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Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) incorporating tangibles are becoming more accessible. The success of applications combining 3D printed tangibles and VR often depends on how accurately size is perceived. Research has shown that visuo-haptic perceptual information is important in the perception of size. However, it is unclear how these sensory-perceptual channels are affected by immersive virtual environments that incorporate tangible objects. Towards understanding the effects of different sensory information channels in the near field size perception of tangibles of graspable sizes in IVEs, we conducted a between-subjects study evaluating the accuracy of size perception across three experimental conditions (Vision-only, Haptics-only, Vision and Haptics). We found that overall, participants consistently over-estimated the size of the dials regardless of the type of perceptual information that was presented. Participants in the haptics only condition overestimated diameters to a larger degree as compared to other conditions. Participants were most accurate in the vision only condition and least accurate in the haptics only condition. Our results also revealed that increased efficiency in reporting size over time was most pronounced in the visuo- haptic condition.

This investigation compared the emotional impact caused by a crowd of affective virtual humans (VHs) that communicated in the users' native or foreign language. We evaluated the users' affective reactions to a crowd of VHs that exhibited distinct emotional expressions. A total of four emotions were presented, which were Positive, Negative, Neutral, and Mixed. The VHs performed verbal and non-behaviors accordingly. Under the Mixed condition, the VHs were divided into three groups equally and each group was uniquely assigned one of the three emotions (i.e., positive, negative, and neutral). Users collected ten items from a virtual reality market. To complete the tasks, they interacted using natural speech with the emotional VHs. Three language conditions were investigated: one condition in USA and another two conditions in Taiwan. The group of participants in USA interacted with the VHs in English; and the two groups of participants in Taiwan interacted with the VHs using a foreign (English) language and a native (Mandarin) language respectively. We discovered that the medium of communication or language familiarity had a strong influence on participants' emotional reactions. When participants interacted in a foreign language with VHs with a positive emotional disposition, we found their positive emotional reactions were subdued and negative reactions were elevated. However, this was not the case when participants interacted with VHs in their native language, as their emotional reactions were contingent on the emotional disposition of the VHs.

The emergence of People Analytics has been embraced by most HR departments. People Analytics understands workforce and among any dimensions, enhances the performance of the workforce. Talent Analytics as part of people analytics boosts decision making and what parameters are considered important. This study helped the organization improve people management, create efficiency and better decision making. Data recorded over six months were taken from a multinational HR company and using visual analytics, Kibana and Elasticsearch the authors arrived at employee productivity results. This paper discussed the different parameters chosen and how they change over the time period. Challenges faced when introducing analytics in an organization is also discussed along with the benefits of visual analytics to an organization.

Software vulnerabilities are very crucial to organizations as it can cause severe revenue loss if exploited. Study of vulnerabilities and understanding their behavior is necessary to maintain software systems. The process of identifying and understanding vulnerabilities is the initial step in creating policies to stop them in the future. Exploratory Data Analysis is a technique to understand the data and identify the attributes and features that are requires. In this paper the authors use EDA to study the software vulnerability data collected from a company. Vulnerabilities are visualized based on CVSS scores, severity, vulnerability status, category and OS. This study is focused on understanding the features in order to prevent vulnerabilities in the future.

This paper considers a cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access, i.e., C-NOMA system consisting of a base station (BS), and two downlink users, i.e., a near user and a far user. We derive analytical expression for the outage probabilities experienced by both the users and the system outage probability of the C-NOMA network in log-normal fading channels. We perform extensive analytical and simulation studies to determine the impact of various parameters on the outage performance. We determine numerical values for the power allocation coefficient at the BS that leads to equal outage probabilities for the users. Further, we determine numerical values for the power allocation coefficient at the BS that ensures system outage minimization and validate results using particle swam optimization method.

