Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MaMaDroid

As Android has become increasingly popular, so has malware targeting it, thus motivating the research community to propose different detection techniques. However, the constant evolution of the Android ecosystem, and of malware itself, makes it hard to design robust tools that can operate for long periods of time without the need for modifications or costly re-training. Aiming to address this issue, we set to detect malware from a behavioral point of view, modeled as the sequence of abstracted API calls. We introduce MAMADROID, a static-analysis-based system that abstracts app’s API calls to their class, package, or family, and builds a model from their sequences obtained from the call graph of an app as Markov chains. This ensures that the model is more resilient to API changes and the features set is of manageable size. We evaluate MAMADROID using a dataset of 8.5K benign and 35.5K malicious apps collected over a period of 6 years, showing that it effectively detects malware (with up to 0.99 F-measure) and keeps its detection capabilities for long periods of time (up to 0.87 F-measure 2 years after training). We also show that MAMADROID remarkably overperforms DROIDAPIMINER, a state-of-the-art detection system that relies on the frequency of (raw) API calls. Aiming to assess whether MAMADROID’s effectiveness mainly stems from the API abstraction or from the sequencing modeling, we also evaluate a variant of it that uses frequency (instead of sequences), of abstracted API calls. We find that it is not as accurate, failing to capture maliciousness when trained on malware samples that include API calls that are equally or more frequently used by benign apps.
ElastOscillation: 3D Multilevel Force Feedback for Damped Oscillation on VR Controllers

Force feedback from damped oscillation is a common effect in our daily lives, especially when shaking an elastic object, an object hanging or containing other stuff, or a container with liquid, e.g., casting with a fishing pole or wine-swirling. Such a force, affected by complex physical variations and collisions, is difficult to properly simulate using current force feedback methods. Therefore, we propose ElastOscillation on a virtual reality (VR) controller to provide 3D multilevel force feedback for damped oscillation to enhance VR experiences. ElastOscillation consists of a proxy, six elastic bands and DC motors. It leverages the motors to control the bands' elasticity to restrain the movement of the proxy, which is connected with the bands. Therefore, when users shake the ElastOscillation device, the proxy shakes or moves in corresponding ranges of movement. The users then perceive the force from oscillation at different levels. In addition, elastic force from the bands further reinforces the oscillation force feedback. We conducted a force perception study to understand users' distinguishability for perceiving oscillation forces in 1D and 2D movement, respectively. Based on the results, we performed a VR experience study to show that the force feedback provided by ElastOscillation enhances VR realism.
Flight Range Extension in Polistes simillimus Zikán, 1951 (Hymenoptera, Vespidae)

The aim of this study was to determine the flight range extension of the social wasps, Polistes simillimus. The results of the 125 wasps-carried out tests originating from 10 colonies in post-emergency stage demonstrated that the flight range extension of P. simillimus was of approximately 150m, resulting in a collection area of about 70.650m≤ by colony. It suggested wasp’s efficiency as a biological control agent.
"Hey Model!"  Natural User Interactions and Agency in Accessible Interactive 3D Models

While developments in 3D printing have opened up opportunities for improved access to graphical information for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV), they can provide only limited detailed and contextual information. Interactive 3D printed models (I3Ms) that provide audio labels and/or a conversational agent interface potentially overcome this limitation. We conducted a Wizard-of-Oz exploratory study to uncover the multi-modal interaction techniques that BLV people would like to use when exploring I3Ms, and investigated their attitudes towards different levels of model agency. These findings informed the creation of an I3M prototype of the solar system. A second user study with this model revealed a hierarchy of interaction, with BLV users preferring tactile exploration, followed by touch gestures to trigger audio labels, and then natural language to fill in knowledge gaps and confirm understanding.
Can Bullying Detection Systems Help in School Violence Scenarios?: A Teachers' Perspective

The advancement of technology has paved the way for sophisticated school violence detection and intervention systems. Existing researches, however, have come short of reflecting the goals and contexts of the target users: teachers, students, and parents. Therefore, we conducted interviews with 35 teachers about school violence and technology adoption. While there was wide consensus on the necessity of technology, the teachers pointed out the possible adverse effects of its adoption: greater burden on teachers, privacy concerns, and consequences of inaccurate algorithms. Based on the findings, we derived design implications in the stages of data collection, decision making, and data conveyance. These design implications could make a contribution towards shaping the design of school violence detection and intervention system from the teachers' perspective.
Comparative Methods of Estimating Freezing Temperatures and Freezing Injury in Leaves of Chaparral Shrubs

