Evolving Human-Device Interaction for Mobile Devices

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Evolving Human-Device Interaction for Mobile Devices"

by

Mr. Yongpan ZOU


Abstract:

Sensing, computing and communicating are the three basic elements of the world 
in the era of Internet of Things (IoT). Benefited from speedy technological 
development, the power of present devices has been enhanced to such an extent 
that only a palm-sized device can enjoy favorable performance as computers. 
This consequently promotes the broad utilization of various devices in our life 
unobtrusively way the sake of providing convenient services, which in turn also 
gradually blurs the boundaries between human and devices. In such a situation, 
the human-device interaction is getting an increasingly significant component 
of ubiquitous computing which focuses on the design of interactive interfaces 
between human and devices. However, it is noted that the specific designs of 
such interfaces vary with the devices and interactive tasks. In this thesis, we 
follow a line of exploring the design of RF-based and sensor-based interactive 
systems for different application purposes.

Specifically, in the first work, we propose a novel system using off-the-shelf 
sensors embedded in smartphones to aid users distinguish in-wall objects and 
map in-wall pipeline layout. In detail, we combine data of accelerometer, 
gyroscope and magnetometer with novel data fusion techniques to detect, 
distinguish and locate in-wall ferromagnetic objects and finally reconstruct 
the layout of pipelines. In the second work, we develop GRfid, a novel 
device-free gesture recognition system based on phase information output by 
COTS RFID devices. The key insight of designing GRfid is that the RFID phase 
information is capable of capturing the spatial features of various gestures 
with low-cost commodity hardware. GRfid is potentially applied in smart homes, 
museums and art galleries where RFID technology is widely applied. In third 
work, we present a novel text entry system, AcouText, on existing mobile 
devices, aiming at dealing with problem of inputing texts on devices with tiny 
screens. With AcouText, users can enter texts to a device just using a finger 
even without touching the device, which greatly benefits the interaction 
between users and devices with tiny screens. We evaluate the performance of 
above human-device interactive schemes with system implementation and 
comprehensive experiments, and discuss interesting corresponding future work.


Date:			Friday, 19 August 2016

Time:                  	3:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:                  Room 2611
                         (lifts 31/32)

Committee Members:	Prof. Lionel Ni (Supervisor)
  			Dr. Xiaojuan Ma (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Qiong Luo
  			Dr. Ke Yi


**** ALL are Welcome ****