Human Interface and the Management of Information. Information and Interaction for Learning, Culture, Collaboration and Business,

For over 25 years, HCI researchers and developers have been challenged with improving usability of products. More recently, the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) community has focused on developing collaborative systems but even though social interaction was recognized the emphasis was on work. The widespread use of the Internet by millions of diverse users for socializing is a new phenomenon that raises new issues for researchers and developers. Just designing for usability is not enough; we need to understand how technology can support social interaction and design for sociability. Moreover, increasing accessibility to Computer Science and Technology is essential for a discipline that relies on creativity and diverse perspectives. With the educational research community having begun to explore the causes behind the under representation of females and students of color in computing courses, outreach efforts have commenced to overcome these enrollment discrepancies.

One of the goals of academic education is to train students in view of acquiring metacognitive skills, thus becoming self-regulated learners prepared for for lifelong learning. The research in this area has proved that metacognition can be taught and learned and that self-regulation behavior can be guided and constrained by the features of the learning environment. In order to become an educational environment, attractive and at the same time efficient for the students and which would enable students to develop their metacognitive skills, the e-learning system needs continuous improvments. This paper presents a hybrid model of an e-learning system, MEM - Metacognitive E-learning system Model, which aims to develop metacognitive skills in students, based on three learning principles of the InTime model, principles which are adapted from Peter Ewell’s point of view regarding the complexity of the learning process, and on the metacognitive regulations.

Being able to utilize information systems (IS) to address novel issues continues to be challenging for many IS users. IS training has typically focused on acquiring requisite knowledge and skills to complete routine sets of tasks, and not necessarily transference of this IS knowledge and skills to novel contexts. Being unable to perform this transference can then limit an IS users ability to utilize an IS to address unique problems. Drawing upon Identical Elements and Principles Theories, as well as Social Cognitive Theory, this research study proposes an experiment to assess the effectiveness of utilizing self-regulation techniques (i.e., self-explanations and self-evaluations) to improve IS knowledge and skills transference to unique contexts as well as improve IS performance outcomes. The potential contribution will include suggestions of training modifications to enhance IS usage and providing guidance for future research in the domain of IS users’ knowledge and skills transference.

Research related to game-based and technology-enhanced learning lacks a focused experimental method. The present paper articulates a well-defined experimental method for studying game-based learning from pre-learning interventions to post-testing assessment of retention and transfer.

Research on the psychophysiological assessment of the impact of information technologies on humans is reviewed, with a particular focus on learning technologies and research carried out in in the Laboratory for Information Technology Evaluation (LITE) at Missouri S&T. Measures of arousal and valence are discussed first, including galvanic skin response (GSR), pupil dilation, and heart rate. This is followed by a discussion of the measurement of eye movement using eye tracking technologies. Lastly, a summary of the LITE lab research is provided. It is concluded that the measures are promising, based on these initial LITE lab results, though further work is needed to more accurately determine the appropriate constructs and contexts for optimizing the use of these tools.

In collaborative learning, participants progress their learning through multimodal information in a face-to-face environment. In addition to conversation, non-verbal information such as looking at other participants and note taking plays an important role in facilitating effective interaction. By exploiting such non-verbal information in the analysis of collaborative learning activities, this research proposes a collaborative learning environment in which the non-verbal information of participants is collected to analyze learning interaction. For this purpose, we introduce multimodal measurement devices and implement an integration tool for developing a multimodal interaction corpus of collaborative learning.

To support science teachers for preparing their classes, this paper presents concepts and principles on digital contents sharing. The proposed framework is divided into three parts: The first part proposes the maturity levels for science teacher activities based on SECI model and CMMI. The second part designs the system components on DLMS (Distributed e-learning management system) which allows science teachers to share digital contents efficiently. The third part illustrates the scenario how the proposed framework works. The possibility for prototype system based on REST (Representational State Transferred) ful Web service is also discussed. This proposal expects to save time for preparing digital contents for science teachers as they mature on digital contents.

In this paper, we describe the development of a support system that facilitates the process of learning computer programming through the reading of computer program. Reading code consists of two steps: reading comprehension and meaning deduction. In this study, we developed a tool that supports the deduction of a program’s meaning. The tool is equipped with an error visualization function that illustrates a learner’s mistakes and makes them aware of their errors. We conducted experiments using the learning support tool and confirmed that the system is effective.

The objective of this study is to evaluate the spatial ability differences and fatigue between three different students on different interface. An experiment was design to compare the differences between using the convention book (C-book) and using tablet computer, and compare the differences between three department students. Fifty-four vocational high school students, age sixteen to eighteen, participated in the study. Response measure included task performance, eye fatigue (measured by critical flicker fusion, CFF), and wrist fatigue (measured by subjective borg 10-CR scale). The result indicate that using the C-book had higher performance and less wrist fatigue than using tablet computer. In addition, on score sequence of task performance, interior design student is first, architecture student is second, and general student is last.

