Paper Review: The Music Notepad

This paper is written by researchers at Brown University and published at UIST'98.

Notating music can be done with a common UI with windows, icons, menus, and point-and-click (WIMP) such as those used in popular software synthesizers and editing tools (e.g. Cakewalk). However, the user model of using paper and pencil is very different and is more desirable because of the simplicity. This paper presents a system that allows the musicians to create music notation directly using a stylus on a Tablet PC.

 

The system described in this paper followed some previous work from Buxton, but added more features. The notation system allows the drawing of: notation symbols, Beams, Accidentals, Clefs and key signatures. Editing included region selection (lasso), copying, pasting, and deleting (scribble or text editing type delete gesture). The user can also assign instrument and view more of the music score using a perspective wall metaphor.

The authors developed an alternate method for entering notes by "scribbling in" a notehaed. This is different from Buxton's gestures (which had bad user experiences). This allowed accurate placement of symbols because an average position is used. This is also natural to the user because that's how they do it on paper. However, this method could be slower than point and click and also does nto convey the note duration. The video below shows how the system works.

To evaluate the system, the authors asked some users to try the system and then performed some informal interviews.

What's great about this paper is that it is the first in using gesture recognition to tackle the problem mentioned. The weak spot of the paper is its evaluation. If a more formal user study is performed to specifically measure certain aspects of the user performances by comparing old vs. new systems, the results would be more convincing. On a side note, the paper mentioned about estimating probability of posted tokens. I wish the paper had discussed more about how probability is calculated.

You can follow this link to read more about this project at Brown University.

In my humble opinion, a good UI is one where there’s minimal amount of learning/training/practicing involved. To the user it almost seems that all the designs are natural and logical conclusions (based on normal experiences of a standard user – with a certain profession or within a certain era). There might be better and more efficient ways (e.g. I can type a lot faster than write, and my handwriting is ugly), however, it might take a lot of training and practice in order to achieve the efficiency. In such cases, the best thing to do is probably to give the user the options so he/she can pick the way he/she wants it. Some incentives (with proper tutorials and demos) might be helpful to try to persuade the user to move toward the more efficient method, so he/she will endure the (maybe painful or dull) training and practice for higher efficiency. The important point is to let the user make the decision himself/herself. A forceful push toward the new method will only generate resentment (e.g. Windows Vista).



A user judges a solution based on how easy it is to to use, not how great the designer thinks it is.

AI and Robots: StarCraft AI Competition to be held at AIIDE 2010

The Fifth Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE 2010), one of the conferences organized by Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), will be held in October 2010 at Stanford University (as always). And the organizers have recently announced that they will be hosting a StarCraft AI Competition at the conference. AI researchers all over the world will have the chance to let their AI system compete in a Real Time Strategy (RTS) platform, and the final matches will be held live at the conference.

The idea of having AI agents compete with each other in gaming environments is nothing new. In fact, in one of the AI classes I took at BYU, we had to program agents to compete with other teams playing the game of BZFlag, a Capture the Flag game using tanks. The winning team gets an automatic A for the class. That was certainly a lot of fun, even though we didn't win the end of semester competition (because of a bug that confused our agents occasionally between home base and enemy base, doh!), we, as human players, had a hard time beating the agents we created ourselves.

In 2007, I went the the AAAI conference held in Vancouver, BC. At that conference, there were two live AI competitions. One was the General Game Playing Competition, where AI agents would compete in games they have never played before (all they know is the game logic at the competition time). The winning agent then played a game of Pacman against a real human player, and was able to force a tie! The other one was the Computer Poker Competition, and the winning agents challenged two real-world Vegas professional poker players with real money on the table ($50,000). Although the professional poker players narrowly defeated the poker playing software, the two players felt as if they were playing against real human.

What makes this StarCraft AI Competition unique are:

• StarCraft is a very popular game with a commercial rendering engine and beautiful graphics.
  
• It is a Real Time Strategy (RTS) game where the player controls many characters at the same time and had to manage game play strategies both at the macro and micro level.

The following video shows the kind of game play one would expect to see in StarCraft. Make sure you watch the HQ version in full screen mode to really appreciate the beautiful real-time graphic rendering.

Follow this link to get more info about how to use Broodwar APIs to write bots to work with the StarCraft game engine. If I haven't been buried in papers Piled Higher and Deeper, I probably just writing some agents for fun!

