ShareWarm (2008)

ShareWarm
-ShareWarm is a affective object to help you deliver a implicit and warm message to someone else in a critical situation.

Sometimes you don’t really like be disturbed when you are busy, but you have to reply a message to your friends or families immediately. Due to this dilemma, we design a affective object to deliver your care and greeting to others who you care about without any text or voice. When you trigger a signal within mobile wireless device, this object which is placed at home could help you deliver your greeting to someone. “ShareWarm” is a affective service, which can shine for a while when a signal comes. Light means a warm message from someone who care about you.

We know that body movement could express semantic meaning to other people by Choreography, so we plan to design movement to our product. People can interact with product and realize the implicit message. Gesture of “hold up” has some semantic meanings such as “care,” “treasure,” and “sharing.” We plan to bring such message or meaning into people’s heart and let people know somebody send a warm message for him/her.

We collect the idea and feeling when people do “hold up” gesture and utilize fluid and shine material to create a prototype. When people send a implicit message, the objective would shine for a wile and decrease the brightness of the light. The light would emerge people to hold up it and deliver a semantic meaning to them. People would feel relax and warm when they realize the implicit message. ShareWarm help people build a close connection to their friends and families.

PhoneCode (2008)

PhoneCode [Demo]
- PhoneCode is a visual and musical expression to identify the difference among people through a series of phone number.

Cellphone is major communication device for delivering messages with other people.Each person is identify by a series of unique numbers. To get beyond the imagination of numeral codes, we convert a person’s cellphone number to an animation with music. People can be distinguished by this specific visual and musical expression.

In visual display, we use different themes to specify different telecommunication systems. In the beginning, the screen is composed of two colors and is encoded by binary code. The following is a piece of specific animation along with melody. The animation is accompanied with music based on the obtained tempo.

In music part, we use the rule of “Mozart’s Musikalisches Würfelspiel”(http://sunsite.univie.ac.at/Mozart/dice/) to generate an amazing music. It is a musical composition dice game which is created by Mozart and we apply the rule to map each number into a piece of music in order to create specific melody.

Tag-based Profile Presentation with Semantic Relationship (2008)

Tag-based Profile Presentation with Semantic Relationship [Demo]

People construct personal profiles for self presentation and for obtaining online services. Profiles consisting of simple factual data provide an inadequate description of the individual, as they are often incomplete, mostly subjective and cannot reflect dynamic changes. This thesis explores the idea of “you-are-what-you-tag”, namely, an individual can be effectively profiled by the tags associated with his/her social media. 

Specifically, this thesis proposes semantic tag-based profiles, profiles that can be represented as a set of semantically related and weighted tags. The strength of the semantic relationships between these tags are calculated using common sense computing and cooccurrence measurements. Moreover, different views of these profiles are visualized as tag clouds via a 3D switch effect. The proposed approach supports an intuitive and novel interface for people to browse/search through a social web site. 

This work was published in SSS08[pdf] and AAAI08[pdf]. It received 2008 IICM Master Thesis Award. [master's thesis]

Animal Net (Nightmarket 2007)

Animal Net
- Animal Net is a animal care network which people can take care of homeless animal around your community or city.

There are many homeless cats and dogs living around you. It becomes a big problem with the large numbers of homeless animals. Therefore, we plan to build an “Animal Net” to take care of them. People can understand feeding status of each animals and immediately know a variety of emergent situation through Internet. Furthermore, kind people who love these animals can sharing their experience on this platform.

PhoEver (2007)

PhoEver
- PhoEver could help people recall their memory from photos via social network-based visualization.

With the development of technology, digital cameras become increasingly pervasive. People use them to capture memorable moments or to record experience in daily life. The ubiquity of digital cameras today have enabled the general public to take many photos anytime, anywhere. However, in a large amount of photos, it is so difficult for people to retrieve information or recall past experience.

Traditional photo management system is category-based and users must classify their photos by events or time manually. However, this kind of management system is not efficient for arranging a great deal of photos. It lacks support for intelligent analysis toward photo information, such as people, date, and event, so they cannot provide better service for them. Therefore, we design PhoEver to help people get more information from photos and know their social experience. Moreover, people can use another perspective to browse their photos and review past memorable experience among their friends.

Photographs play significant roles for recording lives of people and people like to review past memory through them. Photos capture not only images but also emotion or environment at that time. A lot of things go through your mind when you look at a picture, including who was there, what event
was or when and where the photo was taken. This information constitute the metadata of a photo. In
this research, we define four kinds of photo metadata: people, event, time, and location. In particular, we are interested in modeling the social relationship of a person based on his/her photos, so we utilize “people” information in photos for analysis first. Other metadata will be displayed to provide more information to user.

In our work, we analyze photo metadata to construct user’s personal social network and layout images to form PhoEver Picture which visualize the importance of acquaintance in user’s life. Users can click anyone on this picture to retrieve relevant photos. This retrieved photos are permuted in temporal order by Time Machine and all of metadata are display
together. Hence, the user could recall the past memory about his/her friends from the beginning until
now.

Déjà vu – Social Network Agent for Personal Impression Management (2007)

As technology enabled new and faster modes of communication among people, it has become increasingly difficult to manage our social contacts effectively. Existing contact management tools lack the support for intelligent analysis of our social interactions. Therefore, we developed Déjà vu, an intelligent system of social network agents for managing and analyzing personal social contacts over the web.

Déjà vu is designed to help users record and retrieve contact information by tagging via a simple user interface. In addition, it helps users acquire additional knowledge about their contacts through social computing and tagging analysis. Our preliminary study showed that tagging is a subjective behavior and the proposed social tagging mechanism can compensate for individual difference.

This project got 2nd place in ImagineCup 2007 Software Design Competition(Taiwan site). Some technical detail was published in PRIMA2007[pdf].

Ya Oh! Pinball (Nightmarket 2006)

Ya Oh! Pinball
- People can recall the experience in Taiwan’s nightmarket and enjoy the happy atmosphere through a pinball game.

Everyone has a special night market experience in Taiwan. It’s so full of energy and excitement. In this project, we want to construct a common memory of night market experience. We utilize a common game “Pinball” as a special point for storytelling and utilize large amounts of related images and voices to evoke your past memory. Through this game, people can enjoy night market atmosphere again and connect other people who have the same experience. [news in youtube][workshop movie]

Virtual Blog (2005)

Virtual Blog: Interoperable Blog, Album and Bookmark System in Virtual Reality

Internet provides all kinds of interesting services for us; however, too many resources which are stored in different websites confuse users, and it would be trouble for users to obtain services. We built a XML Web Service to integrate various services from different platforms, and we achieved the goal of Interoperability. Everyone could own a customized private space and could still communicate with other people. Moreover, I sensed a problem on these websites: users are lazy about managing personal data. To stimulate users to manage personal data, I got an idea of including fun and social incentives from online games, and implemented in my project.