arXiv subjects

Tristan Braud

Publications and source records attributed to Tristan Braud.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

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↗

arXiv2022

Beyond the Blue Sky of Multimodal Interaction: A Centennial Vision of Interplanetary Virtual Spaces in Turn-based Metaverse

Human habitation across multiple planets requires communication and social connection between planets. When the infrastructure of a deep space network becomes mature, immersive cyberspace, known as the Metaverse, can exchange diversified user data and host multitudinous virtual worlds. Nevertheless, such immersive cyberspace unavoidably encounters latency in minutes, and thus operates in a turn-taking manner. This Blue Sky paper illustrates a vision of an interplanetary Metaverse that connects Earthian and Martian users in a turn-based Metaverse. Accordingly, we briefly discuss several grand challenges to catalyze research initiatives for the `Digital Big Bang' on Mars.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Decentralized, not Dehumanized in the Metaverse: Bringing Utility to NFTs through Multimodal Interaction

User Interaction for NFTs (Non-fungible Tokens) is gaining increasing attention. Although NFTs have been traditionally single-use and monolithic, recent applications aim to connect multimodal interaction with human behaviour. This paper reviews the related technological approaches and business practices in NFT art. We highlight that multimodal interaction is a currently under-studied issue in mainstream NFT art, and conjecture that multimodal interaction is a crucial enabler for decentralization in the NFT community. We propose a framework that combines a bottom-up approach with AI multimodal process. Through this framework, we put forward integrating human behaviour data into generative NFT units, as "multimodal interactive NFT". Our work displays the possibilities of NFTs in the art world, beyond the traditional 2D and 3D static content.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2022

What is the Metaverse? An Immersive Cyberspace and Open Challenges

The Metaverse refers to a virtual-physical blended space in which multiple users can concurrently interact with a unified computer-generated environment and other users, which can be regarded as the next significant milestone of the current cyberspace. This article primarily discusses the development and challenges of the Metaverse. We first briefly describe the development of cyberspace and the necessity of technology enablers. Accordingly, our bottom-up approach highlights three critical technology enablers for the Metaverse: networks, systems, and users. Also, we highlight a number of indispensable issues, under technological and ecosystem perspectives, that build and sustain the Metaverse.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2022

Re-shaping Post-COVID-19 Teaching and Learning: A Blueprint of Virtual-Physical Blended Classrooms in the Metaverse Era

During the COVID-19 pandemic, most countries have experienced some form of remote education through video conferencing software platforms. However, these software platforms fail to reduce immersion and replicate the classroom experience. The currently emerging Metaverse addresses many of such limitations by offering blended physical-digital environments. This paper aims to assess how the Metaverse can support and improve e-learning. We first survey the latest applications of blended environments in education and highlight the primary challenges and opportunities. Accordingly, we derive our proposal for a virtual-physical blended classroom configuration that brings students and teachers into a shared educational Metaverse. We focus on the system architecture of the Metaverse classroom to achieve real-time synchronization of a large number of participants and activities across physical (mixed reality classrooms) and virtual (remote VR platform) learning spaces. Our proposal attempts to transform the traditional physical classroom into virtual-physical cyberspace as a new social network of learners and educators connected at an unprecedented scale.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Distributed Vehicular Computing at the Dawn of 5G: a Survey

Recent advances in information technology have revolutionized the automotive industry, paving the way for next-generation smart vehicular mobility. Vehicles, roadside units, and other road users can collaborate to deliver novel services and applications. These services and applications require 1) massive volumes of heterogeneous and continuous data to perceive the environment, 2) reliable and low-latency communication networks, 3) real-time data processing that provides decision support under application-specific constraints. Addressing such constraints introduces significant challenges for current communication and computing technologies. Relatedly, the fifth generation of cellular networks (5G) was developed to respond to communication challenges by providing for low-latency, high-reliability, and high bandwidth communications. As a major part of 5G, edge computing allows data offloading and computation at the edge of the network, ensuring low-latency and context-awareness, and 5G efficiency. In this work, we aim at providing a comprehensive overview of the state of research on vehicular computing in the emerging age of 5G and big data.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