There are, of course, other commercial game engines used for AI and robotics research. For example, the game engine for the very popular First-Person Shooting game Unreal Tournament had been turned into USARSim (Unified System for Automation and Robot Simulation), a high-fidelity simulation of robots and environments.

Now my question is: when will EA Sports ever release APIs for their FIFA 2010 video game, so I can write software agents that play the game of soccer like real professionals (at least graphically)?

Picture of the Day:

 

BYU Computer Science Department Building

(See that big Y on the mountain?)

Robot of the Day: Aida, Your Driving Companion

[Don't get confused with the dates. You'll find that I frequently travel back and forth through time -- in my blog. :) ]


Aida is a robot built by Mikey Siegel from the MIT Media Lab for a research project at Audi. It is suppose to be a driving companion, something to be installed in your car!

During the summer of 2009, when I was doing an internship at the Intelligent Robotics Group in NASA Ames, I met Mikey for the first time. He was on his way to Audi Research Center located at the heart of the sunny Silicon Valley to present the robot he had built for them, but decided to stop at NASA Ames first to show us the robot, because he used to be an intern here at the IRG.

The purpose of the robot is to experiment with the idea of using a robot to influence people's driving behavior. Researchers hope to use the movement of the robot (really just the neck movement), the different facial expressions, and the robot's speech to encourage people to drive more safely. This required the robot to be able to communicate with human with many social cues, which was exactly the research topic at the Personal robots Group at MIT, led by Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, Mikey's advisor.

According to Mikey, the robot was built within a three-day period (I assumed that he didn't really get much sleep), which caused all our jaws to drop. The lovely head was printed off a 3D printer, and he also machined all the mechanical parts himself. However, to the fair to the other members of his lab, he added, the neck design was a copy from another project, the animated eyes and mouth movements were created by a friend (if I remember correct, someone from Pixar), and the software control was a mixture of modules previously developed at MIT and open source libraries such as OpenCV.

When Mikey demoed the robot to us, Aida was able to recognize faces. It became excited when it was surrounded by many people, and acted bored when it was left alone. The animated emoticons projected onto the plastic face from the back of the head made the robot look very cute, and the smooth neck movement made it almost appear "alive". At that time, the only sensor it had was a video camera mounted on the base (not moving with the neck or head), but eventually, Aida will be equipped with more eyes (cameras) and ears (microphones), so it can sense the world around it better.

Having a cute robot interacting with people in their cars sounds very cool, however, I am not so sure it is such a great idea.

First of all, could it be possible that the moving robot might distract the driver with its cute winks? I couldn't help but remember those signs next to bus drivers I used to see when I was a young kid: "Do not talk to the driver!" These days, when many states are making it illegal to talk on cell phone while driving, what would they think of a robot that not only talks to the driver, but also try to get the driver to look at it?

Secondly, don't you get annoyed sometimes when your better half keeps criticizing your driving skills (or was that just me)? Now imagine a robot, nagging constantly right next to your ear like your dear Grandma, telling you that you are driving too fast, or that you hit the brake too hard. Especially after you rear-end someone, I am sure a nagging robot saying "Told you! Told you to not follow so closely" would be the last thing you want.... (Disclaimer: I have never rear-ended anyone!)

On the other hand, for those LA solo commuters who get stuck in traffic many hours regularly (I was recently stuck in LA traffic for hours, so I know!), Aida would make a great driving companion! And I certainly wouldn't mind such a cute robot making a conversation with me, while my car drives itself to my intended destination!

Video of the Day:

If you were there at the Liverpool Street Station on January 15, 2009, would you have joined in?

AI and Robots: Highschool Students Register With Their Faces

In a previous post we discussed challenges to facial recognition apps and what people had to do (or choose to do) to get by (or bypass it). Does that mean the technology is not ready for the real world? Today we'll see a case where it is used in real world environment and is actually working quite well.

At the City of Ely Community College in UK, sixth-graders are now check-in and out of school registers using their faces. The facial recognition technology is provided by Aurora and the college is one of the first schools in UK to trail the new technology with its students.

So how does the technology work? The scanning station is equipped with infra-red lights and a regular video camera. Each infra-red sensor actually has two parts: an emitter and a receiver. The emitter shoots out an series of infra-red signals and the receiver detects the infra-red lights deflected back by objects in front of the sensor (a simple example would be the auto-flushing toilets in public restrooms). Then by analyzing the strength and pattern of the received signals, the sensor can sense how far the object is from the sensor. This allows the scanner to create a range (depth) image of the object in front of it. So the resulting image is a 3D surface, unlike a regular 2D image from a camera.

