Human attention is a scarce resource in modern computing. A multitude of microtasks vie for user attention to crowdsource information, perform momentary assessments, personalize services, and execute actions with a single touch. A lot gets done when these tasks take up the invisible free moments of the day. However, an interruption at an inappropriate time degrades productivity and causes annoyance. Prior works have exploited contextual cues and behavioral data to identify interruptibility for microtasks with much success. With Quick Question, we explore use of reinforcement learning (RL) to schedule microtasks while minimizing user annoyance and compare its performance with supervised learning. We model the problem as a Markov decision process and use Advantage Actor Critic algorithm to identify interruptible moments based on context and history of user interactions. In our 5-week, 30participant study, we compare the proposed RL algorithm against supervised learning methods. While the mean number of responses between both methods is commensurate, RL is more effective at avoiding dismissal of notifications and improves user experience over time.
Smart ear-worn devices (called earables) are being equipped with various onboard sensors and algorithms, transforming earphones from simple audio transducers to multi-modal interfaces making rich inferences about human motion and vital signals. However, developing sensory applications using earables is currently quite cumbersome with several barriers in the way. First, time-series data from earable sensors incorporate information about physical phenomena in complex settings, requiring machine-learning (ML) models learned from large-scale labeled data. This is challenging in the context of earables because large-scale open-source datasets are missing. Secondly, the small size and compute constraints of earable devices make on-device integration of many existing algorithms for tasks such as human activity and head-pose estimation difficult. To address these challenges, we introduce Auritus, an extendable and open-source optimization toolkit designed to enhance and replicate earable applications. Auritus serves two primary functions. Firstly, Auritus handles data collection, pre-processing, and labeling tasks for creating customized earable datasets using graphical tools. The system includes an open-source dataset with 2.43 million inertial samples related to head and full-body movements, consisting of 34 head poses and 9 activities from 45 volunteers. Secondly, Auritus provides a tightly-integrated hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) optimizer and TinyML interface to develop lightweight and real-time machine-learning (ML) models for activity detection and filters for head-pose tracking. To validate the utlity of Auritus, we showcase three sample applications, namely fall detection, spatial audio rendering, and augmented reality (AR) interfacing. Auritus recognizes activities with 91% leave 1-out test accuracy (98% test accuracy) using real-time models as small as 6-13 kB. Our models are 98-740x smaller and 3-6% more accurate over the state-of-the-art. We also estimate head pose with absolute errors as low as 5 degrees using 20kB filters, achieving up to 1.6x precision improvement over existing techniques. We make the entire system open-source so that researchers and developers can contribute to any layer of the system or rapidly prototype their applications using our dataset and algorithms.
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