Browsing by Author "Li, Yuan"
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- ARCritique: Supporting Remote Design Critique of Physical Artifacts through Collaborative Augmented RealityLi, Yuan; Lee, Sang Won; Bowman, Douglas A.; Hicks, David; Lages, Wallace S.; Sharma, Akshay (ACM, 2022-12-01)Critique sessions are an essential educational activity at the center of many design disciplines, especially those involving the creation of physical mockups. Conventional approaches often require the students and the instructor to be in the same space to jointly view and discuss physical artifacts. However, in remote learning contexts, available tools (such as videoconferencing) are insufficient due to ineffective, inefficient spatial referencing. This paper presents ARCritique, a mobile Augmented Reality application that allows users to 1) scan physical artifacts, generate corresponding 3D models, and share them with distant instructors; 2) view the model simultaneously in a synchronized virtual environment with remote collaborators; and 3) point to and draw on the model synchronously to aid communication. We evaluated ARCritique with seven Industrial Design students and three faculty to use the app in a remote critique setting. The results suggest that direct support for spatial communication improves collaborative experiences.
- Assisting Spatial Referencing for Collaborative Augmented RealityLi, Yuan (Virginia Tech, 2022-05-27)Spatial referencing denotes the act of referring to a location or an object in space. Since it is often essential in different collaborative activities, good support for spatial referencing could lead to exceptional collaborative experience and performance. Augmented Reality (AR) aims to enhance daily activities and tasks in the real world, including various collaborations and social interactions. Good support for accurate and rapid spatial referencing in collaborative AR often requires detailed environment 3D information, which can be critical for the system to acquire as constrained by current technology. This dissertation seeks to address the issues related to spatial referencing in collaborative AR through 3D user interface design and different experiments. Specifically, we start with investigating the impact of poor spatial referencing on close-range, co-located AR collaborations. Next, we propose and evaluate different pointing ray techniques for object reference at a distance without knowledge from the physical environment. We further introduce marking techniques aiming to accurately acquire the position of an arbitrary point in 3D space that can be used for spatial referencing. Last, we provide a systematic assessment of an AR collaborative application that supports efficient spatial referencing in remote learning to demonstrate its benefit. Overall, the dissertation provides empirical evidence of spatial referencing challenges and benefits to collaborative AR and solutions to support adequate spatial referencing when model information from the environment is missing.
- The Effects of Incorrect Occlusion Cues on the Understanding of Barehanded Referencing in Collaborative Augmented RealityLi, Yuan; Hu, Donghan; Wang, Boyuan; Bowman, Douglas A.; Lee, Sang Won (Frontiers, 2021-07-01)In many collaborative tasks, the need for joint attention arises when one of the users wants to guide others to a specific location or target in space. If the collaborators are co-located and the target position is in close range, it is almost instinctual for users to refer to the target location by pointing with their bare hands. While such pointing gestures can be efficient and effective in real life, performance will be impacted if the target is in augmented reality (AR), where depth cues like occlusion may be missing if the pointer’s hand is not tracked and modeled in 3D. In this paper, we present a study utilizing head-worn AR displays to examine the effects of incorrect occlusion cues on spatial target identification in a collaborative barehanded referencing task. We found that participants’ performance in AR was reduced compared to a real-world condition, but also that they developed new strategies to cope with the limitations of AR. Our work also identified mixed results of the effect of spatial relationships between users.
