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Pan Hui

Publications and source records attributed to Pan Hui.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

Ghost Booking as a New Philanthropy Channel: A Case Study on Ukraine-Russia Conflict

The term ghost booking has recently emerged as a new way to conduct humanitarian acts during the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in 2022. The phenomenon describes the events where netizens donate to Ukrainian citizens through no-show bookings on the Airbnb platform. Impressively, the social fundraising act that used to be organized on donation-based crowdfunding platforms is shifted into a sharing economy platform market and thus gained more visibility. Although the donation purpose is clear, the motivation of donors in selecting a property to book remains concealed. Thus, our study aims to explore peer-to-peer donation behavior on a platform that was originally intended for economic exchanges, and further identifies which platform attributes effectively drive donation behaviors. We collect over 200K guest reviews from 16K Airbnb property listings in Ukraine by employing two collection methods (screen scraping and HTML parsing). Then, we distinguish ghost bookings among guest reviews. Our analysis uncovers the relationship between ghost booking behavior and the platform attributes, and pinpoints several attributes that influence ghost booking. Our findings highlight that donors incline to credible properties explicitly featured with humanitarian needs, i.e., the hosts in penury.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2023

Deepfake in the Metaverse: An Outlook Survey

We envision deepfake technologies, which synthesize realistic fake images and videos, will play an important role in the future metaverse. While enhancing users' immersion and experience with synthesized virtual characters and scenes, deepfake can cause serious consequences if used for fraud, impersonation, and dissemination of fake information. In this paper, we introduce the principles, applications, and risks of deepfake technology, and propose some countermeasures to help users and developers in the metaverse deal with the challenges brought by deepfake technologies. Further, we provide an outlook on the future development of deepfake in the metaverse.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

6G Mobile-Edge Empowered Metaverse: Requirements, Technologies, Challenges and Research Directions

The Metaverse has emerged as the successor of the conventional mobile internet to change people's lifestyles. It has strict visual and physical requirements to ensure an immersive experience (i.e., high visual quality, low motion-to-photon latency, and real-time tactile and control experience). However, the current technologies fall short to satisfy these requirements. Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been indispensable to enable low latency and powerful computing. Moreover, the sixth generation (6G) networks promise to provide end users with seamless communications. In this paper, we explore and demonstrate the synergistic relationship between 6G and mobile-edge technologies in empowering the Metaverse with ubiquitous communications and computation. This includes the usage of heterogeneous radios, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS), non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), and digital twins (DTs) - assisted MEC. We also discuss emerging communication paradigms (i.e., semantic communication, holographic-type communication, and haptic communication) to further satisfy the demand for human-type communications and fulfill user preferences and immersive experiences in the Metaverse.

eess.SY↗
arXiv2023

Attention-based QoE-aware Digital Twin Empowered Edge Computing for Immersive Virtual Reality

Metaverse applications such as virtual reality (VR) content streaming, require optimal resource allocation strategies for mobile edge computing (MEC) to ensure a high-quality user experience. In contrast to online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, which can incur substantial communication overheads and longer delays, the majority of existing works employ offline-trained RL algorithms for resource allocation decisions in MEC systems. However, they neglect the impact of desynchronization between the physical and digital worlds on the effectiveness of the allocation strategy. In this paper, we tackle this desynchronization using a continual RL framework that facilitates the resource allocation dynamically for MEC-enabled VR content streaming. We first design a digital twin-empowered edge computing (DTEC) system and formulate a quality of experience (QoE) maximization problem based on attention-based resolution perception. This problem optimizes the allocation of computing and bandwidth resources while adapting the attention-based resolution of the VR content. The continual RL framework in DTEC enables adaptive online execution in a time-varying environment. The reward function is defined based on the QoE and horizon-fairness QoE (hfQoE) constraints. Furthermore, we propose freshness prioritized experience replay - continual deep deterministic policy gradient (FPER-CDDPG) to enhance the performance of continual learning in the presence of time-varying DT updates. We test FPER-CDDPG using extensive experiments and evaluation. FPER-CDDPG outperforms the benchmarks in terms of average latency, QoE, and successful delivery rate as well as meeting the hfQoE requirements and performance over long-term execution while ensuring system scalability with the increasing number of users.

