A technique for creating touch sensitive surfaces is proposed which allows multiple, simultaneous users to interact in an intuitive fashion. Touch location information is determined independently for each user, allowing each touch on the common surface to be associated with a particular user

coveTIng a per'son's proximale environment is most important for this form of com-puting since the interesting part of the world around us is what we can see, hear, and touch. In this paper we define context-aware computing, and describe four cal-egones of conteL·t-aware applications

presented in this paper, the conclusion is that for almost any real-world gener-alization problem one should use some version of stacked generalization to minimize the general-ization error rate. This paper ends by discussing some of the variations of stacked generalization, and how it touches on other

We recorded electrical activity from 532 neurons in the rostral part of inferior area 6 (area F5) of two macaque monkeys. Previous data had shown that neurons of this area discharge during goal-directed hand and mouth movements. We describe here the properties of a newly discovered set of F5 neurons ('mirror neurons', n = 92) all of which became active both when the monkey performed a given action and when it observed a similar action performed by the experimenter. Mirror neurons, in order to be visually triggered, required an interaction between the agent of the action and the object of it. The sight of the agent alone or of the object alone (three-dimensional objects, food) were ineffective. Hand and the mouth were by far the most effective agents. The actions most represented among those activating mirror neurons were grasping, manipulating and placing. In most mirror neurons (92%) there was a clear relation between the visual action they responded to and the motor response they coded. In-30 % of mirror neurons the congruence was very strict and the effective observed and executed actions corresponded both in terms of general action (e.g. grasping) and in terms of the way in which that action was executed (e.g. precision grip). We conclude by proposing that mirror neurons form a system for matching observation and execution of motor actions. We discuss the possible role of this system in action recognition and, given the proposed homology between F5 and human Brocca 's region, we posit that a matching system, similar to that of mirror neurons exists in humans and could be involved in recognition of actions as well as phonetic gestures.

We describe an augmented reality conferencing system which uses the overlay of virtual images on the real world. Remote collaborators are represented on Virtual Monitors which can be freely positioned about a user in space. Users can collaboratively view and interact with virtual objects using a shared virtual whiteboard. This is possible through precise virtual image registration using fast and accurate computer vision techniques and HMD calibration. We propose a method for tracking fiducial markers and a calibration method for optical see-through HMD based on the marker tracking. 1.

This study examines the relationship between use of Facebook, a popular online social network site, and the formation and maintenance of social capital. In addition to assessing bonding and bridging social capital, we explore a dimension of social capital that assesses one’s ability to stay connected with members of a previously inhabited community, which we call maintained social capital. Regression analyses conducted on results from a survey of undergraduate students (N = 286) suggest a strong association between use of Facebook and the three types of social capital, with the strongest rela-tionship being to bridging social capital. In addition, Facebook usage was found to interact with measures of psychological well-being, suggesting that it might provide greater benefits for users experiencing low self-esteem and low life satisfaction. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00367.x

Advances in 3D scanning technologies have enabled the practical creation of meshes with hundreds of millions of polygons. Traditional algorithms for display, simplification, and progressive transmission of meshes are impractical for data sets of this size. We describe a system for representing and progressively displaying these meshes that combines a multiresolution hierarchy based on bounding spheres with a rendering system based on points. A single data structure is used for view frustum culling, backface culling, level-of-detail selection, and rendering. The representation is compact and can be computed quickly, making it suitable for large data sets. Our implementation, written for use in a large-scale 3D digitization project, launches quickly, maintains a user-settable interactive frame rate regardless of object complexity or camera position, yields reasonable image quality during motion, and refines progressively when idle to a high final image quality. We have demonstrated the system on scanned models containing hundreds of millions of samples.

…Truth [is] being involved in an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline…truth is not in the conclusions so much as in the process of conversation itself…if you want to be in truth you must be in conversation. Parker Palmer

In this overview paper we motivate the need for and research issues arising from a new model of data processing. In this model, data does not take the form of persistent relations, but rather arrives in multiple, continuous, rapid, time-varying data streams. In addition to reviewing past work relevant to data stream systems and current projects in the area, the paper explores topics in stream query languages, new requirements and challenges in query processing, and algorithmic issues.

“Somebody says, ‘You know, you people always say that space is continuous. How do you know when you get to a small enough dimension that there really are enough points in between, that it isn’t just a lot of dots separated by little distances? ’ Or they say, ‘You know those quantum mechanical amplitudes you told me about, they’re so complicated and absurd, what makes you think those are right? Maybe they aren’t right. ’ Such remarks are obvious and are perfectly clear to anybody who is working on this problem. It does not do any good to point this out.” —Richard Feynman [1, p.161]