Free Software Makes Computer Mouse Easier for People With Disabilities

So it often goes for computer users whose motor disabilities prevent them from easily using a mouse.

As the population ages, more people are having trouble with motor control, but a University of Washington team has invented two mouse cursors that make clicking targets a whole lot easier. And neither requires additional computer hardware -- just some free, downloadable software. The researchers hope that in exchange for the software, users offer feedback.

The Pointing Magnifier combines an area cursor with visual and motor magnification, reducing need for fine, precise pointing. The UW's AIM Research Group, which invented the Pointing Magnifier, learned that users can much more easily acquire targets, even small ones, 23 percent faster with the Pointing Magnifier.

The magnifier runs on Windows-based computer systems. It replaces the conventional cursor with a larger, circular cursor that can be made even larger for users who have less motor control. To acquire a target, the user places the large cursor somewhere over the target, and clicks. The Pointing Magnifier then magnifies everything under that circular area until it fills the screen, making even tiny targets large. The user then clicks with a point cursor inside that magnified area, acquiring the target. Although the Pointing Magnifier requires two clicks, it's much easier to use than a conventional mouse, which can require many clicks to connect with a target.

Screen magnifiers for people with visual impairments have been around a long time, but such magnifiers affect only the size of screen pixels, not the motor space in which users act, thus offering no benefit to users with motor impairments. The Pointing Magnifier enlarges both visual and motor space.

Software for the Pointing Magnifier includes a control panel that allows the user to adjust color, transparency level, magnification factor, and area cursor size. User preferences are saved when the application is closed. Keyboard shortcuts quickly enable or disable the Pointing Magnifier. The UW team is also making shortcuts customizable.

"It's less expensive to create computer solutions for people who have disabilities if you focus on software rather than specialized hardware, and software is usually easier to procure than hardware," said Jacob O. Wobbrock, an assistant professor in the Information School who leads the AIM Group.

His group's paper on enhanced area cursors, including the Pointing Magnifier, was presented at the 2010 User Interface Software and Technology symposium in New York. A follow-on paper will be presented at a similar conference in May.

Another AIM technology, the Angle Mouse, similarly helps people with disabilities. Like the Pointing Magnifier, it may be downloaded, and two videos, one for general audiences and another for academic ones, are available as well.

When the Angle Mouse cursor initially blasts towards a target, the spread of movement angles, even for people with motor impairments, tends to be narrow, so the Angle Mouse keeps the cursor moving fast. However, when the cursor nears its target and the user tries to land, the angles formed by movements diverge sharply, so the Angle Mouse slows the cursor, enlarges motor space and makes the target easier to get into. The more trouble a user has, the larger the target will be made in motor space. (The target's visual appearance will not change.)

Wobbrock compares the Angle Mouse to a race car."On a straightaway, when the path is open, the car whips along, but in a tight corner, the car slows and makes a series of precise corrections, ensuring its accuracy."

A study of the Angle Mouse included 16 people, half of whom had motor impairments. The Angle Mouse improved motor-impaired pointing performance by 10 percent over the regular Windows™ default mouse and 11 percent over sticky icons -- an earlier innovation in which targets slow the cursor when it is inside them.

"Pointing is an essential part of using a computer, but it can be quite difficult and time consuming if dexterity is a problem," Wobbrock said."Even shaving one second off each time a person points may save hours over the course of a year."

Wobbrock suggests that users try both the Pointing Magnifier and the Angle Mouse before deciding which they prefer.

"Our cursors make ubiquitous mice, touchpads, and trackballs more effective for people with motor impairments without requiring new, custom hardware," Wobbrock said."We're achieving accessibility by improving devices that computer users already have. Making computers friendlier for everyone is the whole point of our work."

The Pointing Magnifier work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Co-authors of the research paper that included the Pointing Magnifier are Leah Findlater, Alex Jansen, Kristen Shinohara, Morgan Dixon, Peter Kamb, Joshua Rakita and Wobbrock.

