Bashar AltakrouriSaudi Aramco | Saudi Aramco
Bashar Altakrouri
Dr.-Ing.
About
40
Publications
200,125
Reads
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285
Citations
Introduction
Senior researcher at the Ambient Computing Group - Institute of Telematics at Luebeck University. My research focus is on Natural Interactions for physically challenged users i.e. elderly and user with physical disabilities
Additional affiliations
January 2016 - present
Position
- Senior Technical Leader and Architect
Description
- I am a technical leader for Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at IBM Global Watson IoT Headquarter in Munich. I am very privileged to work with the most talented researchers, architects and inventors that shape the world through IoT and AI.
June 2014 - October 2015
October 2010 - August 2014
Position
- PhD Student
Description
- Holds a Scholarship from the Graduate School for Computing in Medicine and Life Sciences
Education
October 2005 - November 2007
International School of New Media at Universität zu Lübeck
Field of study
- Digital Media
September 1999 - September 2004
Field of study
- Electrical Eng.Computer Systems Engineering Branch field
Publications
Publications (40)
Full body interactions are becoming increasingly important for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and very essential in thriving areas such as mobile applications, games and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions. While this enriches the design space of interactive applications in ubiquitous and pervasive environments, it dramatically increases the...
Advances in Human Computer Interaction techniques continue to enrich Natural User Interface (NUI) research. While dozens of novel NUI interaction techniques are proposed every year, the potential of the human body’s sensory and motor systems is not yet fully utilized. Hence, new pressing calls have emerged for exploring the potential of the whole b...
Infrastructure for sharing, adapting and deploying interaction techniques remains an enduring challenge for real-world pervasive computing ecosystems (ambient spaces). In this paper, we address this challenge by introducing the concept of Interaction Plugins, which enables interaction techniques to be constructed as shareable units of functionality...
The human computer interaction (HCI) research continues to furiously enrich the natural interaction paradigm. Hence, new novel interaction techniques employ the whole body movements for interactions with ambient interactive systems. The recent wide spread adoption of this paradigm critically invokes the problem of interaction documentation. We ther...
In a Wizard-of-Oz experiment we investigate to what degree automatic activity recognition could support the use of prioritized lists for nursing documentation on hand held mobile devices. The study involved 15 nurses, 60 patients records and over 250 documented processes at a geriatric care ward. Based on time effort, interaction complexity, error...
Artificial Intelligence and Digital Twins play an integral role in driving innovation in the domain of intelligent driving. Long short-term memory (LSTM) is a leading driver in the field of lane change prediction for manoeuvre anticipation. However, the decision-making process of such models is complex and non-transparent, hence reducing the trustw...
Artificial Intelligence and Digital Twins play an integral role in driving innovation in the domain of intelligent driving. Long short-term memory (LSTM) is a leading driver in the field of lane change prediction for manoeuvre anticipation. However, the decision-making process of such models is complex and non-transparent, hence reducing the trustw...
Federated Learning (FL) is a novel paradigm for the shared training of models based on decentralized and private data. With respect to ethical guidelines, FL is promising regarding privacy, but needs to excel vis-\`a-vis transparency and trustworthiness. In particular, FL has to address the accountability of the parties involved and their adherence...
Machine learning offers promising capabilities to improve administrative procedures. At the same time, adequate training of models using traditional learning techniques requires the collection and storage of enough training data in a central place. Unfortunately, due to legislative and jurisdictional constraints, data in a central place is scarce a...
Classifying stress in firefighters poses challenges, such as accurate personalized labeling, unobtrusive recording, and training of adequate models. Acquisition of labeled data and verification in cage mazes or during hot trainings is time consuming. Virtual Reality (VR) and Internet of Things (IoT) wearables provide new opportunities to create bet...
Elicitation studies are becoming recently popular methodology to investigate novel gestural interfaces. Yet, little is known about possible factors that may influence this type of studies. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate the impact of physical impairments in full-body motion gesture elicitation studies. Our study was conduc...