We propose a system that allows university teachers to check the effectiveness of their lecture videos and to grasp points for improvement in the lectures. The system offers two functions: time-series graphing, which visualizes real-time changes in students’ evaluation during a lecture, and teaching behavior estimation, which shows teachers information on their own teaching behaviors estimated from the overall evaluation by students of a lecture. The system was developed and evaluation experiments of each function were conducted. The subjective evaluation of each function by teachers showed the following: (1) the time series graph function was useful to narrow down which portion of the lecture videos contained points for improvement and (2) the teaching behavior estimation function was useful to determine the tendency of teaching behavior in a lecture.

This study explored the effect of a virtual agent, used as a storyteller in an interactive story, with the purpose of distributing information to leaders at the municipal government of Esbjerg, Denmark. The aim was to investigate the influence an agent might have on the user experience, when comparing it to a story with no agent. A simple story was implemented where the user could choose which parts to read. A test was held where ten participants went through the story with and without an agent as a storyteller, and took part in a focus group discussion. Data on story choices and time was saved and analysed along with the focus group data. From the overall findings it can be concluded that a storyteller agent has a positive impact on the experience. Furthermore, that interactive storytelling requires care in placement of important information, so as to avoid it being missed.

We review the literature on gamification and identify principles of gamification and system design elements for gamifying computer educational games. Gamification of education is expected to increase learners’ engagement, which in turn increases learning achievement. We propose a gamification framework that synthesizes findings from the literature. The gamification framework is comprised of principles of gamification, system design elements for gamification, and dimensions of user engagement.

We propose an English learning system “TED NOTE,” which automatically generates language training game by re-utilizing open content online. As a first prototype, we use Creative Commons licensed content; presentation video and subtitles; from TED.com as educational materials. In this paper, first, we focused on an educational potential of open content online and researched related projects, which apply the concept of the free culture movement for educational uses. In the second half, we describe the design process of TED NOE as a case study. We illustrate the way to re-use and reassemble open contents into the new use technically for providing significant learning experiences in TED NOTE.

The techniques are acquired through repetition of such copying and passed on in this intuitive way. As even the experts acquired them by intuition, the techniques are difficult to put into explicit knowledge, forms of word or value. To solve the problem, recently there are numerous attempts to turn the techniques into explicit knowledge for preservation and transmission thereof. However, current situation is that not all of the knowledge is conveyed by unsuccessfully forcing tacit knowledge (skills) into the disguise of its explicit counterpart. It is necessary to preserve the tacit knowledge learned by experience and intuition and convey it in a way understandable. Techniques refer to postures and motions of experts. Motions of the experts striking a Wadaiko are extracted as data, which is used in developing an instruction system of passing on the techniques of the experts to novices. Finally, it is verified whether the novices have acquired the techniques through the system.

The Crossroad game is a social game that is used for learning to deal effectively with difficult situations such as conflicts in teamwork. This paper investigates the characteristics of questions to be used when the Crossroad game is applied to teamwork scenarios. The questions were collected by using questionnaires and dividing them into three groups, high-agreement, low-agreement, and middle-agreement groups using the chi-square method. Results are obtained from students in Japan and the UK, and it is shown that the attitude toward a dilemma within teamwork depended on the background of the students.

This paper proposes the interactive system that can help humans to understand the trade-off relationship of Pareto optimal solutions (e.g., good products from a certain aspect) in multi-dimensional space. For this purpose, the following two methods are proposed from the viewpoint of the number of evaluation criteria which should be considered by a user at one time: (i) the two fixed evaluation criteria are employed to evaluate the solutions; and (ii) some evaluation criteria selected by a user (

i.e

., the number of the evaluation criteria is varied by a user) are employed to evaluate them. To investigate the effectiveness of our proposed system employing either of two methods, we conduct human subject experiments on the motor selection problem and have revealed the following implications: (i) the proposed system based on the two fixed evaluation criteria contributes to helping users to find better motors in terms of all the evaluation criteria, while (ii) the proposed system based on the selected evaluation criteria is more effective to help users to understand Pareto optimal solutions when more evaluation criteria need to be considered.

In this paper, we propose a method that connects school knowledge to common knowledge through a mobile search system that enables users to think about and perform science experiments relevant to their everyday life. We developed the system and tested it in an evaluation experiment with 15 participants who used the system in everyday life over the course of a week. The evaluation results revealed that the users began to consider appropriate experiments, describe appropriate locations, and understand scientific concepts and methods. Participants’ questionnaire responses showed that they became interested in science experiments and formed a strong connection between school knowledge and common knowledge.

This study proposes a system that helps learners transform mathematical expressions by letting the learners select the part of the original mathematical expression to be transformed. On selection, a list of mathematical expressions is displayed, showing possible transformations. Users select one mathematical expression from the list of displayed candidates. The transformed expressions can be further transformed recursively, step-by-step. In this way, the system supports trial-and-error steps of the transformation process and lets learners transform actively. This study also aims to understand learners’ trial-and-error steps by using transformation history.

We have developed an interactive environment for learning by posing arithmetic word problems that can be solved by either an addition or subtraction. Through experimental use of the environment on desktop computers, we have confirmed that problem posing with the environment is useful for arithmetic learning. In this paper, as the next step, we implemented the environment on media tablets connected by wireless LAN. Because of this implementation, we have realized development of environment for using usual classroom, visualization of the student’s learning performance and suggestion of teaching a method of problem posing. Through this practice, we have confirmed that the first grade students were able to pose problems in the environment, and the teaching and learning by using environment were accepted by the teacher and students as the effective teaching.