Exotherms and lethal low temperatures were examined in four species of chaparral shrubs that co-occur in the Santa Monica Mountains, southern California: Rhus laurina, Rhus ovata, Ceanothus megacarpus, and Ceanothus spinosus. For all but R. ovata, excised leaves froze at significantly lower temperatures than leaves on intact branches (range 4.3⚬-6.9⚬C lower), indicating that only intact shoots should be used for studies of leaf supercooling. Of the four species, only R. laurina showed no leaf supercooling on intact branches. On excised leaves artificially seeded with ice crystals to remove supercooling, the lethal temperature for 50% change in activity or cell death (LT50) was determined by measuring (1) electrical conductivity into a bathing solution (electrolyte leakage), (2) photosynthetic fluorescent capacity (Fv/Fm), (3) the percentage of palisade mesophyll cells stained by fluorescein diacetate (vital stain), and (4) visual score of leaf color (Munsell color chart). In every case, the estimate of LT50 by the electrical conductivity method was significantly higher (less negative) by 2⚬-5⚬C than the other three methods, and electrical conductivity results did not correspond with field observations of dieback. Based on the photosynthetic fluorescent technique, which is both reliable and nondestructive, the LT50 ranged from -5.6⚬C for R. laurina to about -8.5⚬C for the other three species.
Understanding Value and Design Choices Made by Android Family App Developers

The rapidly expanding family mobile app market provides a great opportunity for children's education and development. However, recent research has revealed a prevalence of persuasive designs and tracking of children's data in these apps, which may harm children's online privacy and self-regulation development. We conducted 20 interviews with Android family app developers to understand their design practices. We used the lens of Value Sensitive Design to identify developer's values and how they translate them into design choices. Our findings show that though developer values are generally aligned with the best interest of users, they often must make compromises due to market pressure, lack of monetisation options, and the use of biased design guidelines. Our findings show a need for centralised actionable guidelines and important directions for HCI research to support both end-users' and developers' values.
Contributions of Novel Nanomaterials to Pharmaceutical Analysis

This paper is an analysis of the application of nanomaterials in pharmaceutical situations. The paper discusses the contribution of nanomaterials in liquid chromatography - mass spectrometry (LC-MS), capillary electrophoresis (CE), and chiral separation. Numerous researches demonstrate the positive impact of different types of nanomaterials in a wide range of areas, thus showing their promising future for medical purposes. Moreover, some researches mentioned in this paper are the first reported cases of their areas, indicating that more research needs to be done in order to prove the stability of nanomaterials in certain situations. Overall, the combination of nanotechnology and medical analysis is very efficient, which means this field is highly valuable for further study.
Kubernetes: Towards Deployment of Distributed IoT Applications in Fog Computing

Fog computing has been regarded as an ideal platform for distributed and diverse IoT applications. Fog environment consists of a network of fog nodes and IoT applications are composed of containerized microservices communicating with each other. Distribution and optimization of containerized IoT applications in the fog environment is a recent line of research. Our work took Kubernetes as an orchestrator that instantiates, manages, and terminates containers in multiple-host environments for IoT applications, where each host acts as a fog node. This paper demonstrates the industrial feasibility and practicality of deploying and managing containerized IoT applications on real devices (raspberry pis and PCs) by utilizing commercial software tools (Docker, WeaveNet). The demonstration will show that the application's functionality is not affected by the distribution of communicating microservices on different nodes.
CompAct

This paper addresses the design of systolic array (SA) based convolutional neural network (CNN) accelerators for mobile and embedded domains. On- and off-chip memory accesses to the large activation inputs (sometimes called feature maps) of CNN layers contribute significantly to total energy consumption for such accelerators; while prior has proposed off-chip compression, activations are still stored on-chip in uncompressed form, requiring either large on-chip activation buffers or slow and energy-hungry off-chip accesses. In this paper, we propose CompAct, a new architecture that enables on-chip compression of activations for SA based CNN accelerators. CompAct is built around several key ideas. First, CompAct identifies an SA schedule that has nearly regular access patterns, enabling the use of a modified run-length coding scheme (RLC). Second, CompAct improves compression ratio of the RLC scheme using Sparse-RLC in later CNN layers and Lossy-RLC in earlier layers. Finally, CompAct proposes look-ahead snoozing that operates synergistically with RLC to reduce the leakage energy of activation buffers. Based on detailed synthesis results, we show that CompAct enables up to 62% reduction in activation buffer energy, and 34% reduction in total chip energy.
FaceHaptics: Robot Arm based Versatile Facial Haptics for Immersive Environments

