An often overlooked element of the interactive data visualization stack is the human in the loop. While computational and data processing capabilities have increased over time, human limits have remained constant. In this light, we describe extensions to client-server database-driven visualization systems that are both customized to interactive workloads, and support perceptual models that appr...

We present a novel methodology for building highly integrated multimodal systems. Our approach is motivated by neurological and behavioral theories of sensory perception in humans and animals. We argue that perceptual integration in multimodal systems needs to happen at all levels of the individual perceptual processes. Rather than treating each modality as a separately processed, increasingly ...

A concrete proposal is presented as to how semantics should be naturalized. Rather than attempting to naturalize propositions, they are treated as abstract entities that index concrete cognitive states. In turn the relevant concrete cognitive states are identified via perceptual classifications of worldly states, with the aid of an interactive theory of perception. The approach enables a broadl...

This thesis builds on the observation that robots, like humans, do not have enough experience to handle all situations from the start. Therefore they need tools to cope with new situations, unknown scenes and unknown objects. In particular, this thesis addresses objects. How can a robot realize what objects are if it looks at a scene and has no knowledge about objects? How can it recover from s...

Interactive perception augments the process of perception with physical interactions. By adding interactions into the perceptual process, manipulating the environment becomes part of the effort to learn task-relevant information, leading to more reliable task execution. Interactions include obstruction removal, object repositioning, and object manipulation. In this paper, we show how to extract...

For robot to perform its tasks competently, robustly and in the right context it has to understand the course of its actions and their consequences. For example, imagine the robot being tasked with the clean up of the breakfast table. The robot is confronted with a heavily cluttered scene and has to be able to tell waste, dirty, clean and valuable objects apart. The robot shall be equipped with...

Interactive virtual environments (VEs) are gaining more and more fidelity. Their high quality stimuli undoubtedly increase the feeling of presence and immersion as “being in the world”, but maybe they also affect user’s performance on specific tasks. Vision and spatial hearing are the main contributors of our perception. Sight dominates clearly and has been in the focus of research for a long t...

Norris et al. recently reported experimental evidence that listeners learn phoneme categories in response to lexical feedback. To reconcile these findings with their modular account of speech perception, the authors argue that top-down feedback can be used to support phoneme learning, but not to influence on-line phonemic processing. We suggest that these findings have broader implications than...

We present a QoS (Quality of Service) framework for interactive 3D applications, in which the QoS management relies on high-level QoS parameters of quality scalable 3D objects, which are transmitted from the service provider to the user terminals. PSNR is used as one of these high level parameters for representing the perception quality of 3D objects. In real-time, interactive 3D applications, ...

In this paper we propose interactive visualization techniques which support the spatial comprehension of angiogram images by emphasizing depth information and introducing combined depth cues. In particular, we propose a depth based color encoding, two variations of edge enhancement and the application of a modified depth of field effect in order to enhance depth perception of complex blood vess...