This paper described a practical use of kit-build concept map (KBCM) in science learning class in an elementary school in order to evaluate learners’ understanding ongoing the teaching. The responsible teacher of the class reported that the information provided from KBCM is useful to decide complementary teaching ongoing class and improve lesson plan of the next class. We have confirmed that the map scores in KBCM have significant correlation with the scores of standard test of science learning. This case study suggests that KBCM is promising tool to estimate learners’ understanding in classroom.

Given a collection of survey comments evaluating an E-learning system, the text mining technique is applied to discovering and extracting knowledge from the comments. The purpose is to categorize the comments into several groups in an attempt to identify key criticisms or praises from students using the E-learning system. This study is able to assist the evaluators of the E-learning system to obtain the summarized key terms of major “concerns” without going through potentially huge amount of survey data.

In an improvised bodily expression, it is important to create the image inside the self. We developed a body expression generator called “shadow media” that generates an image by causing a gap between the body and its shadow. In this study, we focused on the dual residual shadow, a type of the shadow media, which generates a dual gap. Using this aspect of the shadow media, we develop new body expression media by introducing fluctuation and cellar automation to the boundary of the dual residual shadow. Experimental results indicate that these shadow media outputs can effectively support the generation of bodily expressions.

This paper describes a virtual experience system that provides to the participant a new experience of a space and travel for a digital museum. The system creates multisensory stimuli to evoke a sensation of a walk in a tourist site. The virtual walk is introduced as a pseudo voluntary reliving of the experience of the precedent walker at the site.

In this research, we designed and developed a “playground” using fog as a media of expression. The “playground” is a space where children express themselves and connect with others using bodily expressions while playing. To realize this concept, we developed the fog display system to satisfy the following requirements. (1) Everyone has access to the media space created by the fog. (2) Fog displays are scattered all over the space. (3) Images projected on fog displays are visible from various directions inside and outside the space. (4) The expelling, rectification, and diffusion of the fog are controlled. And, we tested the effectiveness of the system through its on-site use. As a result, it was found that this system, which can project an image on the fog that has a naturalness (disappearance, spatiality, and extraordinariness), versatility, and plasticity, has the potential to function as the playground.

Interactive Media art communicates with audiences using many interfaces. The audience experiences each interface differently. Two different kinds of art experiences can be generated using the same themes. Using a touch screen monitor and Microsoft Kinect motion sensors, in the same gallery environment, we surveyed visitor experiences with both forms of art in a stereoscopic environment. We discovered that motion interfaces are better than touch interfaces for interactive media art, with the changes in depth providing more powerful stereoscopic audience experiences.

Current 3D digital film gives us a realistic sensation. Also adding physical effect with 3D film called 4D film becomes common entertainment system which generates more realistic sensation. So there are many commercial entertainment systems in order to give realistic experience adapted to such as horror contents. However there is still some problem that is unable us to immerse the horror contents. In order to find an effective way to amplify horror experience to viewers, we propose an original film-viewing theater environment. In concrete, we made a locker-type theater environment implementing polarizing filters on peephole of a locker door. This makes a viewer force to stand when to peep a 3d horror movie in a closed space without wearing 3D glasses. And by peeping a screen from a small hole, it is unable to see an edge of a large screen. By evaluating heart rate of viewers and conducting questionnaire-based survey, we confirmed our proposed method amplifies a horror experience especially by producing a closed viewing space.

Museum is considered as an important application field for digital media technologies. In conventional museum exhibition, museum curators have tried to convey wisdom of mankind to the visitors by displaying real exhibits. Meanwhile, such conventional method for exhibition cannot tell vivid background information about the exhibit such as the social situation where it was made and the mechanism how it worked. Digital media can be used for enhancing delivery efficiency by providing the ability to express background information about exhibits. Based on this idea, we introduced digital exhibition systems, which help us to understand background information of exhibits, into THE RAILWAY MUSEUM (Japan) and held the “Digital Railway Museum” exhibition. In this paper, we describe about the exhibition and report on and knowledge and implication obtained from the exhibition.

In our research, we propose Mixed Reality Digital Museum to convey background information about museum exhibits by using mixed reality technologies. Based on this concept, we construct and demonstrate three types of exhibition system: Digital Display Case, Digital Diorama and Outdoor Gallery. Also to supporting museum activity, we construct and demonstrate several approaches which are acquisition and application of visitor’s activity, supporting curator’s activity, recalling after visiting, and etc. In this paper, the authors first introduce the outline of “Mixed Reality Digital Museum” project under the sponsorship of MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology). Then, the basic concept and project formation of the project are quickly introduced. After that, among the many project subtopics, the authors introduce two types of museum system using Mixed Reality technology: “Digital Display Case” and “Digital Diorama.” Result of the implementation of the first stage prototypes are introduced and future plan is discussed.

The visual representation of large archaeological data sets, especially those related to the subsoil and its stratigraphic units, is a very effective solution for supporting archaeologists’ practice. In this paper we present ArchMatrix, a visual analytics tool for Harris Matrices’ management that relies on an excavation database and allows the archaeologists to easily perform their analysis tasks by simply adopting a direct manipulation interaction style.