eess.SY↗
arXiv2023

Envisioning an Inclusive Metaverse: Student Perspectives on Accessible and Empowering Metaverse-Enabled Learning

The emergence of the metaverse is being widely viewed as a revolutionary technology owing to a myriad of factors, particularly the potential to increase the accessibility of learning for students with disabilities. However, not much is yet known about the views and expectations of disabled students in this regard. The fact that the metaverse is still in its nascent stage exemplifies the need for such timely discourse. To bridge this important gap, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with 56 university students with disabilities in the United States and Hong Kong to understand their views and expectations concerning the future of metaverse-driven education. We have distilled student expectations into five thematic categories, referred to as the REEPS framework: Recognition, Empowerment, Engagement, Privacy, and Safety. Additionally, we have summarized the main design considerations in eight concise points. This paper is aimed at helping technology developers and policymakers plan ahead of time and improving the experiences of students with disabilities.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2023

Quantum bandit with amplitude amplification exploration in an adversarial environment

The rapid proliferation of learning systems in an arbitrarily changing environment mandates the need for managing tensions between exploration and exploitation. This work proposes a quantum-inspired bandit learning approach for the learning-and-adapting-based offloading problem where a client observes and learns the costs of each task offloaded to the candidate resource providers, e.g., fog nodes. In this approach, a new action update strategy and novel probabilistic action selection are adopted, provoked by the amplitude amplification and collapse postulate in quantum computation theory, respectively. We devise a locally linear mapping between a quantum-mechanical phase in a quantum domain, e.g., Grover-type search algorithm, and a distilled probability-magnitude in a value-based decision-making domain, e.g., adversarial multi-armed bandit algorithm. The proposed algorithm is generalized, via the devised mapping, for better learning weight adjustments on favourable/unfavourable actions and its effectiveness is verified via simulation.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2023

Using a virtual reality interview simulator to explore factors influencing people's behavior

Virtual reality interview simulator (VRIS) provides an effective and manageable approach for candidates prone to being very nervous during interviews, yet, the major anxiety-inducing elements remain unknown. During an interview, the anxiety levels, overall experience, and performance of interviewees might be affected by various circumstances. By analyzing electrodermal activity and questionnaire, we investigated the influence of five variables: (I) \textit{Realism}; (II) \textit{Question type}; (III) \textit{Interviewer attitude}; (IV) \textit{Timing}; and (V) \textit{Preparation}. As such, an orthogonal design $L_8(4^1 \times 2^4)$ with eight experiments ($O A_8$ matrix) was implemented, in which 19 college students took part in the experiments. Considering the anxiety, overall experience, and performance of the interviewees, results indicate that \textit{Question type} plays a major role; secondly, \textit{Realism}, \textit{Preparation}, and \textit{Interviewer attitude} all have some degree of influence; lastly, \textit{Timing} have little to no impact. Specifically, professional interview questions elicited a greater degree of anxiety than personal ones among the categories of interview questions. This work contributes to our understanding of anxiety-stimulating factors during job interviews in virtual reality and provides cues for designing future VRIS.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Can ChatGPT Reproduce Human-Generated Labels? A Study of Social Computing Tasks

The release of ChatGPT has uncovered a range of possibilities whereby large language models (LLMs) can substitute human intelligence. In this paper, we seek to understand whether ChatGPT has the potential to reproduce human-generated label annotations in social computing tasks. Such an achievement could significantly reduce the cost and complexity of social computing research. As such, we use ChatGPT to relabel five seminal datasets covering stance detection (2x), sentiment analysis, hate speech, and bot detection. Our results highlight that ChatGPT does have the potential to handle these data annotation tasks, although a number of challenges remain. ChatGPT obtains an average accuracy 0.609. Performance is highest for the sentiment analysis dataset, with ChatGPT correctly annotating 64.9% of tweets. Yet, we show that performance varies substantially across individual labels. We believe this work can open up new lines of analysis and act as a basis for future research into the exploitation of ChatGPT for human annotation tasks.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2023

Tangible Web: An Interactive Immersion Virtual RealityCreativity System that Travels Across Reality