The commercialization of Virtual Reality (VR) devices is making the technology increasingly accessible to users around the world. Despite the success that VR is starting to see with its growing popularity, it has yet to become widely adopted and achieve its ultimate goal- convincingly simulate real life like experiences. The inability to generate adequate levels of presence and to prevent the manifestation of cybersickness are the two prominent barriers that have hindered VR from achieving its ultimate goal. While traditional research has examined factors that influence (correlate with) the onset and severity cybersickness, there is still a gap in our knowledge about the consequences of having motion control on cybersickness in immersive virtual environments (IVE’s) achieved using tracked Head Mounted Displays (HMD’s). Furthermore, outside of a correlational capacity, it is still unclear as to what causes cybersickness to affect presence in immersive virtual environments. The success of immersive virtual reality as a technology will hence largely come down to our ability to understand the interrelationship between these variables and then address the challenges they pose. Towards this end, we investigated how the affordance of motion control affects cybersickness and presence in an HMD based VR driving simulation by conducting a between subjects study where we manipulated the affordance of control between three experimental conditions. We leverage structural equation modeling in an attempt to build a framework that explains the relationship between virtual motion control, workload, cybersickness, time spent in the simulation, perceived time and presence. Our structural model helps explain why motion control could be an important factor to consider in addressing VR’s challenges and realizing its ultimate aim to simulate reality.

In this contribution we examined the effects on users during interaction with a virtual human crowd in an immersive virtual reality environment. We developed an agent-based crowd model with rich properties including eye gaze, facial expression, body motion, and verbal and non-verbal behaviors. The scenario was a virtual market in which the users needed to gather specific items. In a betweensubjects design, users interacted with a virtual human crowd that showed opposite valenced emotional expressions. There are four conditions in the between-subjects design. These includes different affective virtual crowds namely, Positive, Negative, Neutral, and a Mix condition. The Mix group is defined by a combination of Positive, Negative and Neutral emotional expressive characters. Depending on the specific condition, the virtual humans showed specific verbal and non-verbal behaviors. During the experiment we collected objective measures such as skin electrodermal activity, total time in the simulation, the number of interactions with the agents and performance measures. The subjective measures were the differential emotional survey (DES), and a user experience survey. We reported our findings with an in-depth analysis.

Design discussion is a very important course in architecture education. In this paper, we developed a VR based architecture design discussion system that allows members to visualize and discuss the architectural models and to modify the models during discussion. Since the system is designed to work on top of Rhinoceros and Grasshopper, the object database is updated right after the object modification. Members communicate via voice, object manipulations, and mid-air sketching as well as on-surface sketching in the virtual environment. Several tools have been designed to enhance the sense of presence and to make the discussion more effective. We also developed a rollback mechanism to help users intuitively and quickly revert to a previous state of discussion to make some changes or to start a new direction of discussion. To evaluate the system, we conducted an initial user study with 14 participants to assess the user experience, user impression and effectiveness of the system. The feedback from participants were positive and suggested that the system could be effective and useful for supporting architecture design discussion.

Cybersickness is one of the challenges that has prevented the widespread adoption of Virtual Reality (VR) and its applications. Due to its importance, there have been extensive studies on understanding and reducing cybersickness. Inspired by previous work that has sought to reduce cybersickness by applying the blurring effect and reducing the field of view of VR scenes, we present a simulation with controllable peripheral blur in the VR image. The simulation can be used to study cybersickness and spatial knowledge acquisition in an engaging virtual walking scenario.

In this contribution, we design, implement and evaluate the pedagogical benefits of a novel interactive note taking interface (iVRNote) in VR for the purpose of learning and reflection lectures. In future VR learning environments, students would have challenges in taking notes when they wear a head mounted display (HMD). To solve this problem, we installed a digital tablet on the desk and provided several tools in VR to facilitate the learning experience. Specifically, we track the stylus position and orientation in the physical world and then render a virtual stylus in VR. In other words, when students see a virtual stylus somewhere on the desk, they can reach out with their hand for the physical stylus. The information provided will also enable them to know where they will draw or write before the stylus touches the tablet. Since the presented iVRNote featuring our note taking system is a digital environment, we also enable students save efforts in taking extensive notes by providing several functions, such as post-editing and picture taking, so that they can pay more attention to lectures in VR. We also record the time of each stroke on the note to help students review a lecture. They can select a part of their note to revisit the corresponding segment in a virtual online lecture. Figures and the accompanying video demonstrate the feasibility of the presented iVRNote system. To evaluate the system, we conducted a user study with 20 participants to assess the preference and pedagogical benefits of the iVRNote interface., 9 pages, IEEE VR 2019, https://people.cs.nctu.edu.tw/~yushuen/data/iVRNote19.mp4