From 1950 when computer technology began to undertake the creation of computer art, the creation of these “digital works” became a new tool and medium for artistic expression. This also had a major impact on visual artistic expression. This paper takes science fiction movies as the textual source of its research and analyzes the commercial messaging and artistic expression of thematic images within the cinematic arts.

Authors present a novel implementation approach to an operator interface system capable of supporting key phases of the automotive manufacturing machine lifecycle. Review of the lifecycle process realises next-generation requirements which have been addressed through a distributed system components architecture comprising of a Broadcaster, Marshaller and Web-HMI system. This architecture assumes machine control engineering using the Component Based (CB) design approach. Web-HMI system component, the major component serving operator interface systems, is designed using the Blackboard- based methodology, and supported with the Client-Server communication pattern as illustrated in its process runtime description. The proposed approach is assessed through an industrial case study on a web-services based control Ford-Festo test rig. A number of scenarios and demonstrations are applied to investigate the applicability of this approach beyond a theoretical research environment into practice. Importance of this research work is highlighted through identification of potential benefits offered.

In this paper we present the Collaborative Planning Interface (CoPI), a web-based multiuser collaboration interface platform for planning of complex systems. The interface provides analytical and visualization components to support decision makers. The Interface is designed using a user-centered design approach, while considering existing tools and environments in the field of decision support systems. The architecture and structure of the Interface are described as well as the flow of the user experience within the system. Finally, a case study explains the use of CoPI in collaborative policy planning for large-scale infrastructures.

The chances of being interrupted by online communication systems, such as email, instant messenger, and micro-blog, are rapidly increasing. For the adequate control of interruption timing, the real-time estimation of the interruptibility of the user is required. In this study, we propose an interruptibility estimation method using PC activity and conversational voice detection based on the wavelet transform. The offline estimation was applied to a dataset of 50 hours obtained from 10 users. The results indicated the feasibility of improving the interruptibility estimation accuracy by the automatic detection of the existence and end of conversations.

Remote communication systems are getting popular these days, which makes it possible to enjoy audio/video communication over the network in high quality. However, remote communication using these systems is still not identical to face-to-face meeting due to several reasons which are still open issues. This study focuses on two of the issues. One is lack of tele-presence and the other one is lack of connection in communication. In order to tackle these issues, this study proposes an idea of connecting remote individuals through augmented tele-presence systems called ARM-COMS: ARm-supported eMbodied COmmunication Monitor System. ARM-COMS is composed of a desktop robotic arm and a tablet PC which is attached to it. The tablet PC presents audio/video images of a remote person just as typical video conference. However, ARM-COMS controls the physical movement of the tablet PC during the video conference to be consistent with physical motion of the remote participant as if the remote person were there and behaved in a face-to-face conversation. ARM-COMS also considers the meaningful physical position in space to show the connection with other person or topics. The tablet PC approaches to the speaking person as if embodied communication occurs. This paper shows the idea of ARM-COMS and presents some of the on-going work of the study to show the feasibility of the idea.

In this research, we propose “Interlocked Surfaces”, which supports cooperation work between different devices. The system offers to connect different devices wirelessly and allow multiple users to view and edit documents simultaneously. We have developed a technique to share and view documents between different devices even they have difference screen sizes and resolutions. In a user study, we conducted experiments to evaluate the usefulness of the system. The result shows that users can perform the document inspection task more comfortably using the proposed system.

Recently, e-learning has become widely used. We have already developed an edutainment system named GOSAL (GOkko-asobi Supporting system for Active Learning) in which we introduce distinctive CG characters and communication support functions to enhance user communication for group work. We also confirmed that an element of make-believe play promotes the utterance of users. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of the system through an experiment in comparison with real group work, and confirmed the effectiveness for creative and laugh-filled learning.

The management of the massive amount of data in video- and multimedia workflows is a hard and expensive work that requires much personnel and technical resources. Our flexible and scalable open source middleware framework offers solution approaches for the automated handling of the ingest and the workflow by an automated acquisition of all available information. By using an XML format to describe the processes, we provide an easy, fast and well-priced solution without the need for specific human skills.

Within the last years enterprises massively began to adapt social media for internal usage. They do so in order to increase their knowledge management as well as to make collaboration and communication more efficient. However, until now, very little is known about employees who are responsible for adaption processes and the management of the internal social media. In our study we conducted 15 interviews with “social media managers” of 15 large German enterprises. We found that the role of a social media manager is faced with enormous challenges (e.g. providing information about the added value of social media) while on the other hand they lack the power to make decisions (e.g. regarding staff and budget).

In this paper, we describe the requirements elicitation for a digital war room – a group work facility to support people interacting with digital (and analog) materials. The target user group is product design teams and construction engineers/architects. Main requirements for an interactive group work space include fluent sharing of documents within the facility and ability to comment on them, support for both analog and digital sketching and writing by hand, minimum of three displays allowing parallel tasks and comparison of different alternatives and the importance of the physical properties of the facility.