With the advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology, virtual displays have become integral to how museums, galleries, and other tourist destinations present their collections to the public. However, the current lack of immersion in virtual reality displays limits the user's ability to experience and appreciate its aesthetics. This paper presents a case study of a creative approach taken by a tourist attraction venue in developing a physical network system that allows visitors to enhance VR's aesthetic aspects based on environmental parameters gathered by external sensors. Our system was collaboratively developed through interviews and sessions with twelve stakeholder groups interested in art and exhibitions. This paper demonstrates how our technological advancements in interaction, immersion, and visual attractiveness surpass those of earlier virtual display generations. Through multimodal interaction, we aim to encourage innovation on the Web and create more visually appealing and engaging virtual displays. It is hoped that the greater online art community will gain fresh insight into how people interact with virtual worlds as a result of this work.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

One Small Step for Generative AI, One Giant Leap for AGI: A Complete Survey on ChatGPT in AIGC Era

OpenAI has recently released GPT-4 (a.k.a. ChatGPT plus), which is demonstrated to be one small step for generative AI (GAI), but one giant leap for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Since its official release in November 2022, ChatGPT has quickly attracted numerous users with extensive media coverage. Such unprecedented attention has also motivated numerous researchers to investigate ChatGPT from various aspects. According to Google scholar, there are more than 500 articles with ChatGPT in their titles or mentioning it in their abstracts. Considering this, a review is urgently needed, and our work fills this gap. Overall, this work is the first to survey ChatGPT with a comprehensive review of its underlying technology, applications, and challenges. Moreover, we present an outlook on how ChatGPT might evolve to realize general-purpose AIGC (a.k.a. AI-generated content), which will be a significant milestone for the development of AGI.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2023

Vetaverse: A Survey on the Intersection of Metaverse, Vehicles, and Transportation Systems

Since 2021, the term "Metaverse" has been the most popular one, garnering a lot of interest. Because of its contained environment and built-in computing and networking capabilities, a modern car makes an intriguing location to host its own little metaverse. Additionally, the travellers don't have much to do to pass the time while traveling, making them ideal customers for immersive services. Vetaverse (Vehicular-Metaverse), which we define as the future continuum between vehicular industries and Metaverse, is envisioned as a blended immersive realm that scales up to cities and countries, as digital twins of the intelligent Transportation Systems, referred to as "TS-Metaverse", as well as customized XR services inside each Individual Vehicle, referred to as "IV-Metaverse". The two subcategories serve fundamentally different purposes, namely long-term interconnection, maintenance, monitoring, and management on scale for large transportation systems (TS), and personalized, private, and immersive infotainment services (IV). By outlining the framework of Vetaverse and examining important enabler technologies, we reveal this impending trend. Additionally, we examine unresolved issues and potential routes for future study while highlighting some intriguing Vetaverse services.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

The Dark Side of Augmented Reality: Exploring Manipulative Designs in AR

Augmented Reality (AR) applications are becoming more mainstream, with successful examples in the mobile environment like Pokemon GO. Current malicious techniques can exploit these environments' immersive and mixed nature (physical-virtual) to trick users into providing more personal information, i.e., dark patterns. Dark patterns are deceiving techniques (e.g., interface tricks) designed to influence individuals' behavioural decisions. However, there are few studies regarding dark patterns' potential issues in AR environments. In this work, using scenario construction to build our prototypes, we investigate the potential future approaches that dark patterns can have. We use VR mockups in our user study to analyze the effects of dark patterns in AR. Our study indicates that dark patterns are effective in immersive scenarios, and the use of novel techniques such as `haptic grabbing' to drag participants' attention can influence their movements. Finally, we discuss the impact of such malicious techniques and what techniques can mitigate them.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Your Favorite Gameplay Speaks Volumes about You: Predicting User Behavior and Hexad Type

