Abstract. As a daily activity, home cooking is an act of care for family members. Most family cooks are willing to learn healthy cooking. However, learning healthy cooking knowledge and putting the learned knowledge into real cooking practice are often difficult, due to non-trivial nutritional calculation of multiple food ingredients in a cooked meal. This work presents a smart kitchen with UbiComp technology to improve home cooking by providing calorie awareness of food ingredients used in prepared meals during the cooking process. Our kitchen has sensors to track the number of calories in food ingredients, and then provides real-time feedback to users on these values through an awareness display. Our user study suggests that bringing calorie awareness can be an effective means in helping family cooks maintain the healthy level of calories in their prepared meals.

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Amateur instructional videos often show a single uninterrupted take of a recorded demonstration without any edits. While easy to produce, such videos are often too long as they include unnecessary or repetitive actions as well as mistakes. We introduce DemoCut, a semi-automatic video editing system that improves the quality of amateur instructional videos for physical tasks. DemoCut asks users to mark key moments in a recorded demonstration using a set of marker types derived from our formative study. Based on these markers, the system uses audio and video analysis to automatically organize the video into meaningful segments and apply appropriate video editing effects. To understand the effectiveness of DemoCut, we report a technical evaluation of seven video tutorials created with DemoCut. In a separate user evaluation, all eight participants successfully created a complete tutorial with a variety of video editing effects using our system.

Cross-device interactions involve input and output on multiple computing devices. Implementing and reasoning about interactions that cover multiple devices with a diversity of form factors and capabilities can be complex. To assist developers in programming cross-device interactions, we created DemoScript, a technique that automatically analyzes a cross-device interaction program while it is being written. DemoScript visually illustrates the step-by-step execution of a selected portion or the entire program with a novel, automatically generated cross-device storyboard visualization. In addition to helping developers understand the behavior of the program, DemoScript also allows developers to revise their program by interactively manipulating the cross-device storyboard. We evaluated DemoScript with 8 professional programmers and found that DemoScript significantly improved development efficiency by helping developers interpret and manage cross-device interaction; it also encourages testing to think through the script in a development process.

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