In the research field of human-computer interaction, there are many approaches to predicting interactive roles, e.g., conversational dominance or active participation. Although interactive roles have been predicted for entire tasks, little attention has been given to evaluating how such roles are reorganized during a task. This paper explains how to construct a model for predicting emergent division of labor and the reorganization of labor in multiparty collaboration using verbal and nonverbal cues. To build the model, we adopted stepwise multiple-regression analysis, which is a type of statistical model analysis, using both behavioral data and third-party evaluations. We confirmed useful verbal and non-verbal parameters for predicting interactive roles and their reorganization through this model.

In the case of cooperative work through networks, non-verbal communication is obstructed. The purpose of this study is to examine the role of assigned persona for the computer supported cooperative work in remote control environment. This experiment scenario was the workplace and set the user scenario for the real subjects. The superior persona and the subordinate persona which affects the “psychological reward” and the “partner’s evaluation” were assigned to the subjects. The experimental task that was the simulated chemical plant required to operate two subjects during 90 minutes. Results of primary and secondary task performances, the difference among the assigned persona was observed to execute the computer supported cooperative task. It is necessary to manage a basic design of the interaction between the person and the task concerned about the partner’s honor information and the behavior information adequately.

This paper reports the findings from our research on constructing the memory functions of DiWa (Digital War room), an interactive collaboration environment to support work especially with digital information. The aim is to identify the current organizational and personal practices of storing and retrieving meeting information. We report findings from a field study conducted in selected units of four organizations and results from the initial stage of a survey on the users of our collaboration environment. Our findings include that organizational practices and systems for storing meeting information are varied and they are not used systematically; personal practices still largely involve pen and paper notes; and the need to return to meeting information exists.

Collaboration in global distributed teams is only possible by using various information and communication technology (ICT) tools, because team members only seldom meet face to face. This study focuses on studying the types and usage of ICT tools in twelve global teams of Finnish companies. We formulated the following research questions: What ICT tools are used in global virtual teams to support group processes and collaboration, and what are their experienced pros and cons?

To improve the productivity of services and satisfy both customers and employees, the activity support by means of IT systems is effective. However, it is rather difficult to support employees’ activities in interpersonal services such as nursing care with IT systems. One of the main reasons is that they are required to respond to requests from customers or coworkers flexibly and their activity cannot be described in a formal and sequential manner. To develop a effective system to support such activities, analysis on triggers to perform tasks, criteria to prioritize them, and concrete means to perform them are necessary. However, there are few methods to determine which aspects of employee’s activities should be supported in a simple manner.

In this report, the authors propose an employee’s activity model and its usage for the support of interpersonal services. In addition, the authors introduce an example case of activity analysis and support planning of a nursing care service by means of the proposed model.

A consistent user experience in combination with proactive assistance may improve the user performance while interacting with heterogeneous data sources as e.g., occurring in business decision making. We describe our approach which is based on inferring the user intentions from sensory inputs, providing a situation aware information assistance, and controlling the environment proactively by anticipating future goals. Our system has been realized within a smart meeting room and has in parts been evaluated. In this paper, we describe the core ideas underlying our approach and report on first findings from the evaluation.

Human behavior in supply chains is insufficiently explored. Wrong decisions by decision makers leads to insufficient behavior and lower performance not only for the decision maker, but also for other stakeholders along the supply chain. In order to study the complex decision situation, we developed a supply chain game in which we studied experimentally the decisions of different stakeholder within the chain. 121 participants took part in a web-based supply chain game. We investigated the effects of gender, personality and technical competency on the performance within the supply chain. Also, learnability and the effect of presence of point-of-sale data are investigated. Performance depended on the position within the chain and fluctuating stock levels were observed in form of the bullwhip effect. Furthermore, we found that risk taking had an impact on the performance and that the performance improved after the first round of the game.

With changing times, the furniture industry in Taiwan has gradually transformed into a design service industry that integrates set design and manufacturing, and its design development has become increasingly intensive and closely linked, enabling many design information to emerge and accumulate as a result of the process. Henceforth, it is up to businesses to utilize knowledge management measures for effective integration. However, the backbone of the industry is product development process management application, and a majority of Taiwan’s current furniture design industry is unable to advance alongside the industry’s transformation trend. In terms of operations, many mechanism problems, such as knowledge management, still await resolution. Therefore, this research hoped to determine developmental strategies for industrial application of knowledge management and success factors for the industry’s development, and to offer a reference to furniture developers with operation management and transformation strategies. Through the

supplementing

in-depth interviews with multiple case studies, the researcher first explored Taiwan’s furniture developers’ current use of and thoughts on knowledge management in the process of product development. Thereafter, data collected from the interviews and studies were analyzed, and based on knowledge management concepts proposed by scholars, the results were summarized according to four major influencing dimensions, namely business organization, product development process, information technology and cultural system. Using cross-analysis and data generalization, the following conclusions were made regarding knowledge management strategies in the development of related industries in furniture design: (1) Establish a knowledge management model using the development process of the industry as the core, and tailor the model according to the needs of the industry; (2) A complete plan is needed to enable those in charge to have awareness and measures to implement knowledge management; (3) It is more difficult to establish storage mechanisms for some of the tacit knowledge and diversified market survey data in development; and (4) In the furniture industry, the process of creative product thinking and human power will become programmed, making policies and mechanisms for employee training and experience teaching even more important.

