In this paper we introduce the concept of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)
inhibitor, which is meant to standby the BCI until the user is ready, in order
to improve the overall performance and usability of the system. BCI inhibitor
can be defined as a system that monitors user's state and inhibits BCI
interaction until specific requirements (e.g. brain activity pattern, user
attention level) are met. In this pilot study, a hybrid BCI is designed and
composed of a classic synchronous BCI system based on motor imagery and a BCI
inhibitor.

This paper presents a technology that enables the watching of videos at very
high speed. Subtitles are widely used in DVD movies, and provide useful
supplemental information for understanding video contents. We propose a
"two-level fast-forwarding" scheme for videos with subtitles, which controls
the speed of playback depending on the context: very fast during segments
without language, such as subtitles or speech, and "understandably fast" during
segments with such language. This makes it possible to watch videos at a higher
speed than usual and simultaneously understand the contents.

Computers have a direct impact on our lives nowadays. Human's interaction
with the computer has modified with the passage of time as improvement in
technology occurred the better the human computer interaction became. Today we
are facilitated by the operating system that has reduced all the complexity of
hardware and we undergo our computation in a very convenient way irrespective
of the process occurring at the hardware level. Though the human computer
interaction has improved but it's not done yet.

Specifying and programming graphical interactions are difficult tasks,
notably because designers have difficulties to express the dynamics of the
interaction. This paper shows how the MDPC architecture improves the usability
of the specification and the implementation of graphical interaction. The
architecture is based on the use of picking views and inverse transforms from
the graphics to the data. With three examples of graphical interaction, we show
how to express them with the architecture, how to implement them, and how this
improves programming usability.

The first part of the article describes our approach for solution of this
problem by means of Augmented Reality. The merging of the real world model and
digital objects allows streamline the work with the model and speed up the
whole production phase significantly. The main advantage of augmented reality
is the possibility of direct manipulation with the scene using a portable
digital camera. Also adding digital objects into the scene could be done using
identification markers placed on the surface of the model.

Aesthetics of web page refers to how attractive a web page is in which it
catches the attention of the user to read through the information. In addition,
the visual appearance is important in getting attentions of the users.
Moreover, it was found that those screens, which were perceived as
aesthetically pleasing, were having a better usability. Usability might be a
strong basic in relating to the applicability for learning, and in this study
pertaining to Mandarin learning.

Direct-touch presentation devices such as touch-sensitive electronic
whiteboards have two serious problems. First, the presenter's hand movements
tend to distract the audience's attention from content. Second, the presenter'
s manipulation tends to obscure content. In this paper we describe a new
electronic whiteboard system that supports multi-touch gestures and employs a
special pie menu interface named "sPieMenu." This pie menu is displayed under
the presenter's palm and is thus invisible to the audience.

The rapid development of wireless technology, the extensive use of mobile
phones and the availability of location information are facilitating
personalized location-based applications. Easy to carry, easy to use and easy
to buy, smart phones with certain software are of great advantage.
Consequently, mobile social networking (MSN) systems have emerged rapidly,
being a revolution for our everyday life.

A system and method for enabling human beings to communicate by way of their
monitored brain activity. The brain activity of an individual is monitored and
transmitted to a remote location (e.g. by satellite). At the remote location,
the monitored brain activity is compared with pre-recorded normalized brain
activity curves, waveforms, or patterns to determine if a match or substantial
match is found.

The main objective of this work is to design and construct a microcomputer
based system: to control electric appliances such as light, fan, heater,
washing machine, motor, TV, etc. The paper discusses two major approaches to
control home appliances. The first involves controlling home appliances using
timer option. The second approach is to control home appliances using voice
command. Moreover, it is also possible to control appliances using Graphical
User Interface. The parallel port is used to transfer data from computer to the
particular device to be controlled.

Nowadays cell phone is the most common communicating used by mass people. SMS
based communication is a cheap and popular communication method. It is human
tendency to have the opportunity to write SMS in their mother language. Text
input in mother language is more flexible when the alphabets of that language
are printed on the keypad. Bangla mobile keypad based on phonetics has been
proposed earlier. But the keypad is not scientific from frequency and
flexibility point of view.