We present an empirical evaluation on how stereoscopic viewing and haptic feedback deferentially affects fine motor perception-action coordination in a pick-and-place task in Virtual Reality (VR). The factors considered were stereoscopic viewing, haptic feedback, sensory-motor congruence and mismatch, and calibration on perception-action coordination in near field fine motor task performance in VR. Quantitative measures of placement error, distance, collision, and time to complete trials were recorded and analyzed. Overall, we found that participants' manual dexterous task performance was enhanced in the presence of both stereoscopic viewing and haptic feedback. However, we found that time to complete task was greatly enhanced by the presence of haptic feedback, and economy and efficiency of movement of the end effector as well as the manipulated object was enhanced by the presence of both haptic feedback and stereoscopic viewing. Whereas, number of collisions and placement accuracy were greatly enhanced by the presence of stereoscopic viewing in near-field fine motor perception-action coordination. Our research additionally shows that mismatch in sensory-motor stimuli can detrimentally affect the number of collisions, and efficiency of end effector and object movements in near-field fine motor activities, and can be further negatively affected by the absence of haptic feedback and stereoscopic viewing. In spite of reduced cue situations in VR, and the absence or presence of stereoscopic viewing and haptic feedback, we found that participants tend to calibrate or adapt their perception-action coordination rapidly with a set of at least 5 trials.

The commercialization of Virtual Reality (VR) devices has made it easier for everyday users to experience VR from the comfort of their living rooms. This recent uptake in VR has also increased reported incidents of cybersickness. Cybersickness refers to the discomfort experienced by an individual while experiencing virtual environments. The symptoms are similar to those of motion sickness but are more disorienting in nature resulting in dizziness, blurred vision, etc. Cybersickness is currently one of the biggest hurdles to the widespread adoption of VR, and it is therefore critical to explore the factors that influence its onset. Towards this end, we present a proof of concept simulation to study cybersickness in highly realistic immersive virtual environments.

The authors in this paper analyzed how fashion brands are using social media network platforms. The authors performed analysis on the posted messages, pictures and videos by the top 50 fashion brands in India and the responses that they received on one of the most popular online social networks, Instagram. The authors also analyzed the data and explored the results to show how fashion brands in India are using social media networks, in addition they also explored to see which of the social media networks are most frequently used and also if the usage of social media differs based on brands country of origin. The findings of this study show how the fashion brands industry is still in its rudimentary phase, chaotic and unpredictable in using digital technologies like social media networks. The study also shows how the global luxury brands are transitioning and expanding into Indian markets and how these social media platforms are used for adoption. The study specifically explores to see which of the luxury brands use photos, posts and videos.

In this paper, the authors analyze the performance of Corporate Social Responsibility by examining the empirical linkage between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Financial Performance, specifically focusing on leading public Indian companies. Numerous researchers have explored similar study and investigated the exact link for the last 20 years. However, the authors in the current study conducted a study of literature reviews across all regions, especially focusing on the Indian context. The authors of the current study found that across more than 100 literatures there are no more than 3 studies that have the Indian context. Hence, the authors explored this gap on Indian context and efforts are taken to develop the linkage and the relationship between CSP and CFP. The authors also took efforts to explore which of the financial variables are linked and if the results are similar to the already existing studies across other regions.

Hospitals play a vital role in the health and well-being of people. In recent times there are more patients visiting the hospitals owing to various reasons. In a country like Indian where the hospital to patient ratio is very high it is essential to focus towards improving internal processes in order to attain maximum efficiency levels. With the increasing numbers of cancer and related incidents in India, radiology departments in the hospitals play a critical role in the diagnosis and treatment process. Besides, radiology Department also one of the important source of revenue generation for hospitals. The radiology department can provide services like radiograph, Computer Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging and sonography scans and this has contributed to enhanced diagnosis of patients and consequently improved medical treatment world over. With the increasing numbers of patients visiting the radiology department in hospital followed by lack of advanced support from IT that can be used in radiology, coupled with lack of trained administrative and technical staff has created bottlenecks in the Radiology department's process. This operational bottlenecks or inefficiency increase in the waiting time of patients and report generation time has caused inconvenience and dissatisfaction to the patients and has resulted in inefficient utilization of existing services to a number of deserving patients. In this context, our attempt in this paper is to understand and analyze the requirement of Radiology services in Karnataka and measure the (in) efficiency in terms of process flow and waiting time through a primary survey in a hospital with radiology department in Karnataka. Our results and analysis suggest that there is substantial scope to improve the efficiency of radiology departments in Karnataka that not only help in catering to more patients but also help increasing revenue for the hospitals.