Twitter Dataset for 2022 Russo-Ukrainian Crisis

Online Social Networks (OSNs) play a significant role in information sharing during a crisis. The data collected during such a crisis can reflect the large scale public opinions and sentiment. In addition, OSN data can also be used to study different campaigns that are employed by various entities to engineer public opinions. Such information sharing campaigns can range from spreading factual information to propaganda and misinformation. We provide a Twitter dataset of the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian conflict. In the first release, we share over 1.6 million tweets shared during the 1st week of the crisis.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2022

AICP: Augmented Informative Cooperative Perception

Connected vehicles, whether equipped with advanced driver-assistance systems or fully autonomous, require human driver supervision and are currently constrained to visual information in their line-of-sight. A cooperative perception system among vehicles increases their situational awareness by extending their perception range. Existing solutions focus on improving perspective transformation and fast information collection. However, such solutions fail to filter out large amounts of less relevant data and thus impose significant network and computation load. Moreover, presenting all this less relevant data can overwhelm the driver and thus actually hinder them. To address such issues, we present Augmented Informative Cooperative Perception (AICP), the first fast-filtering system which optimizes the informativeness of shared data at vehicles to improve the fused presentation. To this end, an informativeness maximization problem is presented for vehicles to select a subset of data to display to their drivers. Specifically, we propose (i) a dedicated system design with custom data structure and lightweight routing protocol for convenient data encapsulation, fast interpretation and transmission, and (ii) a comprehensive problem formulation and efficient fitness-based sorting algorithm to select the most valuable data to display at the application layer. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype of AICP with a bandwidth-hungry, latency-constrained real-life augmented reality application. The prototype adds only 12.6 milliseconds of latency to a current informativeness-unaware system. Next, we test the networking performance of AICP at scale and show that ACIP effectively filters out less relevant packets and decreases the channel busy time.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2022

From Digital Media to Empathic Reality: A Systematic Review of Empathy Research in Extended Reality Environments

Recent advances in extended reality (XR) technologies have enabled new and increasingly realistic empathy tools and experiences. In XR, all interactions take place in different spatial contexts, all with different features, affordances, and constraints. We present a systematic literature survey of recent work on empathy in XR. As a result, we contribute a research roadmap with three future opportunities in XR-enabled empathy research across both physical and virtual spaces.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Nebula: Reliable Low-latency Video Transmission for Mobile Cloud Gaming

Mobile cloud gaming enables high-end games on constrained devices by streaming the game content from powerful servers through mobile networks. Mobile networks suffer from highly variable bandwidth, latency, and losses that affect the gaming experience. This paper introduces Nebula, an end-to-end cloud gaming framework to minimize the impact of network conditions on the user experience. Nebula relies on an end-to-end distortion model adapting the video source rate and the amount of frame-level redundancy based on the measured network conditions. As a result, it minimizes the motion-to-photon (MTP) latency while protecting the frames from losses. We fully implement Nebula and evaluate its performance against the state of the art techniques and latest research in real-time mobile cloud gaming transmission on a physical testbed over emulated and real wireless networks. Nebula consistently balances MTP latency (<140 ms) and visual quality (>31 dB) even in highly variable environments. A user experiment confirms that Nebula maximizes the user experience with high perceived video quality, playability, and low user load.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2022

DiOS -- An Extended Reality Operating System for the Metaverse

Driven by the recent improvements in device and networks capabilities, Extended Reality (XR) is becoming more pervasive; industry and academia alike envision ambitious projects such as the metaverse. However, XR is still limited by the current architecture of mobile systems. This paper makes the case for an XR-specific operating system (XROS). Such an XROS integrates hardware-support, computer vision algorithms, and XR-specific networking as the primitives supporting XR technology. These primitives represent the physical-digital world as a single shared resource among applications. Such an XROS allows for the development of coherent and system-wide interaction and display methods, systematic privacy preservation on sensor data, and performance improvement while simplifying application development.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