Combining this 3D surface with the 2D image taken from the video camera, features are extracted from the entire data set, then each set of features is tagged with a student ID (we know which face it is because each student has to be scanned at the very beginning so the data can be stored in the database). At the time of the scan, it is a simple machine learning classification problem, and I suspect that they probably just used nearest neighbor to match features with an individual student. You can click the image below to see a video of this from the original news article.

Click image to see video.

So how do people like this high-tech face recognition system? Principal Richard Barker said:

With this new registration technology, we are hoping to free up our teachers' time and allow them to spend it on what they are meant to be doing, which is teaching

As for the students, they love the idea of taking responsibility for their ow n registration and using Mission Impossible-style systems.

So why did this specific application turn out to be a success? That's the question we really should be asking. I think we have to attribute the success to the following factors:

• This is a combination of 3D depth image with a 2D image, which allows the creation of many features (and some of them got the job done).
• The college has a relatively small number of six-grader students. Classification becomes easier when you don't have to recognize a face out of millions of faces (like in the airport security check case).
• The student is also required to enter a pin. This further improves accuracy. I guess the facial recognition technology is really there to prevent students from signing other people in and out.
  
• Most importantly, the consequence of errors is very low. What if a face is not recognized correctly? The worst that could happen is a erred record in the registration. It's not like that the student would be marked as a terrorist at an airport, which could have severe consequences.

I certainly hope to see more and more successful facial recognition applications out there people can focus on what they enjoy to do instead of what they have to do.

Picture of the Day:

I think this would make a perfect picture for today.
Here I present: Lanny in 3D

AI and Robots: No Smile Allowed, When Technology Is Not Good Enough.

Since I've been struggling with my hand recognition application, which is far easier than face recognition, I thought I discuss some more about facial recognition applications.

In a previous post, I talked about how current facial recognition built-into laptops can easily be hacked. Today we'll talk about another real application of facial recognition, and specifically, what do people do when the technology fails.

About 20 states in the US use facial recognition technology with driver's licenses. To fight identify fraud, one standard procedure at DMVs is that the DMV employee would looked at the old photo of a person to see if it looked like the person seeking a new license. Using facial recognition technology, this step can be automated to improve efficiency, and the technology also, supposedly, allows the detection of facial features that are not easy to recognize by human, thus improve the accuracy of the detection.

The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles recently rolled out a new set of rules governing how people must be photographed on their driver's license photos. Unfortunately, Indiana drivers are no longer allowed to smile. Smiling is taboo alongside glasses and hats.

What's going on here? Turned out the new restrictions are in place because the smiling can distort facial features measured by the facial recognition software according to BMV officials.

It is very interesting to see the kind of restrictions placed on users when the technology should have done the job. Here's something that for sure will improve the accuracy of the facial recognition even more: How about requiring all drivers to get a crew cut (men and women) and to be clean shaven?

I simply can't resist to show this picture below, which is part of the grooming standard in BYU's Honor Code, which I am openly opposed to.


Facial recognition technology was also tested at airports in hope to detect terrorists, but failed miserably, as expected.

"According to a story by the Boston Globe, the security firm which conducted the tests was unable to calibrate the equipment without running into one of two rather serious problems. When it's set to a sensitive level, it 'catches' world + dog. When it's set to a looser level, pretty much any idiot can escape detection by tilting his head or wearing eyeglasses."

The most popular facial recognition algorithm used today is SVM (Support Vector Machine) because of its good performance with real world data. The video below demonstrate how well the algorithm works (also using Gabor wavelets).

Anyway, I think there is still a long way to go for facial recognition technology to be useful in serious applications. Frankly, I am no good at facial recognition myself. A lot of times, I rely on hair style, glasses wore to help me remember people's faces. However, I don't think it is a good idea to impose lots of restrictions on the user because the technology is not good enough. That's my 2 cents.

Newton Moment: when you do things that are considered silly by normal people simply because you are too focused in thinking about your research.

Exceeding wife's tolerance threshold for the number of Newton Moment per day can cause serious consequences.


Video of the Day:

Try detect this face!

Robot of the Day: G8 Robotic Fish to Detect Water Pollution

British scientists, specifically, researchers at University of Essex, plan to release a bunch of robot fish into the sea off north Spain to detect pollution. This is part of three-year research project funded by the European Commission and coordinated by BMT Group Ltd.