This paper introduces FaceHaptics, a novel haptic display based on a robot arm attached to a head-mounted virtual reality display. It provides localized, multi-directional and movable haptic cues in the form of wind, warmth, moving and single-point touch events and water spray to dedicated parts of the face not covered by the head-mounted display.The easily extensible system, however, can principally mount any type of compact haptic actuator or object. User study 1 showed that users appreciate the directional resolution of cues, and can judge wind direction well, especially when they move their head and wind direction is adjusted dynamically to compensate for head rotations. Study 2 showed that adding FaceHaptics cues to a VR walkthrough can significantly improve user experience, presence, and emotional responses.
Mind The Voice!: Effect of Robot Voice Pitch, Robot Voice Gender, and User Gender on User Perception of Teleoperated Robots

It is important for communication robots to offer an enjoyable interaction experience while being reasonably persuasive. It has been suggested that robots speaking in a high pitch could be perceived as more attractive than those speaking in a low pitch. However, it is not clear whether the use of a high-pitched voice favors teleoperated robots as well. In principle, teleoperated robots could be perceived differently than autonomous robots because they embody a human agent. To investigate this aspect, we conducted a 2 (voice pitch: original vs. high) × 2 (voice gender: male vs. female) × 2 (user gender: male vs. female) between-participants experiment to study the effects of the robot voice pitch, robot voice gender, and user gender on the attitudinal responses of the users toward a teleoperated robot and the associated decision-making. It was observed that the male and female participants perceived a high-pitched voice differently. The users' awareness of the robot being teleoperated and persuasiveness of the robot were noted to be related, which may provide a plausible explanation for the interaction effects between the voice pitch and user gender.
KeyMap: Improving Keyboard Shortcut Vocabulary Using Norman's Mapping

We introduce a new shortcut interface called KeyMap that is designed to leverage Norman's principle of natural mapping. Rather than displaying shortcut command labels in linear menus, KeyMap displays a virtual keyboard with command labels displayed directly on its keys. A crowdsourced experiment compares KeyMap to Malacria et al.'s ExposeHK using an extension of their protocol to also test recall. Results show KeyMap users remembered 1 more shortcut than ExposeHK immediately after training, and this advantage increased to 4.5 more shortcuts when tested again after 24 hours. KeyMap users also incidentally learned more shortcuts that they had never practised. We demonstrate how KeyMap can be added to existing web-based applications using a Chrome extension.
Parenting with Alexa: Exploring the Introduction of Smart Speakers on Family Dynamics

Smart speakers have become pervasive in family homes, creating the potential for these devices to influence parent-child dynamics and parenting behaviors. We investigate the impact of introducing a smart speaker to 10 families with children, over four weeks. We use pre- and post- deployment interviews with the whole family and in-home audio capture of parent-child interactions with the smart speaker for our analysis. Despite the smart speaker causing occasional conflict in the home, we observed that parents lever-aged the smart speaker to further parenting goals. We found three forms of influence the smart speaker has on family dynamics: 1) fostering communication, 2) disrupting access, and 3) augmenting parenting. All of these influences arise from a communally accessible, stand-alone voice interface which democratizes family access to technology. We discuss design implications in furthering parenting practices and behaviors as the capabilities of the technology continue to improve.
Closer Object Looks Smaller: Investigating the Duality of Size Perception in a Spherical Fish Tank VR Display

Fish Tank Virtual Reality (FTVR) displays provide compelling 3D experiences by rendering view-dependent imagery on a 2D screen. While users perceive a 3D object in space, they are actually looking at pixels on a 2D screen, thus, a perceptual duality exists between the object's pixels and the 3D percept potentially interfering with the experience. To investigate, we conducted an experiment to see whether the on-screen size of the 2D imagery affects the perceived object size in 3D space with different viewing conditions, including stereopsis. We found that the size of on-screen imagery significantly influenced object size perception, causing 83.3% under/overestimation of perceived size when viewing without stereopsis and reducing to 64.7% with stereopsis. Contrary to reality, objects look smaller when the viewer gets closer. Understanding the perceptual duality helps us to provide accurate perception of real-world objects depicted in the virtual environment and pave the way for 3D applications.
Designing a Crowdsourcing System for the Elderly: A Gamified Approach to Speech Collection