EdgeXAR: A 6-DoF Camera Multi-target Interaction Framework for MAR with User-friendly Latency Compensation

The computational capabilities of recent mobile devices enable the processing of natural features for Augmented Reality (AR), but the scalability is still limited by the devices' computation power and available resources. In this paper, we propose EdgeXAR, a mobile AR framework that utilizes the advantages of edge computing through task offloading to support flexible camera-based AR interaction. We propose a hybrid tracking system for mobile devices that provides lightweight tracking with 6 Degrees of Freedom and hides the offloading latency from users' perception. A practical, reliable and unreliable communication mechanism is used to achieve fast response and consistency of crucial information. We also propose a multi-object image retrieval pipeline that executes fast and accurate image recognition tasks on the cloud and edge servers. Extensive experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of EdgeXAR by building mobile AR Apps upon it. Regarding the Quality of Experience (QoE), the mobile AR Apps powered by EdgeXAR framework run on average at the speed of 30 frames per second with precise tracking of only 1~2 pixel errors and accurate image recognition of at least 97% accuracy. As compared to Vuforia, one of the leading commercial AR frameworks, EdgeXAR transmits 87% less data while providing a stable 30 FPS performance and reducing the offloading latency by 50 to 70% depending on the transmission medium. Our work facilitates the large-scale deployment of AR as the next generation of ubiquitous interfaces.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

All One Needs to Know about Metaverse: A Complete Survey on Technological Singularity, Virtual Ecosystem, and Research Agenda

Since the popularisation of the Internet in the 1990s, the cyberspace has kept evolving. We have created various computer-mediated virtual environments including social networks, video conferencing, virtual 3D worlds (e.g., VR Chat), augmented reality applications (e.g., Pokemon Go), and Non-Fungible Token Games (e.g., Upland). Such virtual environments, albeit non-perpetual and unconnected, have bought us various degrees of digital transformation. The term `metaverse' has been coined to further facilitate the digital transformation in every aspect of our physical lives. At the core of the metaverse stands the vision of an immersive Internet as a gigantic, unified, persistent, and shared realm. While the metaverse may seem futuristic, catalysed by emerging technologies such as Extended Reality, 5G, and Artificial Intelligence, the digital `big bang' of our cyberspace is not far away. This survey paper presents the first effort to offer a comprehensive framework that examines the latest metaverse development under the dimensions of state-of-the-art technologies and metaverse ecosystems, and illustrates the possibility of the digital `big bang'. First, technologies are the enablers that drive the transition from the current Internet to the metaverse. We thus examine eight enabling technologies rigorously - Extended Reality, User Interactivity (Human-Computer Interaction), Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Computer Vision, IoT and Robotics, Edge and Cloud computing, and Future Mobile Networks. In terms of applications, the metaverse ecosystem allows human users to live and play within a self-sustaining, persistent, and shared realm. Therefore, we discuss six user-centric factors -- Avatar, Content Creation, Virtual Economy, Social Acceptability, Security and Privacy, and Trust and Accountability. Finally, we propose a concrete research agenda for the development of the metaverse.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2021

Towards Augmented Reality-driven Human-City Interaction: Current Research on Mobile Headsets and Future Challenges

Interaction design for Augmented Reality (AR) is gaining increasing attention from both academia and industry. This survey discusses 260 articles (68.8% of articles published between 2015 - 2019) to review the field of human interaction in connected cities with emphasis on augmented reality-driven interaction. We provide an overview of Human-City Interaction and related technological approaches, followed by a review of the latest trends of information visualization, constrained interfaces, and embodied interaction for AR headsets. We highlight under-explored issues in interface design and input techniques that warrant further research, and conjecture that AR with complementary Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) is a key enabler for ubiquitous interaction with immersive systems in smart cities. Our work helps researchers understand the current potential and future needs of AR in Human-City Interaction.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