The ever-expanding Internet and fast-growing pace of online shopping push companies to implement online customization. Rather than customizing on the information delivery, transaction handling, and product features, companies also start to offer different specific privileges to different types of customers. In this regard, we would like to examine how these different forms of customization affect customer satisfaction.

A previous survey about the use of iPhone and/or iPad apps in supply chain operations learned that the use of such apps varies greatly among different individuals and different organizations, with many respondents using apps, but not for supply chain operations [1]. In product design, an aspect of growing importance is its usability. This raises the question that is the focus of the paper. Namely, are human-computer interaction (HCI) issues a factor being addressed in the mobile apps for supply chain management? It appears that addressing HCI issues for most any kind of commercial mobile app seems to have had little focus, even though some usability problems are well-known. Nielsen summarized this as “the user experience of mobile websites and apps has improved since our last research, but we still have far to go” [2].

In this paper we demonstrate how to use the axiomatic evaluation method to evaluate usability of consumer electronic products. The axiomatic evaluation method examines three domains of a product: customer, functional, and control domains. This method collects not only usability problems reported by the users, but also usability problems found through the mapping matrix between the three domains. To determine how well this new usability evaluation method works, an experiment was conducted to compare the axiomatic evaluation method with a think-aloud method. 60 participants were randomly assigned to use one method or the other to evaluate three popular consumer electronic devices. Number of usability problems discovered and completion time were collected and analyzed. Results showed that the axiomatic evaluation method performed better than the think-aloud method at finding usability problems for the mobile phone and about user expectation and control.

Challenges for incorporating “quality in use” in embedded system development were discussed. In the Japanese embedded system industries the foundation of the quality in use management is not necessarily established because of their various backgrounds and histories. In the paper three key points to introduce the quality in use into the design process in the industries were proposed. These were implementation of user requirement process, understanding of “service” as final outcome and synchronization to functional safety.

While human factors has been recognized as a key component in research and development efforts, there is a lack of systematic guidance as to how to insert human factors evaluation outcomes into system development processes. The current effort proposes a systematic scale comparable to existing Technology Readiness Level scales to objectively quantify and track human factors readiness throughout the system development lifecycle. The resultant Human Factors Readiness Levels (HFRLs), iteratively developed with input from government and industry human factors practitioners across a variety of domains, prioritize each identified human factors issue based on its risk level and by the status of any resolution. The overall scoring method utilizes a scale of 1 to 10, with a higher score indicating a higher level of human factors readiness. The HFRL scale has been integrated into a software tool, the System for Human Factors Readiness Evaluation (SHARE), that supports tracking and calculation of system level HFRLs that can be quickly and easily shared to support acquisition decision making and product development in an effort to realize return on investment through early identification, prioritization and rectification of issues avoiding expensive, late design changes.

Recently, the importance of service is widely accepted. Service Engineering that aims to design a service from the engineering viewpoint has been proposed. In order to achieve a successful service, service providers should maintain service quality and always satisfy their customers. To be specific, the provision of highly reliable service is essential. To realize highly reliable services it is important to minimize the occurrence of service failures. This paper proposes a method for analyzing service failure effects in the service design phase. Specifically, we define service failure and propose a procedure to analyze service failure effects with models that are proposed in Service Engineering. The proposed method is verified through its application to a nursing-care service.

Recently, buzz marketing sites gives the information that is useful for consumers and companies. They want to customer feedbacks of feeling and experience. However, the searched results contain huge numbers of commercial sites when user search review with traditional search engine. We search blog site that include review sentence. We need to decision whether document of blog site include review sentence. Thus we think that two process to decide blog site whether review blog site. The first process creates to data set for certain product that viewpoint feature word. In this paper, feature word is tow term in the evaluated perspective word and evaluated value word. Data set is information for making decision sentence whether review sentence. Second process is a search for review sentence. This process decided blog site whether review blog site. This process use extracted opinion tuples from one sentence of blog site document and created data set to decide sentence whether sentence is review sentence. This process decided review blog whether document of blog site include one and more review sentence. We proposed review blog site searching system that system have two process.

The effects of text presentation applied to mobile advertisings were examined in the context of the explosion of small-screen devices. Presentation mode of text advertising visual structure, position of layout, moving speed, format of segmented presentation, and luminance contrast of text/background window are used as design factors. Ad comprehension, user interface satisfaction, and overall workload would be collected using an orthogonal array experiment. The results indicate the interaction effects of presentation mode and position as well as presentation mode and speed on Ad comprehension are statistically significant. In addition, the interaction effects of presentation mode and format as well as presentation mode and position are statistically significant on user interface satisfaction. It also indicates the interaction effects of presentation mode and format as well as presentation mode and luminous contrast are statistically significant on overall workload. In summary, the interaction effects between text advertising visual structures have to be taken into account for the user-centered usability of mobile text advertising presentation.

In this paper, we focused on the characteristic gestures which producing the sense of realism and intimacy in web communication using 3DAgent, and proposed the gesture exaggeration mechanical model which representing the “reservoir (Tame)” or “deciding actions (Kime)” effectively in Anime and Kabuki. By analyzing some tens of gestures including the natural motion and exaggerating one which had same start and end positions, we obtained the following results. The degree of exaggeration of behavior can be expressed mechanically by the integral value of the joint torque. The ratio of the torque value GER between the portion containing the exaggerated behavior and other position has value within the certain range from 0.4 to 0.6. This value can be used as an indicator in determining the good balanced gesture exaggeration. Moreover, we found that the result could also be seen in the case of exaggeration gestures used effectively such as the speech and presentation of famous persons, so we could determine the gesture exaggeration by GER.