These carp-shaped robots look very much like the real ones, big ones (nearly 5 feet) -- roughly the size of a seal. The tiny chemical sensors installed on these robot fish enable them to find sources of potentially hazardous pollutants in the water.

These robots all have autonomous navigation capabilities, meaning no remote control is needed to direct them. All that is required is to simply "let them loose". Using Wi-Fi technology, data collected can be transmitted to the the port's control center. The battery on each fish can last approximately 8 hours and similar to the Roomba vacuum cleaning robots, they are smart enough to return to a "charging hub" to get recharged when battery runs low. The video below demonstrate the swimming capability of such a robot fish, the G8 model. It really swims like a fish!!

The fish can swith at a maximum speed of about one meter per second, which means the fish can be away from the "charging hub" for as far as 14.4 kilometers (which I think might be too far for the charge hub to still receive good signals). The cost for building one of such robot fish is around £20,000 (roughly $29,000), so it is certainly not cheap. There are also smaller ones created by the same group of researchers as shown in this video below. I guess these are more suited for a fish tank.

So why robot fish? Why not the very machine-looking like mini-submarines? Rory Doyle, a senior research scientist at BMT Group said,

"In using robotic fish we are building on a design created by hundreds of millions of years' worth of evolution which is incredibly energy efficient. This efficiency is something we need to ensure that our pollution detection sensors can navigate in the underwater environment for hours on end."

Personally, I think this technology is great because:
1. As stated, using the fish design is very energy efficient.
2. The robots can navigate autonomous, which doesn't require human interaction.
3. Chemicals dissolved in the water under the surface can be detected.
4. Data can be sent to the data center wirelessly.
5. The fish robots can recharge themselves when needed.
6. The fish form also help them blend in with the environment (and maybe disguise them from people who intentionally pollute our water).

Now if they are capable of the following, it can be even better:
1. Trace the source of the pollution on their own autonomously (maybe through some heuristic path planning algorithms)
2. Take pictures of the pollution source (to help identify/analyze the cause and maybe use them as evidence in a court of law).
3. Somehow obtain energy on their own? Eat seaweed, little fish, or shrimp and generate energy through metabolism?
4. Also, in case of malfunction, is there an easy way to retrieve it? Maybe using another robotic fish?

Every coin has two sides, and there are certainly concerns for this technology too. For example: what if other fish (a shark? although a shark is not technically a fish) attacks the robotic fish and treats it as food? I am sure the robot fish won't be easy to digest and might kill the poor (real) fish. How who's responsible for that? And how about the disappointing fisherman who happen to catch the robotic fish?

You can read more about the robotic fish from the following articles:

Article at BMT web site
News Article at Reuters





Shear will power, no matter how strong it is, will not make a problem go away.

Joy of Life: Volume 1 Chapter 1

Good stuff should be shared. If you enjoy reading my posts, please share them with your friends too! Also welcome to comment on various topics and present different views.

Volume One: The City by the Sea
-- written by Maoni

Chapter 1: Story Gathering^[1]

Port Danzhou was located at the east end of the Qing Empire. Although a city by the sea, due to the fact that the several ports further south had already been developed and the sea route to the western world had also been opened, the empire’s trade center had moved to the south, and the port city gradually showed more and more decline. The once bustling harbor had quieted down over the last few years.

Seagulls flew about the city freely and no longer had to worry about harassment from those loathsome sailors.

The original residents of the city, however, didn’t feel too big of a change in their everyday lives. It was true that their income had declined, but the emperor, His Majesty, had exempted the city from taxes several years ago. Therefore, life wasn’t bad. Besides, this seaport city was so beautiful. Now that it had become quiet once again, it naturally became even more livable. That was why occasionally some influential people would choose to build their manors here.

Because it was too far from the Capital City, very few officials stayed. The only one that somewhat qualified had to be the Old Madam living in the west part of the town.

It was said that the Old Madam was the mother of the Count of Southernland in the Capital City, and chose to live out her life in retirement in the city by the sea. The residents of Port Danzhou all knew that the Count of Southernland was in great favor with His Majesty. That was the reason why he wasn’t assigned a position outside of the Capital City like usual, and instead, stayed in the Capital City and got a job in the Ministry of Finance. That was why everyone showed plenty of manners and respect to the residents of the manor.

