Interview with Beat Signer

Beat Signer is Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and co-director of the Web & Information Systems Engineering (WISE) research lab. He received a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich where he has also been leading the Interactive Paper lab as a senior researcher for four years. He is an internationally distinguished expert in cross-media technologies and interactive paper solutions. His further research interests include human-information interaction, document engineering, data physicalisation, mixed reality as well as multimodal interaction. He has published more than 100 papers on these topics at international conferences and journals, and received multiple best paper awards. Beat has 20 years of experience in research on cross-media information management and multimodal user interfaces. As part of his PhD research, he investigated the use of paper as an interactive user interface and developed the resource-selector-link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel. With the interactive paper platform (iPaper), he strongly contributed to the interdisciplinary European Paper++ and PaperWorks research projects and the seminal research on paper-digital user interfaces led to innovative cross-media publishing solutions and novel forms of paper-based human-computer interaction. The RSL hypermedia metamodel is nowadays widely applied in his research lab and has, for example, been used for cross-media personal information management, an extensible cross-document link service, the MindXpres presentation platform as well as in a framework for cross-device and Internet of Things applications. For more details, please visit https://beatsigner.com.

Critical Qualitative Methodologies

Critical qualitative scholarship offers humble grounds and many unforeseen possibilities to seek and promote justice, critical global engagement, and diverse epistemologies. This dialogical and interactive paper is based on a panel session at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry that highlighted diverse areas of critical qualitative inquiry, namely justice, difference, ethics, and equity. Authors in this paper share their critical qualitative research practices and provide examples of how justice can be addressed through research foci, methods, theories, and ethical practices.

PaperCAD: A System for Interrogating CAD Drawings Using Small Mobile Computing Devices Combined with Interactive Paper

Smartphones have become indispensable computational tools. However, some tasks can be difficult to perform on a smartphone because these devices have small displays. Here, we explore methods for augmenting the display of a smartphone, or other PDA, using interactive paper. Specifically, we present a prototype interface that enables a user to interactively interrogate technical drawings using an Anoto-based smartpen and a PDA. Our software system, called PaperCAD, enables users to query geometric information from CAD drawings printed on Anoto dot-patterned paper. For example, the user can measure a distance by drawing a dimension arrow. The system provides output to the user via a smartpen’s audio speaker and the dynamic video display of a PDA. The user can select either verbose or concise audio feedback, and the PDA displays a video image of the portion of the drawing near the pen tip. The project entails advances in the interpretation of pen input, such as a method that uses contextual information to interpret ambiguous dimensions and a technique that uses a hidden Markov model to correct interpretation errors in handwritten equations. Results of a user study suggest that our user interface design and interpretation techniques are effective and that users are highly satisfied with the system.