Gang Li

Gang Li, Gilles Baechler, Manuel Tragut et al.

The layout of a mobile screen is a critical data source for UI design research and semantic understanding of the screen. However, UI layouts in existing datasets are often noisy, have mismatches with their visual representation, or consists of generic or app-specific types that are difficult to analyze and model. In this paper, we propose the CLAY pipeline that uses a deep learning approach for denoising UI layouts, allowing us to automatically improve existing mobile UI layout datasets at scale. Our pipeline takes both the screenshot and the raw UI layout, and annotates the raw layout by removing incorrect nodes and assigning a semantically meaningful type to each node. To experiment with our data-cleaning pipeline, we create the CLAY dataset of 59,555 human-annotated screen layouts, based on screenshots and raw layouts from Rico, a public mobile UI corpus. Our deep models achieve high accuracy with F1 scores of 82.7% for detecting layout objects that do not have a valid visual representation and 85.9% for recognizing object types, which significantly outperforms a heuristic baseline. Our work lays a foundation for creating large-scale high quality UI layout datasets for data-driven mobile UI research and reduces the need of manual labeling efforts that are prohibitively expensive.

Forrest Huang, Gang Li, Xin Zhou et al.

The design process of user interfaces (UIs) often begins with articulating high-level design goals. Translating these high-level design goals into concrete design mock-ups, however, requires extensive effort and UI design expertise. To facilitate this process for app designers and developers, we introduce three deep-learning techniques to create low-fidelity UI mock-ups from a natural language phrase that describes the high-level design goal (e.g. "pop up displaying an image and other options"). In particular, we contribute two retrieval-based methods and one generative method, as well as pre-processing and post-processing techniques to ensure the quality of the created UI mock-ups. We quantitatively and qualitatively compare and contrast each method's ability in suggesting coherent, diverse and relevant UI design mock-ups. We further evaluate these methods with 15 professional UI designers and practitioners to understand each method's advantages and disadvantages. The designers responded positively to the potential of these methods for assisting the design process.

Kang Wang, Xueqian Wang, Gang Li

Brain Computer Interface (BCI) can help patients of neuromuscular diseases restore parts of the movement and communication abilities that they have lost. Most of BCIs rely on mapping brain activities to device instructions, but limited number of brain activities decides the limited abilities of BCIs. To deal with the problem of limited ablility of BCI, this paper verified the feasibility of constructing BCI based on decoding imagined speech electroencephalography (EEG). As sentences decoded from EEG can have rich meanings, BCIs based on EEG decoding can achieve numerous control instructions. By combining a modified EEG feature extraction mehtod with connectionist temporal classification (CTC), this paper simulated decoding imagined speech EEG using synthetic EEG data without help of speech signal. The performance of decoding model over synthetic data to a certain extent demonstrated the feasibility of constructing BCI based on imagined speech brain signal.