Idea for using Google Glass for Autism Research Study




Thought I 'd just mention a quick idea...

I got an idea yesterday which may be a useful application of Google Glass.

In a nutshell, my idea is to have a research group/population of young parents wear Google Glass when interacting with their very young children.

The camera and microphone in the glasses, in conjunction with specialized software, could statistically characterize and analyze/track infant eye movement and sound/voice/speech patterns over time.

Should a rapid degradation in, say, the degree of infant eye contact, be detected over a 24-48 hour period, a notification would promptly be generated to the parents and researchers along with supportive data.

In such a situation, the parents' memory of what specific factors the child was exposed to in the past days/week would be quite complete and accurate while the resulting suspect causal factors would be narrowed down exponentially thus giving researchers a much shorter list of possible Autism causal factors to contemplate.

The above assumes that children can sometimes transition from normal to ASD over a very short period (days). Many parents have stated they feel this is the case, however, this may not be the case.

Here is the URL to the Google+ posting I made earlier today where I describe the idea in more detail:



https://plus.google.com/109632926185753183937/posts/EJZvHvyh13h










That's a wrap...

Distributed Large-Scale Object-Oriented Parallel Processing Framework

In 2007 I developed a prototype implementation of a large-scale computing framework capable of solving problems similar to Map-Reduce, as well as many perhaps more general computing problems and services.  (Feel free to contact me for more real-world examples of the computing tasks this framework was designed to support.)

The design for this framework evolved informally in my head from 2002-2007 until I actually got around to creating a default implementation in late 2007.

Why I'm sharing this work

Last year, I completed the +Coursera Machine Learning course taught by +Andrew Ng and also I am currently taking the Introduction to Data Science course taught by +Bill Howe of UW.  These two courses gave me my first exposure to Map-Reduce/Hadoop.

Since the distributed parallel computing framework I describe in this posting is similar to and perhaps more flexible in some ways than Map-Reduce, I thought I'd share this old/prior work from my startup of the time.

Quick Introduction

This link (http://goo.gl/55xYj) has a few more details along with a few unit test results including examples of how wildcarding could be exploited, but here is a high-level overview, mostly about how the novel message bus functioned:

• I designed and created a novel message bus similar to JMS.

• Every message was an RPC request.

• Each message's recipient(s) could be addressed via multiple fields:

Namespace: Any unique string, but usually a hierarchical path (wildcards supported)

Class name: The leaf class name, or any ancestor class or implemented java interface (wildcards supported)

Uuid: A globally-unique identifier (wildcards supported)

Method name: The method name to be invoked by the recipient

• Each RPC request could be unicast or broadcast (one-to-many) by using wildcarding.  (For example, the uuid could be set to '*' which would result in all instances of a specific class in the specified namespace (which could be '*' as well) receiving and invoking the RPC request in parallel.  Similarly, the hierarchical namespace could have wildcards in its hierarchical path.)

• The potentially very large network of message servers were loosely-coupled and dynamically configured into small, local groups/clusters for routing/switching.

• Messages were sent using the HTTP protocol, and platform-specific header fields were added to each HTTP message header which were used:

1) By  message servers to route the messages

2) By the message recipients to invoke their RPC header-fields-addressed method

3) To specify where to send the results of the computation

• While most RPC requests were asynchronous, synchronous RPC requests were also supported.

• All message servers routed their messages via dynamically-configurable DecisionTree routing objects which could access the HTTP header fields to compute next-hop message routing.  So, the routing methodology was quite flexible.  The last example in the unit test output file dumps out one example DecisionTree object.