This paper reports the results of a series of field experiments designed to
investigate how peer effects operate in a real work setting. Workers were hired
from an online labor market to perform an image-labeling task and, in some
cases, to evaluate the work product of other workers. These evaluations had
financial consequences for both the evaluating worker and the evaluated worker.
The experiments showed that on average, evaluating high-output work raised an
evaluator's subsequent productivity, with larger effects for evaluators that
are themselves highly productive.

Designing human computer interaction interface is an important and a complex
task, but it could be simplified by decomposing task into subcomponents and
maintaining relationships among those subcomponents.

The automobile is always a point of interest where new technology has been
deployed. Because of this interest, human-vehicle interaction has been an
appealing area for much research in recent years. The current in-vehicle design
has been improved but still possesses some of the design from the traditional
interaction style. In this paper, we propose a new user-oriented model for
in-vehicle interaction model known as i-Interaction. The i-Interaction model
provides user with an intuitive approach to interact with the In-Vehicle
Information System (IVIS) by the keypad entry.

Successful collaboration depends on effective communication. Ongoing group
awareness facilitates communication by enabling workers to be more informed
about their collaborators, about their activities, and about the interpersonal
dependencies among people working together. In this paper we present MyUnity, a
new system that aids workers in building group awareness.

With an historical point of view combined with a bibliographic overview, the
article discusses the idea that haptic force feedback transducers correspond
with a paradigm shift in our real-time tools for creating music. So doing, il
shows that computer music may be regarded as a major field of research and
application for haptics.

This paper proposes a more general evaluation methodology to measure the
usability and user experience qualities of accessible synchronous
computer-mediated communication applications. The proposed methodology goes
beyond current practices by evaluating how the interaction between a user and a
product influences the user experience of those at the other endpoint of the
communication. Another contribution of the paper is the proposal of a user test
where one of the participants tries to guess whether the other participant has
a disability or not.

We examine the properties of all HTTP requests generated by a thousand
undergraduates over a span of two months. Preserving user identity in the data
set allows us to discover novel properties of Web traffic that directly affect
models of hypertext navigation. We find that the popularity of Web sites -- the
number of users who contribute to their traffic -- lacks any intrinsic mean and
may be unbounded. Further, many aspects of the browsing behavior of individual
users can be approximated by log-normal distributions even though their
aggregate behavior is scale-free.

In this paper we will describe all necessary parts of Brain-Computer
Interface (BCI), such as source of signals, hardware, software, analysis,
architectures of complete system. We also will go along various applications of
BCI, view some subject fields and their specifics. After preface we will
consider the main point of this work-concepts of using BCI in education.
Represented direction of BCI development has not been reported prior. In this
work a computer system, currently being elaborated in author's laboratory, will
be specified.

We present iScale, a survey tool for the retrospective elicitation of
longitudinal user experience data. iScale employs sketching in imposing a
process in the reconstruction of one's experiences with the aim to minimize
retrospection bias. Two versions, the Constructive and the Value-Account
iScale, were motivated by two distinct theories on how people reconstruct
emotional experiences from memory. These two versions were tested in two
separate studies. Study 1 aimed at providing qualitative insight into the use
of iScale and compared its performance to that of free-hand sketching.

A Human Computer Interface (HCI) System for playing games is designed here
for more natural communication with the machines. The system presented here is
a vision-based system for detection of long voluntary eye blinks and
interpretation of blink patterns for communication between man and machine.
This system replaces the mouse with the human face as a new way to interact
with the computer. Facial features (nose tip and eyes) are detected and tracked
in realtime to use their actions as mouse events.

Various techniques for developing spreadsheet models greatly improve the
chance that the end result will not contain basic mechanical errors. However,
for every discipline in which a given technique is useful, there is likely to
be another in which the same technique works badly. As a result, the author
urges that EuSpRIG does not succumb to internal or external pressures to
champion a particular set of "best practices", because no such set is optimal
in all spreadsheet applications.

