The joint Student Conference in Interaction Technology and Design and Student Conference in Electronics and Mechatronics is the annual grand finale of the courses Current Topic in Interaction Technology and Design and Student Conference in Electronics and Mechatronics at the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics, Umeå University. The idea and objective of the two courses are to give the students a forum where they can actively participate in scientific research and development through their own ideas and interests.  The course introduces students to independently researching an interesting topic, using a foreign language orally and in writing, writing a scientific article, peer-review and presenting their work at a conference. The conference format was chosen to provide a realistic environment for the presentation of the results. The work has been reviewed both by other participant on the course and members of the department. If the reviews are favorable, the paper is accepted as a full paper at the conference and included in the proceedings. Research that has an interesting topic and potential for future publication is presented as work-in-progress at the conference and the abstract is included in the conference proceedings. This year 10 full papers and 2 work-in-progress papers were accepted at the conference and all included in this proceedings as full papers and extended abstracts, respectively.

With the digitalization and increasing number of Internet users,more and more personal data breaches occur. Many people are not awareof their personal data rights and have not received any instructions on howto act in situations such as when their personal data is abused. This issomething that illustrates the flaws of the Internet. A technology thatprovides solutions to some of these problems, such as trust andtransparency, is the blockchain technology. Hence, the objective of thispaper is to investigate knowledge about personal data rights and to explorethe design of a prototype of a blockchain application for increased securityand transparency. User tests were conducted, highlighting the greatestneeds for users to feel secure and in control over their personal data. Thisknowledge provide the foundation for a prototype based on blockchaintechnology that gives the users increased security and forces those whostore personal data to be more transparent with the usage.

When using online nudges to steer people in the right directionwhile they are making a decision, there is usually one preferable outcome.What might happen if the user experience is inadequate, will the nudgesstill work or might they be undermined? In this paper we investigate thecorrelation between user experience and digital nudges in a decisionmaking process. A user A/B test was conducted to investigate theproblem. The test participants visited one of two websites that includedthe same nudges where they were nudged to choose option (a) instead of(b). The only difference in the websites was the quality of the userexperience, one website design had a good user experience while the otherone offered an inadequate user experience. The results showed thateveryone who was assigned the good user experience chose (a), while twoof the inadequate experience participants chose (b). The results indicatethat user experience design can be used for digital nudging.

Utbildningskvalité är en mycket viktig fråga som diskuteras frekvent inom universitetsvärlden. Såväl kontroll som förbättring av utbildningskvalité är i många lägen starkt kopplat till olika former av utvärderingar. Denna artikel syftar till att illustrera och analysera en utvärderingsmodell som har använts på ett civilingenjörsprogram vid Umeå universitet. Målsättningen med utvärderingsmodellen är att skapa mer holistiska utvärderingar med ett starkare fokus på de intressenter som finns för kvalitetsutveckling - studenter och lärare.

Progression bars and spinners have long been the norm when providing feedback during wait times on the web. However, a more recent trend is the use of skeleton screens. This paper aims to evaluate the usefulness of skeleton screens as an alternative to spinners. This is done user testing a fictional news site with two variations, one showing skeleton screens before content is loaded, and another utilizing spinners. Both a questionnaire and measuring timing while finding a specified article when entering a website for the first time was used. The results show that the page using skeleton screens, scored higher on average on both perceived speed and ease of navigation. However, people using the page with spinners were faster at finding the article when entering the site for the first time. The results of this paper cannot show any significant differences in any of the comparisons between the web pages.

Loading screens are still important in 2018, and there is a reason for that: they provide a great way to give feedback to the user in the interface during wait times after a user's action. Previous research shows that it is essential for a well designed interface and it is a well established way to increase and maintain a user's satisfaction. This study specifically examine the looped, passive animation screen with regards to how the animation speed affects the user. Results suggests that with faster animation, perceived wait time gets shorter and the user is more satisfied.

In recent years, schools made large investments to increase the integration and use of contemporary technologies in teaching and learning.Today iPads and educational applications are growing in popularity and are commonly used. These technologies have a potential beneficial effect on the learning, but studies show that some applications have flaws that hinder these positive effects, for example regarding the feedback provided to the user. This study has determined a number of guidelines for effective feedback in a learning situation and has further shown how well these guidelines can be reached in an educational application today. The study shows that there are both advantages and disadvantages of feedback in an application compared to giving feedback in a more traditional learning situation. Many of the guidelines for effective feedback were found to be possible to reach in an application, and the greatest advantage found in applications is that they can provide feedback timely on each action taken by the pupils.

Images are central to firms in their use of social media platforms as part of their marketing strategy. Images are a powerful online marketing tool as they allow for engagement and personalisation of marketing content for individual customers. However, images can be a double edge sword in the web 2.0 world, where consumers are able to post content to branded social media sites. This study evaluates the benefits of integrating image recognition into social media from the users perspective. The pilot study undertaken found the majority of the participants thought the possibilities presented for image recognition technology are useful, however they showed concern in relation to their privacy if this technology were to be in social media networks. The results also showed that prior familiarity with this technology does not have any significant impact in how social media users feel about having this technology in social media.

Virtual Reality (VR) headsets occlude a significant portion of human face. The real human face is required in many VR applications, for example, video teleconferencing. This paper proposes a wearable camera setup-based solution to reconstruct the real face of a person wearing VR headset. Our solution lies in the core of asymmetrical principal component analysis (aPCA). A user-specific training model is built using aPCA with full face, lips and eye region information. During testing phase, lower face region and partial eye information is used to reconstruct the wearer face. Online testing session consists of two phases, i) calibration phase and ii) reconstruction phase. In former, a small calibration step is performed to align test information with training data, while the later uses half face information to reconstruct the full face using aPCA-based trained-data. The proposed approach is validated with qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Predictive schemes are current standards of video coding. Unfortunately they do not apply well for lightweight devices such as mobile phones. The high encoding complexity is the bottleneck of the Quality of Experience (QoE) of a video conversation between mobile phones. A considerable amount of research has been conducted towards tackling that bottleneck. Most of the schemes use the so-called Wyner-Ziv Video Coding Paradigm, with results still not comparable to those of predictive coding. This paper shows a novel approach for Wyner-Ziv video compression. It is based on the Reinforcement Learning and Hadamard Transform. Our Scheme shows very promising results.