But kids are ignorant of such things.

It was a fine and warm day. Adults mostly found themselves sitting inside a wine-house, enjoying the salty humidity blown in by the sea winds, together with the preserved plums and wine in their cups.

In the western part of the town, just outside the backdoor of Count of Southernland’s manor, a group of teenagers surrounded the stone steps. Shoulder to shoulder, they filled the entire opening. What could they be doing there?

If one got closer, he would find a very interesting scene. It turned out that all these lads were listening to a four or five-year old kid speaking. The little boy had a pretty face. His well trimmed eyebrows and his crystal-clear eyes looked as though they came out of a beautiful painting. Although his young voice was that of a little kid, the tone of his words clearly showed the arrogance of a senior. With a sigh, he gestured with his little arms.

“Truman walked up to the wall, and saw a staircase, so he walked up the staircase step after step. Then he found the door. Pushing the door open, he walked out…”

“What happened then?”

“Then? Then…he naturally went back to the real world.” The little boy pouted, as though he was quite weary of such a retarded question coming out of someone much older than him.

“It can’t be! Shouldn’t he go seek out that Hanny…something…?”

“Harris,” another teen picked it up.

“Right! Shouldn’t Truman find that Harris guy and kick his butt to vent his anger? He was locked in for so many years.”

“Nope.” The little boy shrugged.

“That was no fun! Young Master Fan Xian, today’s story is certainly not as good as the ones in the last few days.”

“Which ones did you like?”

“A Dreamy Journey to the Far, Far Away^[1]!”

“The Story of a Charming Wanderer^[2]!"

“Bah!” the little boy named Fan Xian stuck his middle finger out at the older kids around him. “Fighting, killing everywhere is bad for your health! Digging everywhere for treasure is bad for the environment!”

A loud, angry voice arose from inside the manor all of the sudden, “Young Master, where did you go again?”

The older kids surrounding him also stuck their middle fingers out in imitation and shouted in unison, “Bah!” Because of the large number of people involved, it was a much grander effect. Grinning triumphantly, they quickly scattered and disappeared into the nearby alleys.

The little boy stood up from the stone steps and swiftly whisked the dust off the underside of his pants. Then he turned and dashed into the courtyard. Before he closed the door, he shot a quick glance toward the young, blind shopkeeper in the small grocery store across the street with his shrewd eyes, while a complex emotion, something completely inappropriate for his age, flashed across his face, before he tenderly shut the door tight.

This was the fourth year after Fan Shen first came to this world. Throughout these years, he finally realized it was not a dream. He had indeed arrived at an unknown world. This world appeared to be identical to the world in his memory, but seemed to also have many differences.

By eavesdropping on conversations among servants in the Count’s Manor, he eventually figured out his status: he was the baseborn son of the Count of Southernland. Just like any TV series about powerful and rich families, the status of a baseborn son made him an easy target for all kinds of evil schemes from people such as First-Aunt^[3], Second-Aunt^[4], and others. He happened to be the only son of his “supposed” father. For the sake of extending the Count’s bloodline, he was sent to the city Port Danzhou far away from the Capital City.

After so many years, he gradually grew accustomed to his new identity. Trapping an adult’s soul in the body of a child was certainly a very different experience both biologically and spiritually. If he were any other normal person, he probably would have gone mad – however, conveniently, Fan Shen happened to be a patient with non-functional muscles and lived in a sick bed for many years. His difficulty in mobility during this life was nothing compared to the miserable state in his prior life. As a result he found himself without much discomfort living inside the body of an infant.

The most discomfort was actually his name nowadays. When he had been about one-year old, His Excellency, the Count in the Capital City, sent a letter and bestowed a name upon him: Fan Xian^[5], with a middle name Anzhi.

This was not a good name because it sounded just like the cuss word in his original hometown – “Fan Xian”, which meant having nothing better to do.

Since his outside form was just an infant, it was impossible for him to voice his objection.

In his prior life when he had been treated in the hospital, especially in the early days, he could at least still turn his head around. So he frequently begged that lovely little nurse to buy pirated DVDs and books for him.

After living in the Count’s Manor for an extended period, he could tell that the Old Madam only appeared to be cold in manner, but inside, she doted on him very much. The slave girls and servants also didn’t regard him with any special treatment because of his status as a baseborn son. Though, the pain of not being able to communicate with others bothered him very much.