Crowdsourcing is a form of "peer production" in which work traditionally
performed by an employee is outsourced to an "undefined, generally large group
of people in the form of an open call." We present a model of workers supplying
labor to paid crowdsourcing projects. We also introduce a novel method for
estimating a worker's reservation wage--the smallest wage a worker is willing
to accept for a task and the key parameter in our labor supply model.

The advent of Web 3.0, claiming for personalization in interactive systems
(Lassila & Hendler, 2007), and the need for systems capable of interacting in a
more natural way in the future society flooded with computer systems and
devices (Harper et al., 2008) show that great advances in HCI should be done.
This chapter presents some contributions of LIA for the future of HCI,
defending that using common sense knowledge is a possibility for improving HCI,
especially because people assign meaning to their messages based on their
common sense and, therefore, the use of this knowledge in deve

In this article, we present the interactive opera project on CD-ROM
Virtualis. This project includes a scientific dimension as well as artistic. It
gave us the opportunity to design a model of the opera performance using
formalisms from organization sciences. Moreover, our investigation on
interactions between a user and opera contents led us to use models of
relationships between entities based on physical forces, where the user is in a
way absent. We detail some aspects of a reading but also writing environment on
artistic complex contents between text, music and graphics.

User-driven applications belong to the new type of programs, in which users
get the full control of WHAT, WHEN, and HOW must appear on the screen. Such
programs can exist only if the screen view is organized not according with the
predetermined scenario, written by the developers, but if any screen object can
be moved, resized, reconfigured, and rotated by any user at any moment. This
article describes the algorithm, by which an object of an arbitrary shape can
be turned into moveable and resizable.

A location and tracking system becomes very important to our future world of
pervasive computing. An algorithm for accurate location information is being
incorporated in the human walking model and in the blind human walking model.
We want to implement an accurate location tracking mechanism using Zigbee along
with GPS, we have incorporated Markov chain algorithm for establishing
accuracy.

This article presents the Cogni-CISMeF project, which aims at improving the
health information search engine CISMeF, by including a conversational agent
that interacts with the user in natural language. To study the cognitive
processes involved during information search, a bottom-up methodology was
adopted. An experiment has been set up to obtain human dialogs related to such
searches. The analysis of these dialogs underlines the establishment of a
common ground and accommodation effects to the user.

As far as music is concerned, instruments have always been part of a cultural
?landscape? (on technical, expressive and symbolic levels). The present
contribution explores the changes brought about by the shift that occurred
during the 20th century, from mechanical to digital instruments (also named
?virtual instruments?). First and foremost, a short recall of some historical
steps of the technological developments that have renewed our relationship to
sound, music, and instruments will be presented.

User experience (UX) evaluation is gaining increased interest lately, both
from academia and industry. In this paper we argue that UX evaluation needs to
fulfill two important requirements: scalability, i.e. the ability to provide
useful feedback in different stages of the design, and diversity, i.e. the
ability to reflect the di-versity of opinions that may exist in different
users. We promote the use of the Repertory Grid Technique as a promising UX
evaluation technique and discuss some of our concerns regarding the
quantitative side of its use.

Selection methods that require only a single-switch input, such as a button
click or blink, are potentially useful for individuals with motor impairments,
mobile technology users, and individuals wishing to transmit information
securely. We present a single-switch selection method, "Nomon," that is general
and efficient. Existing single-switch selection methods require selectable
options to be arranged in ways that limit potential applications.

Ideas about how to make interaction between 'a human' and 'a computer' such
that our unconscious will embrace it are developed in this tutorial paper.
Evidence of impact of the unconscious functioning is presented. The unconscious
is characterised as being a responsive, contextual, and autonomous participant
of human-computer interaction.

Researchers got success in mining the Web usage data effectively and
efficiently. But representation of the mined patterns is often not in a form
suitable for direct human consumption. Hence mechanisms and tools that can
represent mined patterns in easily understandable format are utilized.
Different techniques are used for pattern analysis, one of them is
visualization. Visualization can provide valuable assistance for data analysis
and decision making tasks. In the data visualization process, technical
representations of web pages are replaced by user attractive text
interpretations.