W&M Featured Events
[PAST EVENT] Nancy Carter, Computer Science - Ph.D. Defense
Abstract:
New personal computing technologies such as smartphones and personal fitness trackers are widely integrated into user lifestyles. Users possess a wide range of skills, characteristics and backgrounds. It is important to understand user technology practices to ensure that new designs are usable and productive. Conversely, it is important to leverage our understanding of user characteristics to optimize new technology efficiency and effectiveness. Our work initially focused on studying older users, and personal fitness tracker users. We applied the insights from these investigations to develop new techniques improving user security protections, computational efficiency, and also enhancing the user experience. We offer that by increasing the usability, efficiency and security of personal computing technology, users will enjoy greater privacy protections along with experiencing greater enjoyment of their personal computing devices.
Our first project resulted in an improved authentication system for older users based on familiar facial images. Our investigation revealed that older users are often challenged by traditional text passwords, resulting in decreased technology use or less than optimal password practices. Our graphical password-based system relies on memorable images from the user?s personal past history. Our usability study demonstrated that this system was easy to use, enjoyable, and fast. We show that this technique is extendable to smartphones.
Personal fitness trackers are very popular devices, often worn by users all day. Our personal fitness tracker investigation provides the first quantitative baseline of usage patterns with this device. By exploring public data, real-world user motivations, reliability concerns, activity levels, and fitness-related socialization patterns were discerned. This knowledge lends insight to active user practices.
Personal user movement data is captured by sensors, then analyzed to provide benefits to the user. The dynamic time warping technique enables comparison of unequal data sequences, and sequences containing events at offset times. Existing techniques target short data sequences. Our Phase-aware Dynamic Time Warping algorithm focuses on a class of sinusoidal user movement patterns, resulting in improved efficiency over existing methods.
Lastly, we describe secure computation techniques to provide privacy protections for both user personal data on the sensor, and important data residing on cloud-based servers providing data sequence comparison services.
Bio:
Nancy Carter is a Ph.D. candidate at William & Mary in the Department of Computer Science. She is advised by Dr. Qun Li. Her research interests are human-computer interaction, and smart personal computing devices. Nancy received a Bachelor?s degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland College Park in 1981, and a Master?s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey California in 1992.