Could he have discussed with the slave girls that he was actually from another world? Could he have told the home teacher that he actually already knew all the characters in the books?

Therefore, he often snuck out of the Count’s Manor from the side door and played with those children of the poor on the streets. His favorite activity was to tell stories to them, stories from movies and novels in his own world.

It was as though he wanted to keep reminding himself about something, that he did not belong to this world. The world he truly belonged to had movies, the Internet, and YY novels^[6].

He didn’t know why he told the story of the movie: The Truman Show. The plot of the movie was plain to start with; besides, there was no Jim Carrey to make people laugh. He should have clearly known that these teenagers of Port Danzhou would have no way of liking it.

But he told it anyway, because he always felt that absurdity deep inside his heart. He was on a dying course. What made him reincarnate inside this body? He couldn’t help but to remember that movie…. Maybe, all these people, the streets in front of him, even the seagulls flying in the sky, are just props intentionally arranged by someone, just like in Truman’s world.

Truman eventually discovered the falsity of the world he lived in, so he resolutely took the ship and found the exit.

But Fan Shen, no, he should be called Fan Xian now … knew that he was no Truman, and this world truly existed. It was not just a huge soundstage. Therefore his act of telling stories every day, to remind himself that he was from a different world, was something truly absurd by itself.

---

[1] A popular Internet novel.

[2] Another popular Internet novel.

[3] First wife of the Count.

[4] Second wife of the Count.

[5] Here “Fan” is the last name, and “Xian” is the first name. In Chinese, “Xian” means leisure, idle and unoccupied. “Anzhi” means relax and be content and came from the verse, “Once here, then relax and be content,” which originally came from the book “The Analects of Confucius.”

[6] YY stands for Yi Ying, which means being as ridiculous and impudent as your mind will let you. The main character in such YY novels would always have the best fortune in the entire universe and eventually have all the fame, money, and power and become epic heroes, kings or gods in this ridiculous and non-logical world the author created. This novel itself could be classified under this genre.

Now support the author Maoni by clicking this link, and support the translator Lanny by following my blog! :)

Video of the Day:

This has nothing to do with robots or translations. But isn't this kid simply amazing?

AI and Robots: Researchers Hack Facial Recognition Authentication

Yesterday we talked about fingerprints. These days, another form of biometric identifier has gained more attention -- facial recognition. In fact, several laptop manufactures have included facial recognition as authentication caveats to attract more consumers. The selling pitch was that facial recognition is more convenient for the user than entering user name/password pair. The video below is a fun commercial by Lanovo promoting such technology.

Similarly, Toshiba also included such technology with their latest product lines.

However, several Vietnamese researchers have demonstrated at BlackHat DC 2009 how these facial recognition authentications can easily be cracked using photos of the user or multiple phony facial images in kind of "brute-force" attacks. The key lies in how the facial recognition algorithms work. They only treat the user's face as digital images, therefore, by manipulating lighting conditions and view angles of photos, such authentication systems can be easily fooled even though the security level is set to high. The researchers also wrote a paper describing their work. Too bad they didn't make a video of the presentation at the conference. There is, however, an interview with Duc Nguyen, the main researcher.

Here's also a link to an article with more details.

These Windows XP and Vista laptops come with built-in webcams that work with the facial-recognition technology. This form of authentication is considered more convenient than fingerprint scans and more secure than traditional passwords. The software scans the user's face and stores the images and facial characteristics. Then the user can log in by scanning his or her face, which is then matched against the image data.

Don't get me wrong here. Facial recognition is a great technology. However, we have to be very careful about how we apply new technologies to real world problems. Using facial recognition to customize/personalize things (such as seat positions in cars) is great. But using it for security authentication might not be that good of an idea just like RFID tags (see my other post for a discussion on that).





Don't let stupid reviewers ruin your joyful life. There's always another conference out there, waiting for you!

Paper Review: A User Interface Using Fingerprint Recognition - Holding Commands and Data Objects on Fingers

This paper by Atsushi Sugiura and Yoshiyuki Koseki from NEC was published at UIST '98.

The main idea of the paper is that by using a fingerprint scanner, the unique fingerprint of each finger can be identified, and commands or objects can then be associated with each finger as though each finger was carrying things with it.