The purpose of this study was to compose

Kansei

Scale on Uniqueness Products (KSUP) which evaluates the uniqueness of products, and to clarify relations between uniqueness of products and the consumer’s purchase motivation. The evaluated products were humidifiers. We examined Kansei elements consisted uniqueness of humidifier, and relationships between Kansei elements of uniqueness and purchase motivation. As the result of present study, it was indicated suggested that the KSUP on humidifier consisted of “

Feeling of nondaily life

” and “

Reminiscent

”. In addition, “

Feeling of nondaily life

” showed a tendency to have a high positive correlation with purchase motivation than “

Reminiscent

”. It is expected that the KSUP will become one of the most effective indexes used in product development and that it will help designers develop more attractive products that are in line with consumer needs.

Online retailers employ recommendation agents (RAs) to provide product recommendations with the objectives of not only to support consumers’ decision-making but also to influence their decisions of product choice. However, some empirical studies have found that product recommendations are not always well accepted by consumers. While one cause for the non-acceptance might be the poor personalization of the product recommendations as suggested by prior studies, another plausible cause would be the failure in providing a product recommendation in the wrong way and/or at the wrong time. Building on the theoretical lens of Preference Inconsistency Paradox, this study seeks to investigate how a RA could offer recommendations based on product reviews (i.e., the basis of a recommendation) and at the juncture when consumers are most receptive to (i.e., the timing). A controlled laboratory experiment was subsequently conducted. The results reveal that the basis and time of recommendations could lead to varying impacts on a consumer’s decision satisfaction and decision difficulty. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

This research is utilizes 2*2 dual factor grouping research design (between - subjects designs) and, based on the planning for versions of commercial websites, takes 24 front page commercial items and 24 non-front page commercial items as its sample, thus there are 48 samples in total.

This study used a logistic regression model to investigate the relationship between several predicting factors and burglary occurrence probability with regard to the epicenter. These factors include day of the week, time of the day, repeated victimization, connectors and barriers. Data was collected from a local police report on 2010 burglary incidents. Results showed the model has various degrees of significance in terms of predicting the occurrence within difference ranges from the epicenter. Follow-up refined multiple comparisons of different sizes were observed to further discover the pattern of prediction strength of these factors. Results are discussed and further research directions were given at the end of the paper.

Social media is increasingly used for all kinds of everyday communication, with vast amounts of user-generated content being continuously generated and published. The data provides a new form of information source that can be exploited for obtaining additional knowledge regarding a subset of the population. Although it might be difficult to organize and assess individual text fragments, valuable insights contributing to the overall situational awareness can also be gained through acquiring social media texts and analyzing statistical properties in the data in near real-time. One such avenue of approach which is currently being developed is to analyze the text content linguistically and extract measures regarding the overall feelings and attitudes that people express in relation to an ongoing crisis. To make use of this kind of new information requires the algorithms and the resulting statistics to be designed and presented according to operational crisis management needs. In this paper, we describe the involvement of crisis management stakeholders in a series of user-centered activities in order to understand the needs, and design a useful tool. In particular, video prototyping has been used as method for quickly capturing a first explicit design idea based on real life experience, that could later be used for further generalization and tool design.

A service is mainly produced by human capabilities and their interaction, and therefore, the process for the service production includes a lot of uncertainties caused by human factors. In order for service organizations to cope with these uncertainties, in this study, the concept of the modular architecture is applied to the service organization. Especially, this study proposes a method to determine teams consisting of human resources based on the concept of the modular service organization. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated by the application to a hotel service.

The importance of technology strategy in business is getting emphasized as global technology competition is being rapidly intensified. To achieve successful business, nothing is more important than timely establishment of proper technology strategy. The process of establishing technology strategy is technology planning, which should be supported by technology intelligence (TI). To reduce the cost of manual technology intelligence activities, we suggest an automated technology intelligence system which can support whole steps of technology planning systematically. We examined what decision should be made and what information is required in each step. And then, we suggested seven services and their explicit insights which have a specific role at each step of technology planning. Considering recent growth of mobile environment of users, we implemented our system running on tablet PCs.

Recently, sales data of a store is called POS (Point of Sales) data. POS data set of items that each customer purchased is highly expected to be utilized for creating new sales strategies. Though POS data is generally analyzed by data mining techniques, the results do not contain the fact why the customers purchased the items. Therefore, customers moving history in a store is important because such data is directly connected to the reason why they have bought items. However, it was difficult to obtain moving history data. In this paper, Sales Strategy Mining system that supports users to create new sales strategies with customers moving history is proposed. Moving history data is combined with POS data and visualized on the interface effectively. According to the experimental results, the system was effective to create new various sales strategies.

