Abstract:

As we inevitably step deeper and deeper into a world connected via the Internet, more and more information will be exchanged digitally. Displays are the interface between digital information and each individual. Naturally, one fundamental goal of displays is to reproduce information as realistically as possible since humans still care a lot about what happens in the real world. Human eyes are the receiving end of such information exchange; therefore it is impossible to study displays without studying human visual system. In fact, the design of displays is rather closely coupled with what human eyes are capable of perceiving. For example, we are less interested in building displays that emit light in the invisible spectrum.

This dissertation explores how we can augment displays with computation, which takes both display hardware and the human visual system into consideration. Four novel projects on display technologies are included in this dissertation. By taking advantage of the fast growing power of computation and sensors, these four novel display setups - in combination with display algorithms - advance the frontier of computational display research.

The field of computer science has long been plagued by issues of diversity – in particular, attracting and retaining those historically marginalized in computing contexts. This is a great loss to the field, to the future of innovation, and to society. Perhaps most importantly, it is an incalculable loss to those populations excluded from pursuing a passion for computing in the first place.

This dissertation chronicles a collection of projects aimed at broadening perceptions of computing, who is participating in computing, and what kinds of artifacts are created with computing. These projects leverage extensive fieldwork in the educational domains of computational craft and open source contribution; they entail (1) course design at the college level and (2) tool and curriculum design for a more open-ended audience of hobbyists and educators. The contribution of this dissertation is documentation of these design processes, along with my subsequent reflections, recommendations, and analysis.

First, I share my experience designing two courses developed while on faculty at Berea College: Craft of Computing, which aims to attract a diversity of first- and second-year students to computing, and Open Source Software Engineering, which seeks to retain a diversity of upperclassmen through graduation and into computing careers beyond. Second, I revisit my own prior work in e-textiles tool/curriculum design, sharing long-term impact analysis for the LilyTiny sewable microcontroller and accompanying workshop guide.

Evidence so far suggests that my forays into college course design successfully piqued students' interest in new domains, while positively influencing their confidence, identity, and sense of belonging. Analysis of the LilyTiny and accompanying workshop curriculum is also promising; it shows that an inexpensive and stable tool, coupled with freely available instructional resources, can indeed achieve widespread adoption in a market suggestive of novice and educational use.

Crowdsourcing is a powerful approach to solve some of the biggest problems today - social and scientific. To harness the potential of crowdsourcing, researchers have often relied and successfully used crowd marketplaces such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. However, in spite of a large worker base and past successes, these platforms come with their own limitations. 40% of all the tasks are spam on Mechanical Turk; and it’s also difficult to accomplish tasks which require a broader participation base, or expert knowledge. Citizen crowd, at the same time, involves distributed group of people with diverse background and skills; who might organize to accomplish tasks or solve problems without engaging with paid crowd platforms. The motivation for them lies in reasons other than micro-payments.

In this dissertation, I explore problems of varying size and duration, where mobilizing the citizen crowd can achieve worthwhile goals. To investigate the possibilities with citizen crowdsourcing, I built systems and ran initiatives that require different level of expertise. This thesis highlights three projects, ranging from seconds of micro contributions to months of highly intellectual contributions. To begin with, we built a mobile lock screen application, that supports completion of quick microtasks in short bursts of time - each time someone unlocks their phone. Next, we launched first of its kind large scale distributed and time-critical campaign in India; where we mobilized the crowd and studied aspects around team building, collaboration, incentives and communication channel; to achieve a common goal. Finally, we ran a first of its kind "research-at-scale" initiative, that explores the possibility of crowdsourcing large open ended problems - by connecting professors with students from around the world - providing access and educational value. All these initiatives have engaged thousands of people from around the world, and we can conclude that it is possible to mobilize the citizen crowd to accomplish worthy goals.

We live in a digital age. As more of our interactions are mediated by computers, their visual displays become our windows to the world. Every year, new and `more-realistic' displays bring the world to our fingertips, and we recognize the quaint limits of last year's printers, televisions, and phones. This dissertation pushes display technology on four fronts, each immersing us more deeply in the scene we're shown, letting us forget the display itself.

First, we introduce printed photos that respond to ambient light as would the depicted 3D scene. Shadows and shading in a printed image change to match its new lighting environment. With a 3D object and a print side by side, a light to their right will casts shadows to the left on both. Shiny, dimpled `Reflectance Paper' - with opaque ink on an overlaid transparency - selectively blocks light from each direction independently.

Second, we look to 3D displays, where stereo glasses funnel different images to each eye. Typical 3D displays show a confusing double-image to those not wearing stereo glasses. Our 3D+2DTV gives a 3D view to those with the glasses, but presents a single, 2D view to those without. For those without glasses, we cancel one of the two stereo images with an inverted third image that only they see.

Third, we increase the fidelity of mobile displays' power-saving backlight dimming. With maximum brightness reduced, intermediate brightness levels are remapped to preferentially retain detail at strong edges in the image.

Fourth, we personalize photography. Displaying photos with content-aware image manipulations and eyetrack-based saliency subtly preserves photographers' intentions as recorded in their eye gaze history.

Display technology's relentless evolution enriches our increasingly digitized world. This dissertation's four contributions raise the immersiveness of our digital portals, heightening our view of the world and our communication with one another.

The work reported here is the first part of a larger effort focused on efficient numerical simulation of redox zone development in contaminated aquifers. The sequential use of various electron acceptors, which is governed by the energy yield of each reaction, gives rise to redox zones. The large difference in energy yields between the various redox reactions leads to systems of equations that are extremely ill-conditioned. These equations are very difficult to solve, especially in the context of coupled fluid flow, solute transport, and geochemical simulations. We have developed a general, rational method to solve such systems where we focus on the dominant reactions, compartmentalizing them, in a manner that is analogous to the redox zones that are often observed in the field. The compartmentalized approach allows us to easily solve a complex geochemical system as a function of time and energy yield, laying the foundation for our ongoing work in which we couple the reaction network, for the development of redox zones, to a model of subsurface fluid flow and solute transport. Our method (i) solves the numerical system without evoking a redox parameter, (ii) improves the numerical stability of redox systems by choosing which compartment, and thus which reaction network, to use based upon the concentration ratios of key constituents, (iii) simulates the development of redox zones as a function of time without the use of inhibition factors or switching functions, and (iv) can reduce the number of transport equations that need to be solved in space and time. We show, through the use of various model performance evaluation statistics, that the appropriate compartment choice under different geochemical conditions leads to numerical solutions without significant error. The compartmentalized approach described here facilitates the next phase of this effort where we couple the redox zone reaction network to models of fluid flow and solute transport.

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