In this paper, we describe a public navigation system which uses adaptive displays as directional signs. The displays are mounted to walls where they provide passersbys with directional information. Each sign is an autonomous, wirelessly networked ...

We describe a method for notifying users through auditory cues embedded in an ambient soundscape in the environment. It uses pieces of music which are composed in such a way, that particular instruments or motifs can be added or omitted without losing ...

A task-oriented space can benefit from an augmented reality interface that layers the existing tools and surfaces with useful information to make cooking more easy, safe and efficient. To serve experienced users as well as novices, augmented reality ...

Machine learning (ML) is a complex process that can hardly be carried out by non-expert users. Especially when using adaptive systems that interpret and exploit observations of the user to modify their behavior according to the user's perceived ...

Every program tells a story. Programming, then, is the art of constructing a story about the objects in the program and what they do in various situations. So-called programming languages, while easy for the computer to accurately convert into code, are,...

At the Media Lab we are developing a resource called StoryNet, a very-large database of story scripts that can be used for commonsense reasoning by computers. This paper introduces ComicKit, an interface for acquiring StoryNet scripts from casual ...

The paper presents a first prototype of a handheld museum guide delivering contextualized information based on the recognition of drawing details selected by the user through the guide camera. The resulting interaction modality has been analyzed and ...

We describe a tool for transcribing voice generated percussive rhythms. The system consists of: (a) a segmentation component which separates the monophonic input stream into percussive events (b) a descriptors generation component that computes a set of ...

In this paper, we explore the conventions that people use in managing multiple dialogue threads. In particular, we focus on where in a thread people interrupt when switching to another thread. We find that some subjects are able to vary where they ...

SemanticTalk is a tool for supporting face-to-face meetings and discussions by automatically generating a semantic context from spoken conversations. We use speech recognition and topic extraction from a large terminological database to create a network ...

In this paper, we describe an intelligent user interface designed for camera phones to allow mobile users to specify the object of interest in the scene simply by taking two pictures: one with the object and one without the object. By comparing these ...

We describe several approaches for using prosodic features of speech and audio localization to control interactive applications. This information can be applied to parameter control, as well as to speech disambiguation. We discuss how characteristics of ...

Current sketch recognition systems treat sketches as images or a collection of strokes, rather than viewing sketching as an interactive and incremental process. We show how viewing sketching as an interactive process allows us to recognize sketches ...

A principal problem in speech recognition is distinguishing between words and phrases that sound similar but have different meanings. Speech recognition programs produce a list of weighted candidate hypotheses for a given audio segment, and choose the "...

Researchers have noticed that readers are increasingly skimming instead of reading in depth. Skimming also occur in re-reading activities, where the goal is to recall specific topical facts. Bookmarks and highlighters were invented precisely to achieve ...

The problem of providing help for complex application interfaces has been a source of interest for a number of researcher efforts. As the computational power of computers increases, typical applications not only increase in functionality but also in the ...

Integrating and mining data from different web sources can make end-users well-informed when they make decisions. One of many limitations that bars end-users from taking advantages of such process is the complexity in each of the steps required to ...

We describe a method for predicting user intentions as part of a human-robot interface. In particular, we show that funnels, i.e., geometric objects that partition an input space, provide a convenient means for discriminating individual objects and for ...

The aim of this research was to develop methods for the automatic person-independent estimation of experienced emotions from facial expressions. Ten subjects watched series of emotionally arousing pictures and videos, while the electromyographic (EMG) ...

This paper describes SmartCanvas, an intelligent desk system that allows a user to perform freehand drawing on a desk or similar surface with gestures. Our system requires one camera and no touch sensors. The key underlying technique is a vision-based ...