The Angle Mouse work was supported by Microsoft Research, Intel Research and the National Science Foundation.

Co-authors of the Angle Mouse paper are Wobbrock, James Fogarty, Shih-Yen (Sean) Liu, Shunichi Kimuro, and Susumi Harada.

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Mathematical Model Simulating Rat Whiskers Provides Insight Into Sense of Touch

Hundreds of papers are published each year that use the rat whisker system as a model to understand brain development and neural processing. Rats move their whiskers rhythmically against objects to explore the environment by touch. Using only tactile information from its whiskers, a rat can determine all of an object's spatial properties, including size, shape, orientation and texture.

But there is a big missing piece that prevents a full understanding of the neural signals recorded in these studies: no one knows how to represent the"touch" of a whisker in terms of mechanical variables.

"We don't understand touch nearly as well as other senses," says Mitra Hartmann, associate professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science."We know that visual and auditory stimuli can be quantified by the intensity and frequency of light and sound, but we don't fully understand the mechanics that generate our sense of touch."

To create a model that starts to quantify these mechanics, Hartmann's team first studied the structure of the rat whisker array -- the 30 whiskers arranged in a regular pattern on each side of a rat's face. By analyzing them in both two- and three-dimensional scans, they defined the relationship between the size and shape of each whisker and its placement on the face of the rat.

Using this information, the team created a model that quantifies the full shape and structure of the rat head and whisker array. The model now allows the team to simulate the rat"whisking" against different objects and to predict the full pattern of inputs into the whisker system as a rat encounters an object. The simulations can then be compared against real behavior.

The research is published online in the journalPLoS Computational Biology.

Understanding the mechanics of the rat whisker system may provide a step toward understanding the human sense of touch.

"The big question our laboratory is interested in is how do animals, including humans, actively move their sensors through the environment and somehow turn that sensory data into a stable perception of the world," Hartmann says.

To determine how a rat can sense the shape of an object, Hartmann's team previously developed a light sheet to monitor the precise locations of the whiskers as they came in contact with the object. Using high-speed video, the team can also analyze how the rat moves its head to explore different shapes. These behavioral observations can then be paired with the output from the model.

These advances will provide insight into the sense of touch but may also enable new technologies that could make use of the whisker system. For example, Hartmann's lab created arrays of robotic whiskers that can, in several respects, mimic the capabilities of mammalian whiskers. The researchers demonstrated that these arrays can sense information about both object shape and fluid flow.

"We show that the bending moment, or torque, at the whisker base can be used to generate three-dimensional spatial representations of the environment," Hartmann says."We used this principle to make arrays of robotic whiskers that can replicate much of the basic mechanics of rat whiskers." The technology, she said, could be used to extract the three-dimensional features of almost any solid object.

Hartmann envisions that a better understanding of the whisker system may be useful for engineering applications in which the use of cameras is limited. But most importantly, a better understanding of the rat whisker system could translate into a better understanding of ourselves.

"Although whiskers and hands are very different, the basic neural pathways that process tactile information are in many respects similar across mammals," Hartmann says."A better understanding of neural processing in the whisker system may provide insights into how our own brains process information."

In addition to Hartmann, other authors of the paper are Blythe Towal, Brian Quist and Joseph Solomon, all of Northwestern, and Venkatesh Gopal of Elmhurst College.

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iPad Helps Archaeologists

UC teams of archaeologists have spent more than a decade at the site of the Roman city that was buried under a volcano in 79 AD. The project is producing a complete archaeological analysis of homes, shops and businesses at a forgotten area inside one of the busiest gates of Pompeii, the Porta Stabia.

Through years of painstaking recording of their excavations, the researchers are exploring the social and cultural scene of a lost city and how the middle class neighborhood influenced Pompeian and Roman culture.