Detection of moving object is a challenging task. Object detection is an important technology in the field of computer vision, robotics, surveillance, security etc. The security attacks are increasing day to day. So the human detection's importance is also increased a lot. In these days we are using cameras for security purpose. In this paper trying to develop a algorithm for human detection by analyzing the camera output. Analyze the video and trying to detect the human presence. In order to analyze the video for human detection we are using a morphology based method. By using the edge morphology method detect the human presence.

Creating realistic animations of virtual humans remains comparatively complex and expensive. This research explores the degree to which animation fidelity affects users' gaze behavior when interacting in virtual reality training simulations that include virtual humans. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions, wherein the virtual patient either: 1) was not animated; 2) played idle animations; or 3) played idle animations, looked at the participant when speaking, and lip-synced speech and facial gestures when conversing with the participant. Each participant's gaze was recorded in an inter-personal interactive patient surveillance simulation. Results suggest that conversational and passive animations elicited visual attention in a similar manner, as compared to the no animation condition. Results also suggest that when participants face critical situations in inter-personal medical simulations, visual attention towards the virtual human decreases while gaze towards goal directed activities increases.

We describe a system for experiment standardization and distributing medication in medical trials using a virtual human. In our system, we employed a virtual experimenter that explains the experiment, medication, procedure and risks involved through a large screen display. The participant is able to interact with and ask questions of the virtual experimenter through a touch screen interface on an additional monitor display. During the interaction, the virtual experimenter will present the participant with a pill. The pill is physically distributed by a custom-made Arduino based dispenser. We conducted an initial user evaluation of the system using a placebo response protocol and a perceived pain scale. In the study, participants submerged their hand in a hot water bath before and after interacting with the system and reported their perceived pain response. The system was either a virtual human or text interface that either disseminated a pill stating that it was an analgesic or did not provide a medication. Through this system, we propose the potential use of virtual humans as a method to provide a consistent and standardized interaction between a participant and experimenter, while maintaining the benefits of social interaction in medication trials.

Every task we perform in our day-to-day lives requires us to make judgements about size, distance, depth, etc. The same is true for tasks in an immersive virtual environments (IVE). Increasingly, Virtual Reality (VR) applications are being developed for training and entertainment, many of which require the user to determining whether s/he can pass through an opening. Typically, people determine their ability to pass through an aperture by comparing the width of their shoulders to the width of the opening. Thus, judgments of size and distance in an IVE are necessary for accurate judgments of passability. In this experiment, we empirically evaluate how passability judgments in an IVE, viewed through a Head-Mounted Display (HMD), compare to judgments made in the real world. An exact to scale virtual replica of the room and apparatus was used for the VR condition. Results indicate that the accuracy of passability judgments seem to be comparable to the real world.

This paper details the results of an initial empirical evaluation conducted to examine how stereoscopic viewing and haptic feedback affects fine motor actions in a pick-and-place task, similar to the peg transfer task in an FLS training curriculum for laproscopic sugical training. In a between subjects experiment, we examined the effect of stereoscopic viewing and simulated tactile feedback during the fine motor actions of a participants' actions in the near field on the number of collisions and time to complete the task. We found that stereo and haptic feedback contributed to the effectiveness of task performance in different ways. Specifically, we found that the mean time to complete the trials was significantly higher in the abcense of tactile feedback as compared to when it was present, and the mean number of collisions was significantly higher in the presence of stereo as compared to when it was absent.

Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) are becoming more accessible and more widely utilized for training. Previous research has shown that the matching of visual and proprioceptive information is important for calibration. While research has demonstrated that self-avatars can enhance ones' sense of presence and improve distance perception, the effects of self-avatar fidelity on near field distance estimations has yet to be investigated. This study tested the effect of avatar fidelity on the accuracy of distance estimations in the near-field. Performance with a virtual avatar was also compared to real-world performance. Three levels of fidelity were tested; 1) an immersive self-avatar with realistic limbs, 2) a low-fidelity self-avatar showing only joint locations, and 3) end-effector only. The results suggest that reach estimations become more accurate as the visual fidelity of the avatar increases, with accuracy for high fidelity avatars approaching real-world performance as compared to low-fidelity and end-effector conditions. In all conditions reach estimations became more accurate after receiving feedback during a calibration phase.

We study the performance of stochastically trained deep neural networks (DNNs) whose synaptic weights are implemented using emerging memristive devices that exhibit limited dynamic range, resolution, and variability in their programming characteristics. We show that a key device parameter to optimize the learning efficiency of DNNs is the variability in its programming characteristics. DNNs with such memristive synapses, even with dynamic range as low as $15$ and only $32$ discrete levels, when trained based on stochastic updates suffer less than $3\%$ loss in accuracy compared to floating point software baseline. We also study the performance of stochastic memristive DNNs when used as inference engines with noise corrupted data and find that if the device variability can be minimized, the relative degradation in performance for the Stochastic DNN is better than that of the software baseline. Hence, our study presents a new optimization corner for memristive devices for building large noise-immune deep learning systems., Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, accepted at ICECS 2017

In this paper, we propose a modified harvest-then cooperate (M-HTC) protocol to improve the performance of two hop relay assisted next generation cellular networks. In the proposed M-HTC protocol, the relay node (RN) harvests energy from base station (BS) during downlink and uses this energy for downlink wireless information transfer to the mobile node (MN). Similarly, RN harvests energy from BS during uplink and uses this energy for relaying the uplink information from MN to BS. We derive a mathematical expression for the end-to-end uplink outage probability of the wireless powered relay assisted cellular network under the proposed M-HTC protocol. We also consider relay location optimization, i.e, finding the optimal relay position that minimizes the end-to-end uplink outage probability of the network. Numerical results show that the M-HTC protocol shows better outage performance than conventional HTC.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are the third generation of artificial neural networks that closely mimic the time encoding and information processing aspects of the human brain. It has been postulated that these networks are more efficient for realizing cognitive computing systems compared to second generation networks that are widely used in machine learning algorithms today. In this paper, we review the learning algorithms, hardware demonstrations and potential applications of SNN based learning systems.

In this paper, we investigate the problem of finding optimal location of the relay node in an underlay cognitive full-duplex relay (CogFDR) network. First of all, an analytical model for the outage probability experienced by the secondary user in a CogFDR network assuming Rayleigh fading channel and neglecting the interference from the primary transmitter is considered. Then, a non-linear optimization problem to find the optimal relay position by minimizing the outage probability is described. To solve this optimization problem, we make use of genetic algorithm. The performance gain of optimal relay positioning is also studied in terms of improvement in outage probability.

Health care is most important for a healthy society. It is defined as diagnosis, prevention and treatment of diseases. Heart being an important functional unit of body, ECG which records it electrical activity plays important role in many diagnosis. Conventional ECG recording, done by 12 leads which require patients in rest is performed at clinical levels. Mobile ECG monitoring which can perform like clinical methods will help in early or fast diagnosis. For this we require a novel method in which real time and computation issues is taken into consideration so that we can balance the clinical system in which incorporating a complex computational system is not a problem. ECG acquisition is done using two electrodes so as to get Lead II values. There exists different algorithms for peak detection, but they require efficient computation and powerful processing. An algorithm is designed so as to nullify errors with reduced computation. Using the algorithm R peaks are detected and their nature is analyzed for arrhythmia detection. This whole setup is implemented as embedded system.

IEEE 802.11ad standard defines high data rate WLAN at 60 GHz. It uses a hybrid MAC protocol consists of CSMA/CA and TDMA. This paper investigates theoretical maximum throughput of IEEE 802.11ad milli meter Wave (mmWave) WLAN during contention based access period (CBAP). We describe an analytical model to compute the maximum achievable throughput with two level MAC frame aggregation for various physical layer modulation and coding schemes. ns-3 simulations are used for validating the result. MAC frame size which maximizes the throughput under error prone channels is also calculated. Numerical and simulation results show that frame aggregation is mandatory for 802.11ad WLAN systems.

