Donald J. Patterson

Category: Conference Papers

Proof-by-Location as a Socially Responsible Financial Infrastructure

Architectural diagram of the Proof-by-Location cryptocurrency system, Xylem.

“Proof-by-Location” published in iGETblockchain Bill Tomlinson and I published a paper in 2022 IEEE 1st Global Emerging Technology Blockchain Forum: Blockchain & Beyond (iGETblockchain) This was a first of its kind forum and was presented in a very well-organized virtual conference format. We joined a number of other scholars to discuss globally focussed blockchain work, such…

Computational Agroecology: Sustainable Food Ecosystem Design

A polyculture in a community garden in Urbana, IL.

“Computational Agroecology” published in alt.chi A team of people that I’m working with, led by Barath Raghavan, just had a paper accepted to alt.chi 2016! This is a portion of the CHI conference that is devoted to “controversial, risk-taking, and boundary pushing presentations at CHI”. The focus of the paper is to argue for the increased…

Toward Alternative Decentralized Infrastructures

Toward Alternative Decentralized Infrastructures

I’m very excited to announce that my colleagues and I had a paper accepted to ACM DEV 2015, “a premier venue to present original and innovative work on the applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computing in developing regions.”  We used the paper to put forward a vision of resilient local infrastructures that are coordinated via software…

ICT4S 2029: What will be the systems supporting sustainability in 15 years

ICT4S paper cover

  Research is often inspired by visions of the future. These visions can take on various narrative forms, and can fall anywhere along the spectrum from utopian to dystopian. Even though we recognize the importance of such visions to help us shape research questions and inspire rich design spaces to be explored, the opportunity to…

Interchange: Bidding for green lights

Interchange: Bidding for green lights

In urban environments great effort is directed toward alleviating traffic including the design and implementation of complex software and hardware infrastructure. We introduce the idea of an auction-based mechanism for resolving vehicle intersections using a multi-way group auction mechanism. We propose a supporting infrastructure that has promise for increasing performance and responsiveness to dynamic traffic…

Augmenting Gesture Recognition with Erlang-Cox Models To Identify Neurological Disorders in Premature Babies

Augmenting Gesture Recognition with Erlang-Cox Models To Identify Neurological Disorders in Premature Babies

In this paper we demonstrate a Markov model based technique for recognizing gestures from accelerometers that explicitly represents duration. We do this by embedding an Erlang-Cox state transition model, which has been shown to accurately represent the first three moments of a general distribution, within a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN). The transition probabilities in the…

Collapse Informatics: Augmenting the Sustainability & ICT4D Discourse in HCI

Collapse informatics: Augmenting the Sustainability & ICT4D Discourse in HCI cover sheet

Research in many fields argues that contemporary global industrial civilization will not persist indefinitely in its current form, and may, like many past human societies, eventually collapse. Arguments in environmental studies, anthropology, and other fields indicate that this transformation could begin within the next half-century. While imminent collapse is far from certain, it is prudent…

Massively Distributed Authorship of Academic Papers

Massively Distributed Authorship of Academic Papers

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that…

Involuntary Gesture Recognition for Predicting Cerebral Palsy in High-Risk Infants

Involuntary Gesture Recognition for Predicting Cerebral Palsy in High-Risk Infants

In this paper we describe a system that leverages accelerometers to recognize a particular involuntary gesture in babies that have been born preterm. These gestures, known as cramped-synchronized general movements are highly correlated with a diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy. In order to test our system we recorded data from 10 babies admitted to the newborn…

Efficiently Scaling Up Video Annotation with Crowdsourced Marketplaces

Efficiently Scaling Up Video Annotation with Crowdsourced Marketplaces

Accurately annotating entities in video is labor intensive and expensive. As the quantity of online video grows, traditional solutions to this task are unable to scale to meet the needs of researchers with limited budgets. Current practice provides a temporary solution by paying dedicated workers to label a fraction of the total frames and otherwise…

