Children and young people today are uniquely datafied, tracked, and digitally monitored like no generation before them. Children are increasingly vulnerable to data collection through seemingly benign toys and devices equipped with voice recognition, geolocation, sensors, and cameras, but typically lack awareness or control over these data exchanges, as consent is usually provided by adult caregivers (who may also lack data literacy). Although there have been advancements in legislation and design guidelines, there is a significant need for interdisciplinary approaches to directly empower children in understanding, valuing and benefiting from their personal data, as well as learning to manage it. We ask, how can the CHI community support children to be informed and included in design for and with their personal data? How do we support children to participate in their personal data - and do they want to? This workshop aims to gather designers, researchers and practitioners working on projects relating to children's personal data, and to map out the current practices and methods at play across the CHI community on this critical topic.

WebChucK IDE is a web-based integrated development environment for writing and running ChucK code. WebChucK IDE provides tools and workflows for developing and running ChucK on-the-fly and in any web browser, on desktop and mobile devices. This environment integrates ChucK development with visualization and code-based generative web UI elements to offer an accessible and playful way to program computer music. In this paper, we detail the design and implementation of WebChucK IDE and discuss its various affordances and limitations as a sandbox for learning, experimentation, and art making.

Webchuck is a new platform for real-time web-based music synthesis. Combining expressive music programming power with the ubiquity of web browsers is a game changer, one which we've experienced in recent teaching at Stanford's CCRMA. The paper will describe how this has fulfilled a long-sought promise for accessible music making and simplicity of experimentation. The Chuck music programming language now runs anywhere a browser can and a link is all it takes. Sample-synchronous live coding alongside full-on studio functionality is what a Webchuck can Chuck, thanks to advances in the web audio API.

RFID shows great potentials to build useful sensing applications. However, current RFID sensing can obtain mainly a single-dimensional sensing measurement from each reader-to-tag query, such as phase, RSS, etc. This is sufficient to fulfill the designs that are bounded to the tag's own movement, e.g., the localization of tags. However, it imposes inevitable uncertainty to many sensing tasks relying on the features extracted from the RFID signals, which limits the fidelity of RFID sensing fundamentally and prevents its broader usage in more sophisticated sensing scenarios. This paper presents RF-Wise to push the limit of the RFID-based sensing, motivated by an insightful observation to customize RFID signals. RF-Wise can enrich the existing single-dimensional feature measure to a channel state information (CSI)-like measure with up to 150 dimensional samples across different frequencies concurrently. More importantly, RF-Wise is a software solution atop the standard EPC Gen2 protocol without using any extra hardware, requires only one tag for sensing and works within the ISM band. RF-Wise, so far as we know, is the first system of such a kind. Extensive experiments show that RF-Wise does not impact underlying RFID communications, while by using the features extracted by RF-Wise, applications' sensing performance can be improved remarkably. The source codes of RF-Wise are available at https://cui-zhao.github.io/RF-WISE/.

Blockchain-based supply chains provide a new solution to decentralized multi-party product management. However, existing methods, including ID-based and cryptographic-based solutions, cannot achieve both counterfeit resistance and decentralization in supply chain management. We argue that this dilemma comes from the disconnection and inconsistency of the data records and physical product entities. This paper proposes RF-Chain, a novel decentralized supply chain management solution that uniquely combines data record authentication and physical-layer RFID tag authentication to effectively achieve credibility and counterfeit resistance. The main contribution of this work is to integrate physical-layer authentication of cheap commodity RFID tags into a blockchain-based information management system, and RF-Chain is the first to do so. The proposed cross-layer authentication can effectively defend against counterfeit attacks without relying on a central key management service. Real-world experiments utilizing the Ethereum (ETH) platform and more than 100 RFID tags demonstrate that RF-Chain is secure, effective, time-efficient, and cost-efficient.

Inclusive musical instruments benefit from incorporating wearable interfaces into digital musical instrument design, creating opportunities for bodily felt experiences and movement-based interactions. In this article, we discuss the evolution of our inclusive design approach behind the design and performance practices of three wearable musical instruments. By focusing on the embodied, somatic, and tacit dimensions of movement-based musical interaction, we evaluate these case studies, combining the third and first-person perspectives. The design and implementation of the wearable sensing, utilizing the additive manufacturing techniques, are discussed for each instrument and its performer in specific cases of musical expression. This article further discusses how our approach integrates music performance as a crucial step into design and evaluation, utilizing these performance practices and such collaborative settings for improved diversity and inclusion. Finally, we examine how our design approach evolves from user-centered design to more participatory practices, offering people with diverse abilities a shared music performance space.

In this article, we discuss the creation of The Furies: A LaptOpera, a new opera for laptop orchestra and live vocal soloists that tells the story of the Greek tragedy Electra. We outline the principles that guided our instrument design with the aim of forging direct and visceral connections between the music, the narrative, and the relationship between characters in ways we can simultaneously hear, see, and feel. Through detailed case studies of three instruments—The Rope and BeatPlayer, the tether chorus, and the autonomous speaker orchestra—this paper offers tools and reflections to guide instrument-building in service of narrative-based works through a unified multimedia art form.