Despite the need for representation of older adults in crowdsourced data, crowd work is generally not designed for older adults and participation by older adults is low. In this paper, we demonstrate a process for designing crowd work for older adults; identifying their needs, designing an approach to foster their participation, and verifying its effectiveness. We found when older people feel connected to others while doing crowd work, they are highly motivated. Furthermore, gamification is an effective tool for fostering their engagement when aligned with their needs and values, as opposed to the needs and values of younger participants. Lastly, we suggest important considerations and opportunities for designing crowd work approaches for senior citizens.
In‐field Triticum aestivum ear counting using colour‐texture image analysis

Abstract A colour and texture image analysis method based on the determination of a hybrid space was developed for a feasibility study for the (semi‐)automatic counting of Triticum aestivum wheat ears to simplify manual counting. To detect ears, five textural and statistic features, and colour analyses were both used to give a new representation of the images within a specific space (hybrid space). This new representation was constructed with a priori knowledge about the images (especially the number of classes and training points), providing better recognition than in the standard RGB space (Red/Green/Blue). Classical methods of image segmentation and classification, combined with morphological information about wheat ears, were then applied to the new images to assist counting. Only 20 images were tested and classification accuracy ranged from 73% to 85%. The counting information, which needs to be validated on numerous images, will be in future combined with grain counting per ear and thousand‐seed weight to obtain an estimation of wheat yields. The resulting information could prove to be relevant, for example, to allow French cooperatives to organise their harvest.
Pepper in the Library" Students' First Impressions

Humanoid robots through their embodied features and range of interactivity are proving to be effective as service or information disseminating agents. However in the Australian context, the deployment and evaluation of robots in public spaces is limited. In this study, we report on an observation based exploratory study of university students interaction with the Pepper humanoid robot over 8 days in the library of an Australian university. The students' first impressions of Pepper using the top-of-mind association showed that they were in general wary and scared of service robots. Many considered Pepper as creepy. Their positive remarks were related to the novelty of Pepper's features and technology. In conclusion, we speculate on the results obtained and what they mean for the integration of humanoid robots in mainstream Australian society.
On Conducting Security Developer Studies with CS Students: Examining a Password-Storage Study with CS Students, Freelancers, and Company Developers

Ecological validity is a major concern in usable security studies with developers. Many studies are conducted with computer science (CS) students out of convenience, since recruiting professional software developers in sufficient numbers is very challenging. In a password-storage study, Naiakshina et al. (CHI'19) showed that CS students behave similarly to freelance developers recruited online. While this is a promising result for conducting developer studies with students, an open question remains: Do professional developers employed in companies behave similarly as well? To provide more insight into the ecological validity of recruiting students for security developer studies, we replicated the study of Naiakshina et al. with developers from diverse companies in Germany. We found that developers employed in companies performed better than students and freelancers in a direct comparison. However, treatment effects were found to be significant in all groups; the treatment effects on CS students also held for company developers.
Who Is Changing Your Question on a Social Q&A Website?

Effective moderation of online communities is an important, but challenging, topic in HCI. In this paper, we study people's co-editing behavior on one of the most popular social Q&A websites in China, called Zhihu.com. We examined question logs to understand who/when/how a question is edited differently by multiple users; we also conducted semi-structured interviews with users who edited others' questions on Zhihu to understand their motivations and their perceptions of co-editing behavior, as well as their concerns and suggestions for future website designs for moderating such behavior. Our findings reveal that although co-editing questions is perceived as a positive and effective approach for improving questions' answerability and shaping norms in the online community, effective moderation mechanisms need to be designed to improve transparency and communication about co-editing behavior and to address possible tensions as a result of co-editing wars.
Touch me Gently: Recreating the Perception of Touch using a Shape-Memory Alloy Matrix

We present a wearable forearm augmentation that enables the recreation of natural touch sensation by applying shear-forces onto the skin. In contrast to previous approaches, we arrange light-weight and stretchable 3x3cm plasters in a matrix onto the skin. Individual plasters were embedded with lines of shape-memory alloy (SMA) wires to generate shear-forces. Our design is informed by a series of studies investigating the perceptibility of different sizes, spacings, and attachments of plasters on the forearm. Our matrix arrangement enables the perception of touches, for instance, feeling ones wrist being grabbed or the arm being stroked. Users rated the recreated touch sensations as being fairly similar to a real touch (4.1/5). Even without a visual representation, users were able to correctly distinguish them with an overall accuracy of 94.75%. Finally, we explored two use cases showing how AR and VR could be empowered with experiencing recreated touch sensations on the forearm.