A mathematical model, a continuation of the work by Zhao et al. [1] that describes particle trajectories during chemical mechanical polishing, was extended to account for the effects of larger particles, particle location changes due to slurry dispensing and in-situ conditioning. Material removal rate (MRR) and within wafer non-uniformity (WIWNU) were determined based on the calculated particle trajectory densities in the absence of chemical activity from the slurry. The effect of pad-wafer rotary dynamics and reciprocating motion of the wafer carrier on MRR uniformity were included. It was also shown that in-situ conditioning improves the MRR uniformity of the polished wafers. Using the model, we also investigated the effect of particle size distribution and large particles (>200 nm in diameter) on WIWNU and scratch growth. It was shown that the presence of even 1 wt.% of larger particles can deteriorate the WIWNU.

In this paper, we present Augmented-Art Creation Tool (AACT) as our solution to the IEEE 3DUI 2017 challenge. Our solution employs multi-finger touch gestures along with the built-in camera and accelerometer on a mobile device for interaction in an Augmented Reality (AR) setup. We leverage a user's knowledge of touch gestures like pinching, swiping, etc. and physical device movement to interact with the environment making the metaphor intuitive. The system helps prevent occlusion by using the accelerometer and allowing touch gestures anywhere on the screen. The interaction metaphor allows for successful art piece creation and assembly.

In this study, we empirically evaluated the effects of presentation method and simulation fidelity on task performance and psychomotor skills acquisition in an immersive bimanual simulation towards precision metrology education. In a 2 × 2 experiment design, we investigated a large-screen immersive display (LSID) with a head-mounted display (HMD), and the presence versus absence of gravity. Advantages of the HMD include interacting with the simulation in a more natural manner as compared to using a large-screen immersive display due to the similarities between the interactions afforded in the virtual compared to the real-world task. Suspending the laws of physics may have an effect on usability and in turn could affect learning outcomes. Our dependent variables consisted of a pre and post cognition questionnaire, quantitative performance measures, perceived workload and system usefulness, and a psychomotor assessment to measure to what extent transfer of learning took place from the virtual to the real world. Results indicate that the HMD condition was preferable to the immersive display in several metrics while the no-gravity condition resulted in users adopting strategies that were not advantageous for task performance.

The switching activity due to various test vectors has direct effect on amount of power consumption during testing. Due to higher switching activity during test mode compared to the switching activity during functional mode the power consumption may be higher than functional mode power consumption. The excessive average and instantaneous power requirement during slow speed and high speed test conditions may results in test failure and test escapes due to higher IR drop affecting the yield and the quality of the design. It is necessary to study the switching activity, power consumption and IR drop during various test conditions. The objective is to compute test mode power, establish correlation between computed and silicon power consumption data and to analyze IR drop during various test conditions. This study using 32nm design used for implementing face detection algorithm should provide insight into test mode power issues on chips implementing Face detection algorithms and help controlling the overall test environment more efficiently to minimize the power usage and the IR drop.

In this paper, we investigate the outage performance of multihop full duplex decode and forward relay system, in which information gets forwarded from a source node to a destination node with the help of multiple relays in cascade. We derive an exact analytical expression for the end-to-end outage probability considering the effects of co-channel interference caused by inter-relay links and the echo interference at the full duplex relays in independent, non-identical Nakagami-m fading channels. We also provide a highly accurate closed form approximation for the outage probability. We make an extensive comparison of multihop full duplex relaying (FDR) and the equivalent half duplex relaying (HDR) system. The analytical results are corroborated by extensive computer simulation results. We also establish that the closed form approximate model for the outage probability is highly accurate.