Product reviews on the web sites help not only consumers to purchase products but also developers to analyze consumers’ needs. Because huge amount of the reviews are presented on the various sites, however, it is a hard task for them to read and to find only the reviews which match their viewpoint that they focus on. Though, to overcome this issue, many researchers in the field of the natural language processing tried to find review sites, classification of reviews according to their viewpoints does not have been succeeded because the corpus for classification must be needed and building it takes a lot of cost. In this paper, we propose a method to build the corpus for each type of products automatically and also propose a method for automatic classification of method of the review. In our method of classification, we focused on the property of review by extending the Tf-Idf. As the classification results contained many errors of classifications in the similar viewpoints, we built the improved method. In this method, we divided the classification process into two-stage. As the result, we could classify reviews by over 80 point.

In recent years, people came to write the opinion of them by social networking service, such as a twitter, mixi, a blog. However, it is the present conditions that we cannot analyze it though we can watch a lot of opinions. Answer to choice is important, but opinion in a free writing conveys a thought concretely. From it, the authors considered using text mining in the spot. By doing text mining, it can enumerate frequent appearance word and we can know user’s needs. The width of the analysis thereby spreads. For example, those who say a specific word find out in what kind of tendency it is. The authors can think about the product development that we matched with each user from there. In addition, it can compare the opinion by various approaches. In this way, Text mining is an effective way to take advantage of user’s voice.

We deal with a multi-agent model of the iterated prisoners’ dilemma with evolvable strategies, originally proposed by Lindgren that allows elongation of genes represented by one-dimensional binary arrays, by means of three kinds of mutations: the duplication, the fission, and the point mutation, and the strong strategies are set to survive according to their performance at every generation change. The actions that the players can choose are assumed to be either cooperation (represented by C) or defection (represented by D). We conveniently use 0,1 instead of D,C. Each player has a strategy that determines the player’s action based on the history of actions chosen by both players. Corresponding to the history of actions, represented by a binary tree of depth m, a strategy is represented by the leaves of that tree, an one-dimensional array of length 2m. We have performed extentive simulations until many long genes are generated by mutations, and by evaluating those genes we have discovered that the genes of high scores are constructed by 3 common quartet elements, [1001], [0001], and [0101]. Furthermore, we have found that the strong genes commonly have the element [1001 0001 0001 0001] that have the following four features:

1

never defects under the cooperative situation, represented by having ‘1’ in the fourth element of the quartet such as [***1],

2

retaliates immediately if defected, represented by having ‘0’ in the first element and the third element in the quartet such as [0*0*],

3

volunteers a cooperative action after repeated defections, represented by ‘1’ in the first element of the genes,

4

exploits the benefit whenever possible, represented by having ‘0’ in the quartet such as [*0**].

This result is stronger and more specific compared to [1**1 0*** 0*** *001] reported in the work of Lindgren as the structure of strong genes.

The authors use the Marketing Science.And the one of the authors study to clarify the type of “Otome-game”user. “Otome-game” users have many kinds of liking or desire.So it is difficult for makers to create products that match with the demands of users.By this research, users and makers will be able to trade at the suitable type of demands. So the auther will research the market of the “Otome-game”. The data that is collected by marketing research is analyzed by SPSS.

It is important to provide developed products in accord with customer needs to the market. We usually use QFD (Quality Function Deployment) to assure the quality fit for the customer needs. We can check the completeness of the qualities which are necessary to realize the customer needs by QFD, and compute importance of qualities in terms of QA. Supporting tools for QFD make quality table and compute importance of qualities. Moreover, QFD tools with ontologies are developed to treat hierarchy of qualities. However in real QFD, we cannot deploy without technical knowledge of design and manufacturing engineers. The relationships among the qualities sometimes change by product mechanisms of technical condition and we must consider various conditions when we perform horizontal deployment. Thus, we need a supporting tool that can represent logical restrictions of incorporating product mechanism. Our main aim of this paper is to propose a methodology of QFD based on logical restrictions and propose a supporting tool for QFD.

Many e-commerce sites employ collaborative filtering techniques to provide recommendations to customers based on the preferences of similar users. However, as the number of customers and products increases, the prediction accuracy of collaborative filtering algorithms declines because of sparse ratings. In addition, the traditional recommendation approaches just consider the item’s attributes and the preference similarities between users; however, they are not concerned that users’ preferences may be developed as their familiarity with or experiences during choice or preference elicitation grows. In this work, we propose an anchor-based hybrid filtering approach to capture the user’s preferences of movie genres interactively and then achieve precise recommendations. To conduct this experiment, we recruited 30 users with different types of preference stabilities for movie genres. The experimental results show that the proposed anchor-based hybrid filtering approach can effectively filter out the users’ undesired movie genres, especially for the user who has unstable movie genre preferences. The results suggest that the factor of the stability of users’ preferences can be considered for developing effective recommendation strategies.

In recent years, the problem with which the world is faced has arisen by many complex problems being intermingled by change of global environment and a resident life. We are holding various subject, such as an increase in world population, economic growth of a newly emerging country, global warming, a natural disaster, low birthrate and longevity and so on. In March 11 2011, a huge earthquake disaster has occurred and we had to stop having to change consciousness how a better life and a life should be realized with safe relief.

This research was applied as the technique of finding out about a subject and needs. As a result, it turned out that it is applicable as the technique of the ability to grasp and visualize needs and the subject of an employee or residents which are end users.