Human Computer Interaction based on gestures offers enormous potential for designing ergonomic user interfaces in future smart environments. Although gestures can be perceived as very natural, the specific gesture set of a given dedicated interface might be complex and require some kind of self-description of expected body movements. We have theref...
Intelligent Environments like Smart Homes consist of a variety of interconnected devices, which are increasingly controlled by NUI. However, provided interaction possibilities and functionality are often not obvious to users. Illustrating such scenario, we’ve developed an ambient light-control using two NUI devices for interaction. Building on this...
In the course of ubiquitous and pervasive computing a variety of smart devices are developed and entering our everyday life. These devices increasingly rely on novel interaction modalities from the field of Natural Interaction, such as gesture control. Common concepts to explain and illustrate devices’ interaction possibilities can’t be applied to...
Dozens of novel natural interaction techniques are proposed every year to enrich interactive eco-systems with multitouch gestures, motion gestures, full body in motion, etc. We present a novel investigation of the community’s applied documentation practices for Natural User Interfaces (NUI). Our investigation includes analyzing a survey targeted at...
The increasing acceptance and innovation in Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) promise a widespread adoption of interactive systems following this paradigm. Although dozens of novel interaction techniques are being proposed every year, the currently applied approaches for designing and implementing NUI-based systems are greatly challenged. This worksho...
In this paper, we describe a distributed crowd-sensing infrastructure that integrates and bridges small scale personalized ad-hoc Internet of Things (IoT) spaces (consisting of
personal interconnected smart devices, sensors and actuators dynamically deployed at runtime) to large scale IoT spaces. While a lot of innovation takes place on large scale...
A large-scale dynamic runtime deployment of existing and future interaction techniques remains an enduring challenge for engineering real-world pervasive computing ecosystems (ambient spaces). The need for innovative engineering solutions to tackle this issue increases, due to the ever expanding landscape of novel natural interaction techniques pro...
Gestural interactions will continue to proliferate, enabling a wide range of possibilities to interact with mobile, pervasive, and ubiquitous environments. Particularly, motion gestures are getting an increasing attention amongst researchers. Likewise, a large adoption of motion gestures is noticeable on a commercial level. Motion gestures research...
The Web of Things (WoT) aims to extend the Web into the physical world by promoting the adoption of Web protocols by situated services and smart objects (ambient artifacts). However, real-world ambient artifacts often adopt proprietary and/or non-Web protocols, making them invisible to Web search engines and inaccessible to conventional Web agents....
Imagine if your favorite social networking website provided a "Share to Screen" button that automatically dimmed the room lights and streamed your web-based photos and videos to a nearby television, projector or photo frame. Unfortunately, such fluid interactions between the Web and the physical environment remain challenging, since conventional We...
Noise pollution is among the leading causes for illness among urban residents. It constitutes a major cause for
stress and poor sleep, it reduces life quality while increasing the risk for hypertension, hearing loss and lower cognitive performance. In light of those risks, the European Union mandates the creation of noise contour maps to gather inf...
The Web has rapidly evolved from a static informational medium into a highly capable interactive application platform. Today, Web browsers have become the de facto interface for many networked applications; however, conventional Web browsers are still unable to directly interact with the broad range of context sources and actuators available in hig...
![Figure 2: DoubleFlip interaction technique as in [17] While it was...](profile/Bashar-Altakrouri/publication/230897533/figure/fig2/AS:300386675118081@1448629172146/DoubleFlip-interaction-technique-as-in-17-While-it-was-relatively-sufficient-to-relay_Q320.jpg)
Exploring the potential of whole body in motion is inevitably important for natural interactions. People are expected to use different body parts to simultaneously interact with multiple interactions techniques. Therefore, interactive ecosystems in interactive spaces become a real challenge. We have identified three closely related issues to be sol...
Effectively assisting people in complex and highly dynamic work environment requires advances in high-level declarative activity models that can describe the flow of human work activities and their intended outcomes, as well as novel interaction approach for distributing and coordinating information across physical objects, time and space. This pap...
