Haluk O. Bingol

Dogukan Erenel, Haluk O. Bingol

Recent trend of touch-screen devices produces an accessibility barrier for visually impaired people. On the other hand, these devices come with sensors such as accelerometer. This calls for new approaches to human computer interface (HCI). In this study, our aim is to find an alternative approach to classify 20 different hand gestures captured by iPhone 3GS's built-in accelerometer and make high accuracy on user-independent classifications using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) with dynamic warping window sizes. 20 gestures with 1,100 gesture data are collected from 15 normal-visioned people. This data set is used for training. Experiment-1 based on this data set produced an accuracy rate of 96.7~\%. In order for visually impaired people to use the system, a gesture recognition based "talking" calculator is implemented. In Experiment-2, 4 visually impaired end-users used the calculator and obtained 95.5~\% accuracy rate among 17 gestures with 720 gesture data totally. Contributions of the techniques to the end result is also investigated. Dynamic warping window size is found to be the most effective one. The data and the code is available.

Ibrahim Cimentepe, Haluk O. Bingol

An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are physically close to each other. Clearly these groups are relatively small compared to the entire population. We restrict selection of the teachers from such small groups, called imitation sets, around parents. Then the child learns language from a teacher selected within the imitation set of her parent. As a result, there are subcommunities with their own languages developed. Within subcommunity comprehension is found to be high. The number of languages is related to the relative size of imitation set by a power law.

Metin Doslu, Haluk O. Bingol

It is hard to detect important articles in a specific context. Information retrieval techniques based on full text search can be inaccurate to identify main topics and they are not able to provide an indication about the importance of the article. Generating a citation network is a good way to find most popular articles but this approach is not context aware. The text around a citation mark is generally a good summary of the referred article. So citation context analysis presents an opportunity to use the wisdom of crowd for detecting important articles in a context sensitive way. In this work, we analyze citation contexts to rank articles properly for a given topic. The model proposed uses citation contexts in order to create a directed and weighted citation network based on the target topic. We create a directed and weighted edge between two articles if citation context contains terms related with the target topic. Then we apply common ranking algorithms in order to find important articles in this newly created network. We showed that this method successfully detects a good subset of most prominent articles in a given topic. The biggest contribution of this approach is that we are able to identify important articles for a given search term even though these articles do not contain this search term. This technique can be used in other linked documents including web pages, legal documents, and patents.