Tuesday, September 30, 2014

#6: Sketch principles


    1. A list of ten principles of things a sketch system should do 1) Intuitive error messages: what is wrong and why? 2) Intuitive function buttons: easy to use 3) Rapid feedback: time to show error messages or correct message 4) High performance of sketch recognizer: easy to draw due to well-recognition 5) Well-organized UI 6) Implement and provide only necessary function 7) Consistency: same input - same output 9) Save a user's previous sketch history well 10) Easy to edit drawing (e.g. click the drawing for naming or remove parts of it)
    2. A list of ten principles of what they shouldn’t do 1) Vague error messages 2) Button of functions are not intuitive 3) Slow feedback: high occurrences of server errors 4) Bad sketch recognizer: hard to make it understand what a user intends to draw 5) Ineffective UI 6) Unnecessary functions: distracts users 7) Duplicated functions: distracts users 9) Inconsistency 10) Hard to edit drawing
    3. List 5 improvements for Mechanix 1) Performance of server (too many errors pop up.)
      - Server is busy. Please try again later.
      - Read timed out 

      2) Checklist bugs
      3) Vague check messages
      4) Labeling failure (quite often, especially #6)
      5) Error #7
    4. I finished the tutorial except #12.

Monday, September 29, 2014

Paper Review #5: Visual Similarity of Pen Gestures

1. Paper Bibliography
  • Title: Visual Similarity of Pen Gestures
  • Authors: A. Chris Long, Jr., James A. Landay, Lawrence A. Rowe, and Joseph Michiels
  • Publication: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, 2000.

2. Summary
  • This paper studied perceptual similarity of pen-based gestures. They had done two similarity tests with multiple-dimensional scaling(MDS). With MDS, they selected the features that affect gestures mostly. The similarity of the gestures is given by the Euclidean distance between the two gestures in the feature space, where smaller distance means greater similarity. The first trial got 0.74 of correlation. In the second trial, the computation model they studied predicted perceived gesture similarity that correlates 0.56 with observation.

3. My opinion
    1) Method
  • They used Euclidean distance and MDS for their experiments. The paper said that depending on researches, researchers can use either Euclidean distance or Manhattan distance, and they got a better result with Euclidean distance, so they used it. I think this methodology is interesting.  
    2) Idea
  • This idea gave me a lot of ideas for my research. I also need to do user study in order to get intuitive hand gestures which imply emotions.
    3) New research idea
  • I think that the main steps of this experiment can be applied to any HCI user studies such as hand gestures.  

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Paper Review #4: Specifying Gestures by Example

1. Paper Bibliography
  • Title: Specifying Gestures by Example 
  • Authors: Dean Rubine
  • Publication: Vol. 25. No. 4. ACM, 1991.

2. Summary
  • This paper tested GRANDMA program which help to implement hand-gesture application. They used GDP as hand-gesture application. With simple gesture(click and drag) and single stroke, they defined the function of each gesture and design them with GRANDMA. The main steps are collecting data, classifying them and manipulation. For evaluation, they tested varying the number of class and training examples. As a result, in spite of its simplicity, it performed well. This paper suggested that this simple step will be a big stepping stone for future work.

3. My opinion
    1) Method
  • They suggested classification algorithm and training algorithm which are short and simple. Basically, since the data are two dimensional, single-stroke gestures, algorithm might be relatively simple. They extracted features from the data and classified the features as a certain class. Then, they ran the training data and rejected some ambiguous data. In these days, this procedure might be well-known, but considered the time the paper published, I think this established the standard for classification. 
    2) Idea
  • I think this idea is pretty simple except all the equations. However, I am impressed the results. In Figure 9, all sets got over 98% of accuracy.
    3) New research idea
  • When I read only the title of the paper, I thought the gestures includes various thing such as hand motions, body movement. Then, I realized that this has been published a quite long time ago. I did not come up with new idea but I can tell that this paper is a milestone for sketch recognition techniques.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Paper Review #3: Mechanix

1. Paper Bibliography
  • Title: Mechanix: A Sketch-Based Tutoring and Grading System for Free-Body Diagrams
  • Authors: Stephanie Valentine, Francisco Vides, George Lucchese, David Turner, Hong-hoe Kim, Wenzhe Li, Julie Linsey, and Tracy Hammond.
  • Publication: AI Magazine 34, no. 1 (2013): 55-66.

2. Summary
  • This paper suggested that an educational application which is based on sketch recognition techniques. Mechanix is focused on helping users build the basic concept of mechanics, especially trusses. A instructor can upload question sets, and students can solve the problems with their sketches on the computer. 

3. My opinion
    1) Method
  •  I think that one of great advantages of Mechanix is prompt feedbacks. Once students submit their drawing, it will automatically tell their errors that need to be fixed. Otherwise, it will show correct message.
    2) Idea
  • The idea that providing sketch recognition techniques for drawing trusses is a good idea.  This application is beneficial for both instructors and students. For students, they can learn the mechanics concepts by getting detailed feedbacks, and for instructors, they are able to grade student assignments in an effective way.
    3) New research idea
  • For now, I cannot come up with any brand new ideas, but I have participated in the mechanix project. We changed UI in more intuitive way.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Paper Review #2: K-Sketch

1. Paper Bibliography
  • Title: K-Sketch: A "Kinetic" Sketch Pad for Novice Animators
  • Authors: Richard C. Davis, Brien Colwell, James A. Landy
  • Publication: SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2008.

2. Summary
  • The paper suggests an pen-based kinetic sketch application. The goal of the paper is to provide the application creating animations for novice. They implement the program which consists of 10 functions: translate, scale, rotate, set timing, move relative, appear, disappear, trace, copy motion and orient to path. Through user studies, they proved that compared to PowerPoint or Flash, K-Sketch is fast enough for sketching ideas, simple enough for novices, and powerful enough to handle a wide variety of tasks.

3. My opinion
    1) Method
  • In my opinion, the interface of K-Sketch is user-friendly and the main functions they implemented are easy to use. It is certain that this can be usable for novice animators and is good for simple animations. Also, as the method they used is a laboratory experiment, I think it is reliable. 
    2) Idea
  • The idea is also interesting. I think that they dealt with a real issues and made a practical solution. In my opinion, this idea is efficient and beneficial for general users.
    3) New research idea
  • It would be also nice that if this can support collaborative works such as multi-sketch function or supporting remotely working together.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Paper Review #1: iCanDraw?

1. Paper Bibliography

  • Title: iCanDraw? - Using Sketch Recognition and Corrective Feedback to Assist a User in Drawing Human Faces
  • Authors: Daniel Dixon, Manoj Prasad, and Tracy Hammond
  • Publication: SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2010.
2. Summary




3. My opinion
    1) Method
    2) Idea
    3) New research idea