Effectively guiding people in complex and highly dynamic work environment requires advances in high-level declarative activity models that can describe the flow of human work activities and their intended outcomes, as well as novel user interface models for distributing guidance information across time and space. This paper describes a new line of...
In this paper, a novel infrastructure, called Medient is proposed. The name "Medient" is constructed from "ambient" and "media". Medient is a service oriented architecture using web services to create context-aware multimedia services on mobile devices. We outline the technical approach using Bluetooth device detection and reverse AJAX push service...
The era of ubiquitous and pervasive computing technology opens the world for new pervasive applications and services within the physical surroundings. Often users find themselves dealing and interacting with multiple applications simultaneously to achieve certain goals to satisfy certain motive. Currently, pervasive computing applications are indiv...
Modern museums provide visitors with mobile, context-aware information and guidance systems. Unfortunately, these systems often suffer from several technological drawbacks: expensive infrastructure, complex maintenance and content modification, difficult to learn user interfaces, manual location specification requirements, etc. Visitors have to ren...
![Figure 3 The recording station in [ 31], an example of multimedia usage...](profile/Bashar-Altakrouri/publication/268153970/figure/fig3/AS:643929087160328@1530536066891/The-recording-station-in-31-an-example-of-multimedia-usage-in-museums_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 4 The Interactive Desk in [ 31], an example of multimedia...](profile/Bashar-Altakrouri/publication/268153970/figure/fig4/AS:643929087164432@1530536066932/The-Interactive-Desk-in-31-an-example-of-multimedia-support-for-interactivity_Q320.jpg)
The ubiquitous computing field is evolving rapidly. Its applications are
penetrating everyday situations. Furthermore, the increasing demand on
personalisation and customisation is calling for new means of providing
content and services to the users based on the user’s own specific context.
Museums and exhibitions, which form an integral part of th...
In this paper we present eyeJOT as a new context-aware smart campus information system combining ambient wall-sized displays with location-aware, context-sensitive information sharing on mobile devices. eyeJOT is a metaphor for how we might want a birds eye view of the activities on and off the university campus to guide users through the plethora...
De Jong, T., Al Takrouri, B., Specht, M., Koper, R. (2007). Campus Memories: Learning with Contextualised Blogging. In D. Griffiths, R. Koper & O. Liber (Eds). Proceedings of The 2nd TenCompetence Workshop (pp. 59-67), January 11-12, 2007, Manchester, United Kingdom.
Questions
Questions (10)
Is it allowed to use figures from published articles in a PhD dissertation or an article, given that the figure is clearly cited as the work of the original author? Or should a request to use the figure be made to the author and publisher as well?
What are the main used metrics for evaluate gestures (on-device or in-air) based interactions and interfaces? Any papers, examples, books, or any references on this topic will be much appreciated.
I am still not sure about the difference between abstract and extended abstract in computer science? how are major differences and features for each type? what is the writing style for each type?
Some conferences in computer science require a long abstract (~ 800 - 1000 words) to be submitted and allows for figures, tables, etc. Writing such an abstract is the key of getting the paper accepted or not.
So what are the best strategies to use for writing a strong abstract?
What are the main guidelines for reusing material from our own workshop papers in writing a new journal or conference articles? Is it generally accepted to republish own workshop papers again as a conference/journal article?
I will be excited actually to collect and read the most controversial papers about the ubiquitous and pervasive computing fields. I am sure that there are a lot of interesting material to read but of course collecting a refined reading list (more or less) is not that easy for one researcher, this should be driven by the community for richer content. Such material could be also used I think by others and more importantly for a hot discussion at the ubiquitous seminars.
I anthropometric information are quite important when design interactions. So far I did not really find any reliable online resources of anthropometric tables that are open source. Of course Nasa (http://msis.jsc.nasa.gov/sections/section03.htm) provides quite a lot of tables but they are very hard to extract information from due to the format. ideally a machine readable or easy to export format will be a very handy tools for a lot of HCI researchers like myself.
If you have something to share please do :-)