The authors specifically compared their FUI (Fingerprint User Interface) with that of the Pick-and-Drop, a pen-based direct manipulation technique that allowed a user to virtually hold a data object in a pen. The advantages of FUI are that there is no special tools required (the fingers themselves would suffice), and there is no ID management since each finger already has a name. Also because a normal person has 10 fingers, it is possible to hold 10 objects/command, which is only achievable by 10 pens in the Pick-and-Drop system.

When associating fingers with commands, FUI can be great for operations where the user cannot look at the operation panel, for example, operating machines in darkness or manipulate them in a bag/pocket, because the user would not need to visually identify different buttons for different functions. FUI is also good when the user wants to conceal commands from others, such as opening the cash register when being robbed: one finger would simply open it while another finger would open it and also send a signal to the police.

Fingers can also be used as containers to store information. For example, text strings can be stored with multiple fingers, and when scanning the finger on another machine or in another application, the strings can be retrieved and pasted into the new machine/app. To the user, it felt just like that each finger is carrying very specific information.

It is important to note the drawbacks of such an interface. Firstly, scanning and identifying fingerprints can be very slow (about 2 seconds). The paper was written in 1998. At that time, it took 1.7 seconds to identify one fingerprint. More than 10 years later, technology today is not much better. The Dell XPS m1530 laptops have fingerprint scanner built in, which allows the user to associate different commands with different fingers. However, it still takes about 1.5 second for the application to identify the fingerprint. This delay can be very annoying to the end user.


Secondly, many times, the end user would forget or get confused about which finger carries what information/command. Thirdly, FUI would not work well for one hand operations when that hand has to hold the device (such as a mobile phone for a user who is driving). Fourthly, the fingerprint identification algorithm can make mistakes. And when that happens, it is important that the user can invoke undo operations to recover. And for things that cannot be undone (such as the lunch of a nuclear missile), this technology better not be used.

Some of the example applications presented in the paper are: operating a CD player where a finger could be "play" while another finger be "fast forward"; using fingers to store bookmarks for web browsing. An interesting application suggested by the authors is that a phone number can be stored with a finger at home, and then at public phones, the number can be retrieved from the finger to automatically dial that number. While this idea is cool, I personally wouldn't think it's a good idea because that would have to allow the public phone to have access to people's fingerprint data together with access to user's data repository (whether the home computer or an online storage), which exposes the user's private information to possible unauthorized accesses.

The main advantages of fingerprints are: they are unique to each user, and the user normally don't lose them (as opposed to keys). However, they are also unchangeable, so once others get hold such information, they can impersonate the user for the rest of his life.

If you are sleepy but want to stay awake, do push-ups. At least you'll be stronger.

Robot of the Day: Winebot, the Wine Tasting Robot

Researchers at NEC and Mie University, both in Japan, came up with a robot, the Winebot, that is capable of distinguishing good wine from bad wine, tell you the brand, and also suggest side dishes that will go well alongside the wine. It is also capable of identifying different cheeses and hors d'oeuvres.

Wait a second. What are hors d'oeuvres? I've never heard of this word before. So I did a google search, and there is actually a wikipedia entry of it (including a sound file for pronunciation). Basically, it means appetizer.

Cold Hors d'œuvre

When presented with three apples, without actually taking a bite, the robot was able to separate the sweet one from the two sour ones. So how does the robot do it? There is actually an infrared spectrometer at the end of the robot's left arm. When objects are placed up against the sensor, the robot fires off a beam of infrared light and then analyze the reflected light in real time. It takes advantage of the fact that different food would have different reflection ratio of light per wavelength for water, protein, etc., kind of like unique "fingerprints", in order to distinguish them.

Just to add a bit more fun, because it is analyzing the chemical composition of the wine or food placed before it, it can also alert its owner to possible health issues, gently warning against fatty or salty products. However, it is not capable of detecting drunkenness, which could have been another great feature.

However, when the Winebot makes mistakes, the consequences could be dramatic. When a reporter’s hand was placed against the robot’s taste sensor, it was identified as prosciutto. A cameraman was mistaken for bacon.

This cute robot is about 2 feet tall, can slightly swivel its head, and when it speaks in a child-like voice, lights flash around its mouth. If you think this makes a great birthday or Christmas present, think again! It cost as much as a new car. With that amount of money, I would have expected the robot to

• cook for me
• wash the dishes
• make beds
• clean the house
• take out the garbage
  
• mow the lawn
• rake the leaves
• shovel the snow
• and the list goes on and on and on ...
  

Take a short break from your busy life so you can appreciate the beautiful things you might be ignoring.