information they are looking for from previously visited web pages without having to plan ahead. Myngle provides a unified web history from multiple personal devices, and allows users to filter their history based on high-level categories influenced by common mobile information need categories (e.g., address, phone number). We evaluated Myngle with 32 users and found that our category-based method of filtering eases the burden of continuing cross-device tasks.

In this work, we introduce Interactive Rich Reading, a new enhanced book experience designed to run on smartphones and a tablet device. Interactive Rich Reading is characterized by a video-based conversational agent that asks questions or makes comments about the current page and is specifically designed to promote engagement with the contents of children's books. We use video compositing techniques to overlay the conversational agent directly over the book contents, creating a magical experience for children by bringing the book to life. We describe technical issues related to enabling this experience on mobile platforms for easier adoption of this technique by other researchers and practitioners.

People interact with numerous personal devices on a daily basis. Sharing content among these devices is often done depending on the device capabilities and context of use; following turn-by-turn directions is more appropriate when mobile. Although several solutions exist to share content among one's devices, these solutions rely on the user planning ahead for the data he may need on another device. In this paper, we describe a system that addresses the unplanned activities, by automatically extracting addresses and points of interest that users view in their web browser and making those readily available through an in-car interface.

We introduce Family Story Play, a system that supports grandparents to read books together with their grandchildren over the Internet. Family Story Play is designed to improve communication across generations and over a distance, and to support parents and grandparents in fostering the literacy development of young children. The interface encourages active child participation in the book reading experience by combining a paper book, a sensor-enhanced frame, video conferencing technology, and video content of a Sesame Street Muppet (Elmo). Results with users indicate that Family Story Play improves child engagement in long-distance communication and increases the quality of interaction between young children and distant grandparents. Additionally, Family Story Play encourages dialogic reading styles that are linked with literacy development. Ultimately, reading with Family Story Play becomes a creative shared activity that suggests a new kind of collaborative story telling.

Increasingly, smartphones are being used to access all manner of information: email messages, Facebook status updates, tweets, RSS feeds, photographs and more. Approaches to dealing with this multi-faceted information stream developed on the desktop, such as switching between multiple applications or multiple browser windows, are unwieldy and scale poorly for mobile devices. In this paper, we propose the combination of the universal inbox and a system called 'Lenses' for extracting information of interest as part of a solution to this problem. These mechanisms allow the user to easily specify ways to sort, filter and manage their universal inbox in an intuitive way. We culminate with a discussion of implications for mobile phone interface design.

TOSHIBA has developed mobile multi-media engine SoC, we call as S1G, which can realize low power ISDB-T one-segment decode in 42mW for eight months short period of time. Since MPEG2 TS (transport stream) de-multiplexing, AAC decoding and H.264 decoding should be simultaneously processed in ISDB-T one-segment decode, two TOSHIBA MeP (media embedded processor) processors and one DSP and hardware blocks are used effectively with pipeline operation in this LSI. Although it is generally considered that dedicated hardware accelerator should be used to realize low power operation for ISDB-T one-segment decode, TOSHBA succeeded in developing low power ISDB-T one-segment decoder using maximum software resources.

In this paper, we present an approach for facilitating user interaction on mobile devices, focusing on camera-enabled mobile phones. A user interacts with an application by moving their device. An on-board camera is used to capture incoming video and the scrolling direction and magnitude are estimated using a computer vision-based algorithm. The direction is used as the scroll direction in the application, and the magnitude is used to set the zoom level. The camera is treated as a pointing device and zoom level control in applications. Our approach generates mouse events, so any application that is mouse-driven can make use of this technique. The user is free to browse through large data sets on a limited size display with one hand, ideal for the mobile domain.

Audiovisual perceptual training of non-native phonetic contrasts was conducted for 10 naive Japanese adults using audiovisual recordings of 13 native English speakers articulating 90 rl minimal word pairs, and analyzed changes in perceptual and articulatory representations of non-native phonetic contrasts. The speech identification score drastically improved during the training. The improvement in non-native rl perceptual distinction was clearly associated with the changes in the perceptual and articulatory representations, which represents perceptual/articulatory dissimilarities between the non-native and native phonemes as maps created using a multi-dimensional scaling analysis (MDS). Results suggested that the new nonnative phonetic categories can be acquired through proper training even in adulthood so that distances among exemplars within each of the acquired categories shrunk and distances between the categories stretch considerably compared to those of pretraining stage in the perceptual and articulatory representations.