Twitter, Sensors and UI: Robust Context Modeling for Interruption Management

Twitter, Sensors and UI: Robust Context Modeling for Interruption Management

In this paper, we present the results of a two-month field study of fifteen people using a software tool designed to model changes in a user’s availability. The software uses status update messages, as well as sensors, to detect changes in context. When changes are identified using the Kullback-Leibler Divergence metric, users are prompted to…

Getting Places: Collaborative Predictions from Status

Getting Places: Collaborative Predictions from Status

In this paper we describe the use of collaborative filtering to make predictions about place using data from custom instant messaging status. Previous research has shown accurate predictions can be made from an individual’s personal data. The work in this paper demonstrates that community data can be used to make predictions in locations that are…

Constructing Topological Maps of Displays with 3-D Positioning Information

Constructing Topological Maps of Displays with 3-D Positioning Information

To better coordinate information displays with moving people and the environment, software must know the locations and three dimensional alignments of the display hardware. In this paper we describe a technique for creating such an enhanced topological map of networked public displays using a mobile phone. The result supports a richer user experience, without the…

Status on Display: a Field Trial of Nomatic*Viz

Status on Display: a Field Trial of Nomatic*Viz

The use of personal status messages is becoming a part of popular culture through wide-spread instant messaging (IM) adoption, the growth of social networking websites and the increased connectivity provided by mobile phones. However, the implications of status broadcasting and people’s behavior in the milieu of social life is still poorly understood. In this paper,…

Online Everywhere: Evolving Mobile Instant Messaging Practices

Online Everywhere: Evolving Mobile Instant Messaging Practices

< In this paper we report on the results of a large scale user survey investigating the status setting and interruption management behavior of mobile instant messaging (IM) users with existing systems. The motivation for this study was to inform the design of interface tools that support users by setting contextually appropriate awareness messages. Our…

Interactive and Intelligent Visual Communication Systems

Interactive and Intelligent Visual Communication Systems

Interventions to support children with cognitive and social developmental disabilities often include visual elements. Use of visual artifacts has been shown to increase the communication and understanding levels of children with disabilities. We describe a research agenda for expanding these capabilities using interactive, collaborative and intelligent systems. ( permanent, local copy ) Published in Interactive Design for…

Involving Intelligent Assistants in Active Human Communication

Involving Intelligent Assistants in Active Human Communication

Intelligent assistants that support human communication need to respect the difficulty of understanding the context surrounding the interchange. Rather than attempting to directly communicate for a user, intelligent assistants should support decision making on the part of the involved parties so that complex social negotiations are preserved. We describe an intelligent assistant that does this…

Fine-Grained Activity Recognition by Aggregating Abstract Object Usage

Fine-Grained Activity Recognition by Aggregating Abstract Object Usage

In this paper we present results related to achieving fine grained activity recognition for context-aware computing applications. We examine the advantages and challenges of reasoning with globally unique object instances detected by an RFID glove. We present a sequence of increasingly powerful probabilistic graphical models for activity recognition. We show the advantages of adding additional…

Opportunity Knocks: a System to Provide Cognitive Assistance with Transportation Services

Opportunity Knocks: a System to Provide Cognitive Assistance with Transportation Services

We present an automated transportation routing system, called “Opportunity Knocks,” whose goal is to improve the efficiency, safety and independence of individuals with mild cognitive disabilities. Our system is implemented on a combination of a Bluetooth sensor beacon that broadcasts GPS data, a GPRS-enabled cell-phone, and remote activity inference software. The system uses a novel…

Pre-mRNA Secondary Structure Prediction Aids Splice Site Prediction

Pre-mRNA Secondary Structure Prediction Aids Splice Site Prediction

Accurate splice site prediction is a critical component of any computational approach to gene prediction in higher organisms. Existing approaches generally use sequence-based models that capture local dependencies among nucleotides in a small window around the splice site. We present evidence that computationally predicted secondary structure of moderate length pre-mRNA subsequences contains information that can…