Mona & Syavash’s HCIdeaBlog

I was reviewing the problem of overfitting in neural networks and I found a nice mapping to the rule which I have obeyed for some years of education until high school!
If a neural network get trained in a bad way for example because of insisting on reaching to a ‘zero’ error, it will be overfitted in the sense that it can not achieve to a good generalization and hence a strong prediction. So, it is highly fitted to the training examples which means it has been trapped into giving correct answers ‘just’ for the training samples that have been already seen.

After years of education, I came to the conclusion that whenever I read too much for my exams, I won’t get a mark as good as if I read it just one/two times. Now, I can analyze my finding about the nature of learning and memorizing using overfitting concept as follows. When I read too much for the exam, I may get trapped in memorizing the materials, while I am not aware of the process. This can lead to high concentration on the memory as I expect to find the answers just by a simple mapping of the problems to the solutions that I have memorized, without any analytical reasoning and exploiting the knowledge which I have gained. Although memorizing and overfitting doesn’t make sense in higher levels of education like graduate studies as one studies for making his/her knowledge broader rather than being evaluated by non-qualified exams,  it can be a big barrier to creative thinking and analytical reasoning in lower levels of education.

Fortunately, I have noticed that memorizing doesn’t work for me for two potential reasons: 1. I didn’t memorize materials completely which means I was not overfitted to the course material space 2. The evaluation method (exam) was good enough in considering analytical ability rather than just relying on memorizing capability. But, others may not notice the problem because they may encounter bad designed exams while having an excellent memory! So they may continue memorizing as it meets the requirements!

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consider a table that has a clean reflective glass on it… every one can see each other’s interactions on the table, such as pointing by finger and other hand movements, and also their head movements and facial expressions…

the idea: table can be an LCD display which shows the reflex (alpha = 25%) of everything above it as background and therefore users can be spatially distributed and see each other’s reflex on the table, while they are sitting at their own table.

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One of the important problems that computer games pose is the separation of game-players and specially children from their families and society. This very short paper (or research proposal) introduces a new type of computer games, which allows people control their teams while working and interacting in the society. Slow-pacing and dividing a game into episodes based on the game’s nature, are proposed for this purpose.

Download the very short paper!

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Become familiar with Prof. Randy Pausch!

He is one of the CMU HCII professors who is fighting with cancer and tries to do his best for the remainder of his life (which we hope it to be a normal life span with complete health). His lecture on “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dream” impressed a lot of people and taught many useful lessons of life to us. Probably this lecture is one of his most important contributions to this world.

You can find his lecture and other info about him: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch

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We have decided to write about other valuable things like influential people, interesting projects, and anything that can be interesting to HCI community, in addition to our ideas.

Stay tuned!

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Why do many people still prefer to read paper books?
probably the main problem is that the emitted light from the display is significantly higher or lower than the peripheral light.
It seems that, a display should emit an amount of light equal to the amount of light reflected from a paper in the same lighting conditions, in order to be comfortable for eyes.
–>Light-Adaptive Displays!

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Due to working a lot with computer mouse, I’ve got a wrist ache. Probably it should be replaced by a more comfortable and efficient device. A wireless spherical device with appropriate size may help. That way you can put your hands in any position you feel comfortable. (Despite using mouse or touchpad, there is no constraint on your hand’s position.)

How does it work?

Take a spherical thing like orange in your hand. Now, you can generate ideas on its functionalities as a mouse. For example, it is better for it to be soft and flexible so that it can be pressed instead of clicking, which is also kind of an exercise for the wrist! Consider a doughy device; you can change its shape to your desirable one. For instance, you may want to stick it to the armrest and then work with it like what you do with a touchpad, just in a more convenient position. For cursor’s movement, you can roll it in your hand at any direction or move your fingers on it.

Imagine and evaluate…!

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Touchpad is a substitute for a mouse… however it has its own characteristics, so we can define a special interaction language for using touchpads…

A moving cursor, probably is the best representation of a mouse, but not necessarily for a touchpad.

Some examples of what we can do with a touchpad:

drawing a question mark by finger, instead of  F1

drawing a cross, instead of moving the cursor to close a window

Deep Menues: we can navigate a menu or list by a spiral movement of our finger (consider the list as a tunnel)

shutting down the computer with a 5-finger touch

…

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Just moved to AwardSpace…

(Reason: Lack of features in “blog-stats” plugin –> need for Google Analyticator plugin –> Move from Wordpress.com)

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Query : Prey
Document : Thread (of a web)
Query matching : Thread vibration
Index :Thread ends beside the spider vibration receptor
IR system : Spider

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