DRLE: Decentralized Reinforcement Learning at the Edge for Traffic Light Control in the IoV

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) enables real-time data exchange among vehicles and roadside units and thus provides a promising solution to alleviate traffic jams in the urban area. Meanwhile, better traffic management via efficient traffic light control can benefit the IoV as well by enabling a better communication environment and decreasing the network load. As such, IoV and efficient traffic light control can formulate a virtuous cycle. Edge computing, an emerging technology to provide low-latency computation capabilities at the edge of the network, can further improve the performance of this cycle. However, while the collected information is valuable, an efficient solution for better utilization and faster feedback has yet to be developed for edge-empowered IoV. To this end, we propose a Decentralized Reinforcement Learning at the Edge for traffic light control in the IoV (DRLE). DRLE exploits the ubiquity of the IoV to accelerate the collection of traffic data and its interpretation towards alleviating congestion and providing better traffic light control. DRLE operates within the coverage of the edge servers and uses aggregated data from neighboring edge servers to provide city-scale traffic light control. DRLE decomposes the highly complex problem of large area control. into a decentralized multi-agent problem. We prove its global optima with concrete mathematical reasoning. The proposed decentralized reinforcement learning algorithm running at each edge node adapts the traffic lights in real time. We conduct extensive evaluations and demonstrate the superiority of this approach over several state-of-the-art algorithms.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2020

A Survey on Computational Politics

Computational Politics is the study of computational methods to analyze and moderate users' behaviors related to political activities such as election campaign persuasion, political affiliation, and opinion mining. With the rapid development and ease of access to the Internet, Information Communication Technologies (ICT) have given rise to massive numbers of users joining online communities and the digitization of analogous data such as political debates. These communities and digitized data contain both explicit and latent information about users and their behaviors related to politics. For researchers, it is essential to utilize data from these sources to develop and design systems that not only provide solutions to computational politics but also help other businesses, such as marketers to increase users, participation and interactions. In this survey, we attempt to categorize main areas in computational politics and summarize the prominent studies in one place to better understand computational politics across different and multidimensional platforms. e.g., online social networks, online forums, and political debates. We then conclude this study by highlighting future research directions, opportunities, and challenges.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Marketplace for AI Models

Artificial intelligence shows promise for solving many practical societal problems in areas such as healthcare and transportation. However, the current mechanisms for AI model diffusion such as Github code repositories, academic project webpages, and commercial AI marketplaces have some limitations; for example, a lack of monetization methods, model traceability, and model auditabilty. In this work, we sketch guidelines for a new AI diffusion method based on a decentralized online marketplace. We consider the technical, economic, and regulatory aspects of such a marketplace including a discussion of solutions for problems in these areas. Finally, we include a comparative analysis of several current AI marketplaces that are already available or in development. We find that most of these marketplaces are centralized commercial marketplaces with relatively few models.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Trustworthy AI in the Age of Pervasive Computing and Big Data

The era of pervasive computing has resulted in countless devices that continuously monitor users and their environment, generating an abundance of user behavioural data. Such data may support improving the quality of service, but may also lead to adverse usages such as surveillance and advertisement. In parallel, Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are being applied to sensitive fields such as healthcare, justice, or human resources, raising multiple concerns on the trustworthiness of such systems. Trust in AI systems is thus intrinsically linked to ethics, including the ethics of algorithms, the ethics of data, or the ethics of practice. In this paper, we formalise the requirements of trustworthy AI systems through an ethics perspective. We specifically focus on the aspects that can be integrated into the design and development of AI systems. After discussing the state of research and the remaining challenges, we show how a concrete use-case in smart cities can benefit from these methods.

cs.CY↗