Example Unit Test Output

Here is an excerpt from the unit test output (note uuid is wildcarded):

cmd selected: MsgServer1,2.getUuid()

RPC Request:

ns = /autogeny/sys
cn = net.autogeny.sockproto.MsgServerImpl
uuid = *
mn = getUuid

Responses:
MsgServer1
MsgServer2

(ns=namespace, cn=classname, mn=method name)

-----------------------------

Okay, that's a quick wrap...  Any comments/discussion are welcome, both private and public.  Thanks for reading:)

Ignored Web and UX Problems

Continuing Problems of the Web

This is a quick and brief summary of some of the problems I’ve observed on the Web.  (I don’t have time to list others…)  I don’t know if anyone or any company has even recognized these as problems, nor if any research/work is underway to solve these problems. 

Linear Discussions

•  Common Pattern: 
• A common Web pattern is: 
• Blog or social network posting, followed by comments/discussion
• Problems arise when:
• The comment count exceeds about 20 postings
• Comments are too verbose
• Comments branch into off-topic areas 
•  Observations: 
• Frequently, high-comment-count discussions suffer from:
• Overly verbose responses which no one has the time to read 
•  Uninformed comment entries because comment authors do not take the time to read the other comments
• Variations on, or repetition of, the same sentiment
• Ideas:
• Summarization:
• Do  not allow traditional comments.
• Instead, allow commentors to do the following:
• Nominate brief sentiment statements on posting topic (less than 10 words).  Common examples:
• “That’s cool!”
• “I agree.”
• “Well, have you thought about X?”
• Vote on nominated sentiment statements as being on- or off-topic
• Agree with or disagree with approved sentiments (single click, not words).  (Display vote counts next to sentiments.)
• Nominate a brief sentiment as the basis for a disagreement vote on an existing sentiment
• Optional recursion (tree or graph structure)
• Offer nominators of sentiments voted as off-topic the option of creating distinct discussion.
• Group into distinct lists, accessed via single buttons:
• Branched topics
• Sentiments voted as off-topic
• Use semantics to further distill sentiments into three-part structures (RDF-like)
• Use something like a Tree widget in combination with other UI widgets to support more effective user navigation of a discussion and its sentiments, etc.

Incoming Stream Postings Buried

• Many people do not have time to monitor their social network(s) incoming stream feeds frequently.
• As a result, when they do get the time to check in, many interesting posts are pushed down so far in their queue that users never see these postings.
• There are many problems behind this problem, including:
• Stream Posting Prioritization 
• Many people post too frequently, and have a low "interesting post" density.
• To the best of my knowledge, no social networking platforms currently have Machine Learning incorporated into their platform which allows users to privately rate/rank their interest level in postings of specific posters and topics/keywords.  
• Thus, social networking platforms have no basis on which to group and prioritize incoming streams into a more structured, non-linear feed.  
• (Although, they could make an attempt to track how much time users spend reading/viewing various posts.)
• No Topic Trees
• No social networking platform that I am aware of offers users the ability to list the topic areas in which they post, nor the topic areas in which they are interested.
• Multiple Personas
• Sometimes users follow people because, for example, they might be a technical community manager and periodically post on interesting, professional/technical subjects.
• Unfortunately, these people publish personal postings as well under the same user ID, and we start seeing postings about their cats, or restaurant visits.
• It would be helpful if social networking platforms allowed users to define multiple personas so that users could post under a specific persona so that users could follow only the persona(s) of interest.
• This problem area could also be improved via Topic Trees.

 Verbosity

• Busy people simply do not have the time to read lengthy postings.
• Sadly, these same people are often the ones who might offer the most insightful comments.
• Posters should take the time to be concise and maximize the clarity of their postings.

Real Estate

• From mobile devices to desktops, many web pages simply waste too much screen real estate (pixels).
• Form and Function
• Often, website or app designers pursue “form” without an associated “functional” benefit.
• Example: Lists of posting summaries with too many lines of text per posting, or wasting too much space on unnecessarily-large “pretty” posting images.