In recent years, the gamification research community has widely and frequently questioned the effectiveness of one-size-fits-all gamification schemes. In consequence, personalization seems to be an important part of any successful gamification design. Personalization can be improved by understanding user behavior and Hexad player/user type. This paper comes with an original research idea: It investigates whether users' game-related data (collected via various gamer-archetype surveys) can be used to predict their behavioral characteristics and Hexad user types in non-game (but gamified) contexts. The affinity that exists between the concepts of gamification and gaming provided us with the impetus for running this exploratory research. We conducted an initial survey study with 67 Stack Exchange users (as a case study). We discovered that users' gameplay information could reveal valuable and helpful information about their behavioral characteristics and Hexad user types in a non-gaming (but gamified) environment. The results of testing three gamer archetypes (i.e., Bartle, Big Five, and BrainHex) show that they can all help predict users' most dominant Stack Exchange behavioral characteristics and Hexad user type better than a random labeler's baseline. That said, of all the gamer archetypes analyzed in this paper, BrainHex performs the best. In the end, we introduce a research agenda for future work.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Dataset for predicting cybersickness from a virtual navigation task

This work presents a dataset collected to predict cybersickness in virtual reality environments. The data was collected from navigation tasks in a virtual environment designed to induce cybersickness. The dataset consists of many data points collected from diverse participants, including physiological responses (EDA and Heart Rate) and self-reported cybersickness symptoms. The paper will provide a detailed description of the dataset, including the arranged navigation task, the data collection procedures, and the data format. The dataset will serve as a valuable resource for researchers to develop and evaluate predictive models for cybersickness and will facilitate more research in cybersickness mitigation.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

A Twitter Dataset for Pakistani Political Discourse

We share the largest dataset for the Pakistani Twittersphere consisting of over 49 million tweets, collected during one of the most politically active periods in the country. We collect the data after the deposition of the government by a No Confidence Vote in April 2022. This large-scale dataset can be used for several downstream tasks such as political bias, bots detection, trolling behavior, (dis)misinformation, and censorship related to Pakistani Twitter users. In addition, this dataset provides a large collection of tweets in Urdu and Roman Urdu that can be used for optimizing language processing tasks.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2023

FRAS: Federated Reinforcement Learning empowered Adaptive Point Cloud Video Streaming

Point cloud video transmission is challenging due to high encoding/decoding complexity, high video bitrate, and low latency requirement. Consequently, conventional adaptive streaming methodologies often find themselves unsatisfactory to meet the requirements in threefold: 1) current algorithms reuse existing quality of experience (QoE) definitions while overlooking the unique features of point cloud video thus failing to provide optimal user experience, 2) most deep learning approaches require long-span data collections to learn sufficiently varied network conditions and result in long training periods and capacity occupation, 3) cloud training approaches pose privacy risks caused by leakage of user reported service usage and networking conditions. To overcome the limitations, we present FRAS, the first federated reinforcement learning framework, to the best of our knowledge, for adaptive point cloud video streaming. We define a new QoE model which takes the unique features of point cloud video into account. Each client uses reinforcement learning (RL) to train video quality selection with the objective of optimizing the user's QoE under multiple constraints. Then, a federated learning framework is integrated with the RL algorithm to enhance training performance with privacy preservation. Extensive simulations using real point cloud videos and network traces reveal the superiority of the proposed scheme over baseline schemes. We also implement a prototype that demonstrates the performance of FRAS via real-world tests.

cs.MM↗
arXiv2022

Identity, Crimes, and Law Enforcement in the Metaverse

With the boom in metaverse-related projects in major areas of the public's life, the safety of users becomes a pressing concern. We believe that an international legal framework should be established to promote collaboration among nations, facilitate crime investigation, and support democratic governance. In this paper, we discuss the legal concerns of identity, crimes that could occur based on incidents in existing virtual worlds, and challenges to unified law enforcement in the metaverse.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2022

Exploring Mental Health Communications among Instagram Coaches

There has been a significant expansion in the use of online social networks (OSNs) to support people experiencing mental health issues. This paper studies the role of Instagram influencers who specialize in coaching people with mental health issues. Using a dataset of 97k posts, we characterize such users' linguistic and behavioural features. We explore how these observations impact audience engagement (as measured by likes). We show that the support provided by these accounts varies based on their self-declared professional identities. For instance, Instagram accounts that declare themselves as Authors offer less support than accounts that label themselves as Coach. We show that increasing information support in general communication positively affects user engagement. However, the effect of vocabulary on engagement is not consistent across the Instagram account types. Our findings shed light on this understudied topic and guide how mental health practitioners can improve outreach.

cs.SI↗