- Elasticsearch (ELS) CS5604 Fall 2019Li, Yuan; Chekuri, Satvik; Hu, Tianrui; Kumar, Soumya Arvind; Gill, Nicholas (Virginia Tech, 2019-12-12)We are building an Information and Retrieval System that will work as a search engine to support searching, ranking, browsing, and recommendations for two large collections of data. The first collection is part of Virginia Tech's collection of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). The Virginia Tech Library has a large collection of ETDs. Currently, there is an effort being made to digitize the pre-1997 theses and dissertations and load them into VTechWorks. Our data set contains over 30K ETDs. The second collection is of tobacco settlement documents. There are 14 million documents in this data set. We are using a CEPH container to store and retrieve information. To achieve its goals, the project has six teams: Collection Management ETDs, Collection Management Tobacco Settlement Documents, Elasticsearch, Front-end and Kibana, Integration and Implementation, and Text Analytics and Machine Learning. This report addresses the work performed by the Elasticsearch team. The Elasticsearch team helps to enable searching and browsing, which are supported based on: facets associated with information extracted from documents, analysis, classification, clustering, summarization, and other processing. The report describes goals, overview, and the process of implementation with Elasticsearch. The Elasticsearch team works closely with the Kibana and Text Machine Learning groups. The data ingested in Elasticsearch is provided to the Front End team for further visualization. Thus, the report also describes the connections established with the other groups, as a high-level overview of the course project. The user manuals have been provided for the reference of other groups.
- Three essays on corporate governance in the hospitality industryLi, Yuan (Virginia Tech, 2019-11-14)The hospitality industry, with its dynamic business environment, has experienced unprecedented disruption and reconfiguration due to the emergence and success of sharing economy firms and online travel agencies. This turbulence calls for effective governance structures that can motivate managers to act in their shareholders' best interests. Despite the importance of effective corporate governance for firm performance and the topic receiving extensive scholarly attention in the management and finance literatures, there seem to be several gaps and mixed findings in the hospitality academic field. To facilitate scholarly advancement, identify gaps in the current knowledge base, and provide direction for future research, in the first essay I undertake a systematic review of research on corporate governance in the hospitality literature. Based on 115 peer-reviewed articles published since 1961, I identify 21 themes explored by scholars, and find that topics related to institutional ownership, executive compensation determinants, board size, and merger and acquisition (MandA) outcomes are commonly examined, whereas topics related to family ownership, debt, and regulation/law are seldom explored. This review contributes to the literature by taking stock of what we know and offering a one-stop-shop for scholars to understand and extend corporate governance literature published in the hospitality field. While evidence in the general business literature suggests that targets, instead of acquirers, are better off after the acquisition, limited studies in the hospitality industry have shown that both bidders and targets are better off after the merger, suggesting that MandAs are more successful in the hospitality industry than in other industries. In the second essay, I empirically examine whether this is indeed the case and what may explain the potential discrepancy in merger performance. Using a comparative study design and a comprehensive sample over 41 years, I find that overall acquirers gain from MandAs, and hospitality MandAs outperform non-hospitality MandAs. Bidders in the hospitality industry are more likely than non-hospitality bidders to acquire large, related targets, using an all-cash mode of payment. Except for industry relatedness, relative size, cash payment, and unlisted target are all positively related to merger performance. This study contributes to the literature by identifying several factors that can explain the differences in MandA performance between hospitality and non-hospitality firms. Despite the fact that MandAs are frequently pursued as a growth strategy in the hospitality industry, their effect on chief executive officer (CEO) compensation has not been systematically examined. Considering that CEO compensation is an important topic related to firm performance, management, and social responsibility, in the third essay I examine the relationship between MandAs and CEO compensation in a sample of hospitality firms consisting of 1,514 firm-year observations over a period of 27 years. The regression analyses find that CEO compensation is significantly higher in the year after large acquisitions; well-governed firms identified via tenure, the Entrenchment-index, and board independence pay their CEOs higher post-acquisition than poorly-governed firms; the fraction of equity-based compensation is unrelated to MandA propensity; and the fraction of cash-based compensation is negatively related to MandA propensity. The additional analyses indicate that CEOs are rewarded for positive stock returns but not penalized for negative stock returns, and even more so in well-governed firms after acquisition. This study finds that MandAs and corporate governance are determinants of CEO compensation and the form of CEO compensation matters to acquisition decisions in hospitality firms. The findings are of importance for shareholders and the board of directors to design compensation plans that align the interests of managers and shareholders.