This article presents design and performance practices for movement-based digital musical instruments. We develop the notion of borrowed gestures, which is a gesture-first approach that composes a gestural vocabulary of nonmusical body movements combined with nuanced instrumental gestures. These practices explore new affordances for physical interaction by transferring the expressive qualities and communicative aspects of body movements; these body movements and their qualities are borrowed from nonmusical domains. By merging musical and nonmusical domains through movement interaction, borrowed gestures offer shared performance spaces and cross-disciplinary practices. Our approach centers on use of the body and the design with body movement when developing digital musical instruments. The performer's body becomes an intermediate medium, physically connecting and uniting the performer and the instrument. This approach creates new ways of conceptualizing and designing movement-based musical interaction: (1) offering a design framework that transforms a broader range of expressive gestures (including nonmusical gestures) into sonic and musical interactions, and (2) creating a new dynamic between performer and instrument that reframes nonmusical gestures-such as dance movements or sign language gestures-into musical contexts. We aesthetically evaluate our design framework and performance practices based on three case studies: Bodyharp, Armtop, and Felt Sound. As part of this evaluation, we also present a set of design principles as a way of thinking about designing movement-based digital musical instruments.

We present a practical philosophy for how to design artfully for virtual reality. Framing this design philosophy is the balance of doing vs. being as a central duality in all design for VR. The values underlying this way of thinking draw from a diverse set of interdisciplinary perspectives and from our own practice in computer music design. We develop a set of design principles, through which we critically analyse several popular musical VR experiences as well as some of our own creations. These include a tool for audio programming in VR, a set of design etudes on musical instruments and a multi-movement artistic work. Through these principles and case studies, we hope to provide lenses – both critical and practical – to inform the design of artful VR.

We present a musical interface specifically designed for inclusive performance that offers a shared experience for both individuals who are hard of hearing as well as those who are not. This interface borrows gestures (with or without their overt meaning) from American Sign Language (ASL), rendered using low-frequency sounds that can be felt by everyone in the performance. The Hard of Hearing cannot experience the sound in the same way. Instead, they are able to physically experience the vibrations, nuances, contours, as well as their correspondences with the hand gestures. Those who are not hard of hearing can experience the sound, but also feel it just the same, with the knowledge that the same physical vibrations are shared by everyone. The employment of sign language adds another aesthetic dimension to the instrument –a nuanced borrowing of a functional communication medium for an artistic end.

Despite a history spanning nearly 30 years, best practices for the use of virtual reality (VR) in computer music performance remain exploratory. Here, we present a case study of a laptop orchestra performance entitled Resilience, involving one VR performer and an ensemble of instrumental performers, in order to explore values and design principles for incorporating this emerging technology into computer music performance. We present a brief history at the intersection of VR and the laptop orchestra. We then present the design of the piece and distill it into a set of design principles. Broadly, these design principles address the interplay between the different conflicting perspectives at play: those of the VR performer, the ensemble, and the audience. For example, one principle suggests that the perceptual link between the physical and virtual world maybe enhanced for the audience by improving the performers’ sense of embodiment. We argue that these design principles are a form of generalized knowledge about how we might design laptop orchestra pieces involving virtual reality.

What is the nature of design, and the meaning it holds in human life? What does it mean to design well-to design ethically? How can the shaping of technology reflect our values as human beings? Drawing from the unconventional book Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime [1], this keynote breaks down the designs of everyday tools, software, toys, musical instruments, and social experiences, examining the ways in which we shape technology and how technology shapes our society, and us in turn. This is a meditation for the "engineer with a soul" as well as for anyone curious (or concerned) about technology - not only what it does for us, but also what it does to us.

This paper introduces the FAUST Physical Modeling Library, an environment to create physical models of musical instruments in a modular way in the FAUST programming language. Low and high level elements can be combined to implement existing or completely novel instruments. Various examples of physical models are provided. The combined use of mesh2faust, a tool to generate FAUST physical models from 3D drawings, and of the FAUST Physical Modeling Library is also demonstrated through the implementation of a marimba physical model.

RFID tag authentication is challenging because most commodity tags cannot run cryptographic algorithms. Prior research demonstrates that physical layer information based authentication is a promising solution, which uses special features from the physical backscatter signals from tags as their fingerprints. However, our recent studies show that existing physical-layer authentication may fail if feature collection and authentication are conducted in different locations, due to location-dependent noises, environmental factors, or reader hardware differences. This paper presents a new physical layer authentication scheme, called Butterfly, which is resilient to environment and location changes. Butterfly utilizes a pair of adjacent tags as an identifier of each object. By using the difference between the RF signals of the two tags as their fingerprint, the environmental factors can be effectively canceled. Butterfly is fully compatible with commodity RFID systems and standards. We set up a prototype Butterfly using commodity readers, tags, and RF devices. Extensive experiments show that Butterfly achieves high authentication accuracy for substantially different environments and device changes.

With the rapid development of Internet technology, the spread of bloody video has become increasingly serious, causing huge harm to society. In this paper, a bloody video recognition method based on audio-visual feature fusion is proposed to complement the limitation of the single vision-modality methods. In the absence of open bloody video data, this paper first constructed a database of bloody videos through web crawlers and data augmentation methods; then it used CNN and LSTM methods to extract the spatiotemporal features of visual channels. Meanwhile, the audio channel features were extracted directly from the original waveforms using the 1D convolutional network. Finally, the neural network based on the audio-visual feature fusion layer was constructed to achieve the early fusion of multimodal cues. The accuracy of the proposed method on the bloody video test data is 95%. The experimental results on self-built bloody video databases demonstrate that the extracted audio-visual feature representations are effective and the proposed multimodal fusion model can obtain the better and discriminative recognition performance than the single-channel model.