The standard archaeological approach to recording this history -- a 300-year tradition -- involves taking precise measurements, drawings and notes, all recorded on paper with pencil. But last summer, the researchers found that the handheld computers and their ability to digitally record and immediately communicate information held many advantages over a centuries-honed tradition of archaeological recording.

"There's a common, archival nature to what we're doing. There's a precious timelessness, a priceless sort of quality to the data that we're gathering, so we have made an industry of being very, very careful about how we record things," explains Ellis."Once we've excavated through it, it's gone, so ever since our undergraduate years, we've become very, very good and consistent at recording. We're excited about discovering there's another way," Ellis says.

"Because the trench supervisor is so busy, it can take days to share handwritten notes between trenches," explains Wallrodt."Now, we can give them an (electronic) notebook every day if they want it."

Wallrodt says one of the biggest concerns of adopting the new technology was switching from drawing on a large sheet of paper to sticking one's finger on the iPad's glass."With the iPad, there's also a lot less to carry. There's no big board for drawing, no ruler and no calculator."

The researchers say they plan to pack even more iPads on their trip to Pompeii this June. The research project is funded by the Louise Taft Semple Fund through the UC Department of Classics.

*The iPad research experiment, led by Steven Ellis, UC assistant professor of classics, and John Wallrodt, a senior research associate for the Department of Classics, has been featured on the National Geographic Channel as well as Apple's website. That's after the researchers took six iPads to UC's excavation site at Pompeii last summer. The iPads themselves were just being introduced at the time.

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Gaming, Simulation Tools Merged to Create Models for Border Security

The Borders High Level Model (HLM) uses a serious gaming platform known as Ground Truth, a force-on-force battle simulation tool called Dante™, and the work of several collaborating organizations.

"There's a lot of debate going on in the government concerning the technology and infrastructure investments that need to be made along the border," explained Jason Reinhardt, who serves as the Borders HLM project manager at Sandia."How much fence do we need? What kind of fence? What is the right mix of border personnel and technology? How can sensors, vehicles and other technical equipment most effectively be used? With Borders HLM, CBP officials can simulate their defensive architectures, accurately measure their performance and start to answer these difficult questions."

Ground Truth, initially funded through internal Sandia investments in 2007, is a gaming platform originally designed to prepare decision makers and first responders for weapons of mass destruction/weapons of mass effect (WMD/WME) attacks in metropolitan areas. Developed by Sandia computer scientist and Borders HLM principal investigator Donna Djordjevich, the software provides a virtual environment where users can play through various scenarios to see the effects of their decisions under the constraints of time and resources.

For the Borders HLM project, the Ground Truth software has been integrated into bottom-projected touch surface table. On this game surface, users can see"people" moving across the border terrain, observe CBP"personnel" respond to incidents and essentially control those movements and"apprehend" suspects. Users can also view a leader board of sorts that shows how many suspects have been apprehended, the dollar amount spent implementing the chosen architecture and other metrics that matter to CBP decision-makers.

Dante™, also part of the Borders HLM platform, is a force-on-force battle simulation tool built on the well-known Umbra simulation framework developed and introduced in 2001 by Sandia researchers.

The work also builds from another Sandia borders project from the mid-2000s (focused on the impact of new detection technology at ports of entry) and capitalizes on a range of existing Sandia capabilities, including the Weapons of Mass Destruction Decision Analysis Center (WMD-DAC), the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC, a joint Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratory program) and even the lab's expertise in robotics.

According to Reinhardt and Djordjevich, there were a number of technical challenges in integrating a mature modeling technology like Dante with a newer gaming technology like Ground Truth.

"We needed to create real-time control for the user, and our current capabilities weren't built to do that," Reinhardt said."There's also the fact that we're modeling 64 square miles of border, and we need to do so at a pretty high fidelity," added Djordjevich, who pointed out that Ground Truth's terrain was originally developed at a fixed, small scale. To help overcome some of the barriers, Sandia has looked to some important collaborators.