 Mobile Smartphone Ergonomics and UX

• A few problems for single-handed usage:
• Placement of UI elements (buttons) either too far (or too close) to a user’s thumb making it uncomfortable or impossible to reach these elements.
• No left/right handedness setting
• In their Settings menus, phone UI frameworks should support a user’s ability to specify that they are left- or right-handed.
• The position of UI screen elements should then adapt based on this information so that all users can comfortably reach these UI elements.
• Lazy image load causes discontinuous scrolling
• When scrolling through posting lists, users expect scrolling to be smooth.
• Lazy loading of graphics/images which are sometimes included in posting “header” summaries in posting lists can cause the scrolling user experience to be “jumpy.”
• Poorly-tuned UX scrolling momentum/velocity can cause problems:
• If too slow (high “coefficient of friction”), then too many fling gestures are required.
• If too fast, (low “coefficient of friction”), then users cannot easily control list navigation. 
• Scrolling Directionality Constraints
• Users should be able to smoothly scroll documents, images, and other content in any direction.
• Sadly, in many cases only vertical and horizontal scrolling are allowed, and even then, the horizontal scrolling can be very cumbersome.

 Semantics-Based Surveys

• I, for one, have never taken a survey which allowed me to precisely express my sentiments regarding the purpose/subject of the survey.  There are two reasons for this:
• Survey authors are unable to assemble the “right” questions.
• There is no support for semantics-based “statements about statement.”
• What is needed is a lightweight semantics-based framework which makes it easy for survey authors to enumerate the “actor” concepts/elements in the query space for which they are seeking user input - ideally, without the author even knowing that semantics are being used under the hood.

The need for provenance and other metadata for Web content

Here is a public Google+ URL to an interesting discussion regarding provenance and other metadata for Web content in which I entered a few thoughts: http://goo.gl/7W2oh (I hope that this link works, both now and in the future.)

Idea: Upgrade 3D TVs to enable viewing of two different TV shows at once

It recently occurred to me that with a few minor tweaks, current 3D TVs could be modified to allow two people to simultaneously watch two different TV shows.

Given the scarcity of 3D content and the millions of couples frequently watching TV shows which are interesting to one but not the other, it seems to me that adding this new dual-channel watching capability to TVs would be very popular. It may very well see much more usage than the current level of 3D content viewing and help drive sales of new 3D TV sets.

At first blush, the tweaks to enable this require the TV to alternate its display, not between left/right images, but between the frames of two (2D) shows and have each person's 3D glasses synchronized with the proper show. The TV could implement a display sequence such as:

- Frame 1-Show A
- Frame 1-Show B
- Frame 2-Show A
- Frame 2-Show B
...and so on

The glasses' firmware could include a new viewing mode where both lenses are simultaneously either opaque or transparent, and synchronized so that each viewer sees only the show they want to view. Alternatively, it may be desirable to follow the current approach of having one lens opaque while the other is transparent, but this may require a more complex TV frame display sequencing approach. Our persistence of vision would give each viewer the illusion that they are watching a single, smooth display of their particular TV show.

In addition to the above, the TV (or a third-party set-top box) would have to stream the audio signals for both TV shows to the glasses, and the glasses (which would require added earbuds) would have to decode the appropriate audio signal.

Please note that many DVRs can already decode two or more HD shows at the same time. So, there really isn't that big of a technology gap between the capabilities of the current 3D TVs and enabling them to simultaneously display two TV shows.

Some TVs may even be capable of allowing the simultaneous viewing of two 3D TV shows. It depends on how quickly the display can be refreshed along with how fast the pixel decay rate is for the display type.

[Application to gaming: It also occurred to me that the same basic idea might allow two people to play two different video games at the same time. Also, for two-player games, each player could see their screen at full resolution as opposed to a split-screen view. This would also prevent the cheating that sometimes occurs with split-screen mode.]

Plasma TVs, due to their faster pixel decay rate, may be more suitable for dual-channel viewing than other types of displays.

Another related capability I would like to see is for TVs to support the display of 3D stereoscopic still photographs, one of my hobbies.


Copyright (c) Richard Creamer 2010 - All Rights Reserved