Heterogeneous social network services, such as Facebook and Twitter, have emerged as popular, and often effective channels for Web users to capture updates from their friends. The explosion in popularity of these social network services, however, has created the problem of “information overload”. The problem is becoming more severe as more and more users have engaged in more than one social net...

The virtuality continuum describes the degrees of positive virtuality under the umbrella term mixed reality. Besides adding virtual information within a mixed environment, diminished reality aims at reducing real world information. Mann defined the term mediated reality (MR), which also considered diminished reality, but without the possibility to describe different degrees of fusion between a ...

Macau’s unique cultural identity as a Special Administrative Region of China has been attributed to its historical blending of East and West and the confluence of the diverse origins of its people. According to definitions from the Bank of English, blending includes: “mixing and mingling”; “to look good together, harmonize”; “a mixture produced by blending.” In terms of the blending of people a...

This paper presents an image blending approach which combines optimal seam finding and transition smoothing for merging a set of aligned source images into a composite panoramic image seamlessly. In this approach, graph cut optimization is used for finding optimal seams in overlapping areas of the source images to create a composite image. If the seams in the composite image are still visible, ...

We investigated the process of design creativity by examining the characteristics of thinking during design activity involving concept synthesis. In our experiments, subjects were asked to perform two tasks to interpret novel noun-noun combinations and to create a design based on novel noun-noun combinations. We analyzed and compared the thinking used in each task using a method reported in cog...

The discontinuities and the large image displacements pose some of the hardest problems in flow estimation. This paper uses a set of filters that change shape to avoid blending of the constraints across discontinuity boundaries. This is done by using an incompatibility measure of the constraints of neighbouring pixels. The algorithm is embedded in a coarse to fine multigrid scheme to address th...

In this paper I explore Fauconnier and Turner's (1998) conceptual blending as an evaluative technique for user interface design. Conceptual blending theory offers a rich model that may account for meaning construction and meaning elaboration in design. Blending has been used previously to analyze jokes (Coulson, 1995), metaphor (Fauconnier & Turner, 1998), and Hebrew verb morphology (Mandelblit...

Amphiphilic block copolymers can assemble into a variety of structures on the nanoscale in selective solvent. The micelle blending protocol offers a simple unique route to reproducibly produce polymer nanostructures. Here we expand this blending protocol to a range of polymer micelle systems and self-assembly routes. We found by exploring a range of variables that the systems must be able to re...

Since 2001, the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network (CTN) has worked to put the results of its trials into the hands of community treatment programs, in large part through its participation in the National Institute on Drug Abuse-Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Blending Initiative and its close involvement with the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment...

Conceptual blending is a cognitive theory whereby elements from diverse, but structurally-related, mental spaces are “blended” giving rise to new conceptual spaces that often possess new powerful interpretative properties, allowing better understanding of known concepts or the emergence of novel concepts altogether. This paper provides an overview of the wide computational methodological spectr...