The University of Utah provided a technology, Visualization Streams for Ultimate Scalability (ViSUS), which allows researchers to progressively stream in terrain and imagery data and minimize data processing requirements, an important consideration given that HLM requires many gigabytes of data. For its part, Happynin Games, an iPhone/mobile game development company, developed the 3-dimentional artwork and the characters found in the simulations. Sandia, acting as the systems integrator, then put all the pieces together, presented the Borders HLM product to CBP and demonstrated how it would allow them to go through all the steps of the"engagement analysis cycle."

"We learned that the border patrol agents and CBP decision-makers need a tool that offers a common view of the problems they face," said Reinhardt."With our high level model, they can play through various scenarios and see how people, technology and other elements all interact. Then, later, they can go back and do a baseline analysis and dig into the details of why certain architectures and solutions aren't working as well as they should." CBP personnel can then play the game again with a recommended solution, and the end users can critique and tweak it to their liking.

With additional funding and the right kind of collaborations, Djordjevich said, more robust features could be added to make Borders HLM even more valuable to CBP and other potential customers. The current version, for instance, only deals with individual border crossers, so it doesn't capture crowd behaviors. Other sensor types, such as radiation detectors or even airborne equipment, could also be added.

Reinhardt says the future of the Borders HLM tool will likely depend on the direction in which CPB chooses to go with its border operations."Our high-level models tool will likely change the way CBP conducts its business, and it will probably have a real long-term impact on how large expenditures are justified or reputed on and around the nation's borders."

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

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Device Enables Computer to Identify Whether User Is Male or Female

The Spanish Patent and Trademark Office has awarded the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos Spanish patent ES 2 339 100 B2 for the device.

Thanks to the new algorithm, devices can be built to measure television or advertising video audiences by gathering demographic information about spectators (dynamic marketing). The new device is also useful for conducting market research at shopping centres, stores, banks or any other business using cameras to count people and extract demographic information. Another application is interactive kiosks with a virtual vendor, as the device automatically extracts information about the user, such as the person's gender, to improve interaction.

A step forward in gender recognition from facial images

This research, the results of which were published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, demonstrates that linear techniques are just as good as support vector machines (SVM) for the gender recognition problem. The developed technique is applicable in devices that have low computational resources, like telephones or intelligent cameras.

The study concludes that linear methods are useful for training with databases that contain a small number of images, as well as for outputting gender classifiers that are as fast as boosting-based classifiers. However, boosting- or SVM-based methods will require more training images to get good results. Finally, SVM-based classifiers are the slowest option. Additionally, the experimental evidence suggests that there is a dependency among different demographic variables like gender, age or ethnicity.

Device for demographic face classification

The invention is a device equipped with a camera that captures digital images and is connected to an image processing system. The image processing system trims each face detection image to the size of 25x25 pixels. An elliptical mask (designed to eliminate background interference) is then applied to the image, and it is equalized and classified.

The device advances the state of the art by using a classifier based on the most efficient linear classification methods: principal component analysis (PCA), followed by Fisher's linear discriminant analysis (LDA) using a Bayesian classifier in the small dimensional space output by the LDA. For PCA+LDA to be competitive, the crucial step is to select the most discriminant PCA features before performing LDA.

One of the major research areas in informatics is the development of machines that interact with users in the same way as human beings communicate with each other. This research is a step further in this direction.

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Self-Cooling Observed in Graphene Elctronics

Led by mechanical science and engineering professor William King and electrical and computer engineering professor Eric Pop, the team will publish its findings in the April 3 advance online edition of the journalNature Nanotechnology.

The speed and size of computer chips are limited by how much heat they dissipate. All electronics dissipate heat as a result of the electrons in the current colliding with the device material, a phenomenon called resistive heating. This heating outweighs other smaller thermoelectric effects that can locally cool a device. Computers with silicon chips use fans or flowing water to cool the transistors, a process that consumes much of the energy required to power a device.