To address the problem of underexposure, underrepresentation, and underproduction of diverse professionals in the field of computing, we target middle school education using an idea that combines computational thinking with dance and movement choreography. This lightning talk delves into a virtual reality education and entertainment application named Virtual Environment Interactions (VEnvI). Our in vivo study examines how VEnvI can be used to teach fundamental computer science concepts such as sequences, loops, variables, conditionals, functions, and parallel programming. We aim to reach younger students through a fun and intuitive interface for choreographing dance movements with a virtual character. Our study contrasts the highly immersive and embodied virtual reality metaphor of using VEnvI with a non-immersive desktop metaphor. Additionally, we examine the effects of user attachment by comparing the learning results gained with customizable virtual characters in contrast with character presets. By analyzing qualitative and quantitative user responses measuring cognition, presence, usability, and satisfaction, we hope to find how virtual reality can enhance interest in the field of computer science among middle school students.

The IEEE 802.11ad millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless LAN (WLAN) standard specifies the use of a hybrid MAC protocol consisting of CSMA/CA during the contention based access periods (CBAPs) and TDMA during the service periods (SPs). To mitigate the effects of higher attenuation in the mmWave band, the standard advocates the use of directional antennas. To provide channel access during CBAP, the coverage area around the AP can be divided into several quasi omni (QO) levels. In this paper, our focus is on uplink channel access during CBAP in which every multi-gigabit station (DMG STA) under a QO level contend for channel access using CSMA/CA protocol. We develop an accurate analytical model to compute the saturation throughput of each QO level and that of the network in the CBAP, by closely following the 802.11ad MAC specifications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of directional communication in 802.11ad WLANs.

The goal of this paper is to explore the throughput and energy efficiency of ALOHA based underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs). Primarily, we frame analytical expressions for the throughput and energy efficiency of UW-ALOHA for single hop UASN. We then procure closed form expression for the optimal channel attempt rates that maximize energy efficiency and throughput Independently. In this case, we notice that the attempt rate that maximizes the energy efficiency leads to drop in the network throughput and vice versa. We then consider a cross layer energy optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the energy efficiency of the network while meeting an SNR constraint at the PHY layer and a throughput constraint at the MAC layer. We also consider underwater acoustic channel specific parameters like distance dependent bandwidth and spreading losses for the analysis. Using Karush-Kuhn Tucker conditions, we derive closed form solution for the optimal channel attempt rates that meet the desired objectives. Extensive performance evaluation results show that sensible selection of the attempt rates by the sensor nodes can improve the energy efficiency of the network significantly.

The basic aim of this paper is to present a broad picture of Big Data and to show how information can be retrieved using different methodologies and especially using evolutionary computation techniques that help in the information retrieval process in a better way compared to traditional retrieval techniques. Big data is considered as a collection of large data which are heterogeneous in nature and cannot be handled by traditional computing techniques and require more advanced statistical procedures to extract relevant information from a voluminous pool of data. This paper also covers some of the basic information retrieval models which are used and present a basic outline of evolutionary computation techniques.

Video games have grown in popularity since the 1980's. The largest consumers of video games are youth populations. Previous research has shown cognitive development and learning principles in video games. As a result, there is an increasing interest in games being teaching tools. Gamification is the use of video game elements in non-game applications. In this paper, I proposed a design to a study of applying gamification to a computer programming software, VENVI, in order to promote motivation, engagement, and computational thinking.

We detail the design, implementation, and an initial evaluation of a virtual reality education and entertainment (edutainment) application called Virtual Environment Interactions (VEnvI). VEnvI is an application in which students learn computer science concepts through the process of choreographing movement for a virtual character using a fun and intuitive interface. In this exploratory study, 54 participants as part of a summer camp geared towards promoting participation of women in science and engineering programmatically crafted a dance performance for a virtual human. A subset of those students (16) participated in an immersive embodied interaction metaphor in VEnvI. In creating this metaphor that provides first-person, embodied experiences using self-avatars, we seek to facilitate engagement, excitement and interest in computational thinking. We qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated the extent to which the activities of the summer camp, programming the dance moves, and the embodied interaction within VEnvI facilitated students' edutainment, presence, interest, excitement, and engagement in computing, and the potential to alter their perceptions of computing and computer scientists. Results indicate that students enjoyed the experience and successfully engaged the virtual character in the immersive embodied interaction, thus exhibiting high telepresence and social presence. Students also showed increased interest and excitement regarding the computing field at the end of their summer camp experience using VEnvI.