Future computer chips made out of graphene -- carbon sheets 1 atom thick -- could be faster than silicon chips and operate at lower power. However, a thorough understanding of heat generation and distribution in graphene devices has eluded researchers because of the tiny dimensions involved.

The Illinois team used an atomic force microscope tip as a temperature probe to make the first nanometer-scale temperature measurements of a working graphene transistor. The measurements revealed surprising temperature phenomena at the points where the graphene transistor touches the metal connections. They found that thermoelectric cooling effects can be stronger at graphene contacts than resistive heating, actually lowering the temperature of the transistor.

"In silicon and most materials, the electronic heating is much larger than the self-cooling," King said."However, we found that in these graphene transistors, there are regions where the thermoelectric cooling can be larger than the resistive heating, which allows these devices to cool themselves. This self-cooling has not previously been seen for graphene devices."

This self-cooling effect means that graphene-based electronics could require little or no cooling, begetting an even greater energy efficiency and increasing graphene's attractiveness as a silicon replacement.

"Graphene electronics are still in their infancy; however, our measurements and simulations project that thermoelectric effects will become enhanced as graphene transistor technology and contacts improve" said Pop, who is also affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science, and the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory at the U. of I.

Next, the researchers plan to use the AFM temperature probe to study heating and cooling in carbon nanotubes and other nanomaterials.

King also is affiliated with the department of materials science and engineering, the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, the Beckman Institute, and the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory.

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Office of Naval Research supported this work. Co-authors of the paper included graduate student Kyle Grosse, undergraduate Feifei Lian and postdoctoral researcher Myung-Ho Bae.

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World First: Calculations With 14 Quantum Bits

The term entanglement was introduced by the Austrian Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, and it describes a quantum mechanical phenomenon that while it can clearly be demonstrated experimentally, is not understood completely. Entangled particles cannot be defined as single particles with defined states but rather as a whole system. By entangling single quantum bits, a quantum computer will solve problems considerably faster than conventional computers."It becomes even more difficult to understand entanglement when there are more than two particles involved," says Thomas Monz, junior scientist in the research group led by Rainer Blatt at the Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck."And now our experiment with many particles provides us with new insights into this phenomenon," adds Blatt.

World record: 14 quantum bits

Since 2005 the research team of Rainer Blatt has held the record for the number of entangled quantum bits realized experimentally. To date, nobody else has been able to achieve controlled entanglement of eight particles, which represents one quantum byte. Now the Innsbruck scientists have almost doubled this record. They confined 14 calcium atoms in an ion trap, which, similar to a quantum computer, they then manipulated with laser light. The internal states of each atom formed single qubits and a quantum register of 14 qubits was produced. This register represents the core of a future quantum computer. In addition, the physicists of the University of Innsbruck have found out that the decay rate of the atoms is not linear, as usually expected, but is proportional to the square of the number of the qubits. When several particles are entangled, the sensitivity of the system increases significantly."This process is known as superdecoherence and has rarely been observed in quantum processing," explains Thomas Monz. It is not only of importance for building quantum computers but also for the construction of precise atomic clocks or carrying out quantum simulations.

Increasing the number of entangled particles

By now the Innsbruck experimental physicists have succeeded in confining up to 64 particles in an ion trap."We are not able to entangle this high number of ions yet," says Thomas Monz."However, our current findings provide us with a better understanding about the behavior of many entangled particles." And this knowledge may soon enable them to entangle even more atoms. Some weeks ago Rainer Blatt's research group reported on another important finding in this context in the scientific journalNature: They showed that ions might be entangled by electromagnetic coupling. This enables the scientists to link many little quantum registers efficiently on a micro chip. All these findings are important steps to make quantum technologies suitable for practical information processing," Rainer Blatt is convinced.

The results of this work are published in the scientific journalPhysical Review Letters. The Innsbruck researchers are supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the European Commission and the Federation of Austrian Industries Tyrol.

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