Human Interface and the Management of Information: Information, Knowledge and Interaction Design

This paper presents the Association Map-Large (AM-L), an interactive visualization of entity associations. AM-L is an extension of a previously reported AM interface that has been enhanced with search and interaction features for supporting larger data sets. We report on a user study with thirty two participants, which assesses user performance and experience with AM-L versus a tabular representation of the same data in the context of an enterprise system. Participants with varying levels of experience were given both simple and complicated tasks to complete with each system. Results indicate greater enjoyment and lower levels of mental effort when using AM-L, as well as less time spent on average when performing tasks. Accuracy results in terms of correctness indicate a learning curve, with overall performance worse with AM-L on the first two simple questions and first complex question, but then as well or better on subsequent questions. Given that the AM-L interface is unlike any with which the users had prior experience, it is not surprising that some exposure to the interface, such as training, would be helpful prior to use. Suggestions from the participants will inform future enhancements to the interface, which will be validated with further studies.

This paper focuses on identifying factors that influence the process of finding a root cause and a derived effect in causal node-link graphs with associated strength and significance depictions. We discuss in detail the factors that seem to be involved in identifying a global cause and effect based on the analysis of the results of an online user study with 44 participants, who used both sequential and non-sequential graph layouts. In summary, the results show that participants show geodesic-path tendencies when selecting causes and derived effects, and that context matters, i.e., participant’s own beliefs, experiences and knowledge might influence graph interpretation.

Control systems widely used in the national infrastructures are mainly aimed at regular performances of the specified tasks. Therefore, whitelisting security solutions or program that define all usable assets and approachable relationships between rules are widely applied to. The working procedure of the whitelisting control system can be described not just by simple accessing abilities, but various rules such as communication period, frequency, sequence of communication objects, concurrency and inclusion relation etc. As a whitelisting has recently developed more complicatedly, it is believed that the research of the information visualizing which helps the users recognize priority information and the research of the UI which let users manage those information more efficiently are necessary. We have set an extended form of whitelisting that is required for control system security, and it is also based on general requirements in that field. Basing on the analysis of relevant tools and interviews with security experts, we propose a visualize method to manage whitelist information more easily and effectively.

Data visualization is an important factor in several areas of study, once understanding information is essential for any scientific advance. In meteorology field, for example, an efficient representation of the complex information approached is fundamental to produce any relevant results. According to this, there are several climatic visualization techniques that are used to represent varied phenomena. In order to investigate the most commonly used techniques in the field, this paper presents a systematic review that addresses representation methods and interaction devices within this context. Finally, this process has identified an approach gap within these techniques that motivated the accomplishment of an experience evaluation involving users that are familiar with such forms of visualization in climatic information.

The complexity of automated production systems increases steadily – especially due to the rising customer demand to manufacture individualized goods. To stay competitive, companies in this domain need to adapt their engineering to deliver machines and plants with higher quality in shorter time. Hence, to reduce design errors and identify problems already in early engineering stages, it is essential to ensure that the disparate engineering models – e.g., from mechanical, electrical and software engineering – are free from inconsistencies. This paper presents a concept for inter-model inconsistency management. In particular, the proposed concept provides an interactive visualization approach that captures the dependencies between the different engineering models explicitly and visualizes them to the involved stakeholders. By that, the location of and cause for inconsistencies can be identified more easily; dependencies between the different engineering disciplines can be visualized in a comprehensive manner.

The development of information-visualization systems requires the design of visualization methods based on data and purposes. Visual tools are desirable solutions supporting the development of visualization programs. However, the applicability of the tools is limited. Therefore, we allowed the developers to embed visualization methods into visualization programs easily to increase the application field. We designed a visualization execution environment that includes the following features: (1) Independence of data formats and Graphics APIs used in target programs, (2) Embeddability of visualization methods into visualization programs, and (3) Low-cost implementation of interface functions. We showed that our execution environment had practical performance through two experiments. Then, using use cases, we showed that our environment could be used in the low-cost development of visualization systems. The design of our execution environment reinforced the practicability of visual tools that support the development of visualization programs.

This research aims to achieve the resident-centered community design by utilizing information and communication technology (ICT), and to create a trigger to regain rich relationship within a community by visualizing media spots which is defined as places where residents communicate much more than the other areas. In order to improve the media spot estimation method proposed by the previous research, we extracted and analyzed location information under various conditions. As a result, we could confirm that a portion of the highest density of location information corresponds to a resident’s home place, and found that a home place can be accurately derived irrespective of the scattering in accuracy. Also, the analysis on how the distribution of location information varies depending on time zone suggests that it is necessary to use location information which is minutely divided in time or aggregated every day of the week.

Created in 2013, our laboratory works on the intelligibility of the activity of social media for others (e.a community animators) and for oneself (e.a member of the community) in a professional context. To bridge the gap between existing measures of activity, visualization of data and intelligibility of activity, we have set up a multidisciplinary team at the crossroads of these various players and knowledge. The goals of this team are to develop intelligible measures of the activity grouped together in a dashboard and to evaluate their contribution to the community’s dynamics. Inspired by the work of Star and Griesemer [16] on boundary objects and standardized methods, this paper aims to explain how we create, adapt and negotiate the current development of our dashboard’s prototype - conceived as a boundary object - sufficiently “robust” to achieve common objectives and “plastic enough” to meet the diverse interests of the different actors involved in the project.

Faced with the challenge of information explosion, almost everyone have been exposed to some kind of information visualization in varies of forms. Understanding how people read, understand, interpret and distinguish various forms of visualizations helps designers and developers think about how to improve the designs from the perspectives of users. This paper applied a mixed research method of quantitative and qualitative to explore how the designs of visualization forms evolved, and whether those kinds of graphs and charts are easy for users to understand, and how much information the users can get from the visualization. By testing if users are able to easily and accurately reach the information and providing the scales of simple to complex, and easy to hard, we see that basic visualizations like bar, pie, bubble, line, and scatter charts have been distributed in areas which are relatively simple in design and easy to read. Nonetheless, visualizations like the tree, parallel coordinate, sunburst, heat map, box plot and Sankey graphs have been concentrated in the regions of relatively complex in design, and are difficult to understand. In addition, the visualizations, including stacked bar, word cloud, box plot, and theme river that frequently appeared in the middle region of the grid, embodied the transitions of visualization design from simple to complex, and easy to hard.

In many situations it is important to detect and identify people and vehicles. In this study the purpose was to investigate subject’s performance to detect and estimate number of stationary people on the ground. The unmanned aerial vehicle used visual- and infrared sensor, wide and narrow field of view, and ground speed 8 m/s and 12 m/s. Participants watched synthetic video sequences captured from an unmanned aerial vehicle. The results from this study demonstrated that the ability to detect people was affected by type of sensor and field of view. It took significantly longer time to detect targets with the infrared sensor than with the visual sensor, and it took significantly longer time with wider field of view than with narrow field of view. The ability to assess number of targets was affected by type of sensor and speed, the infrared sensor causing more problems than the visual sensor. Also, performance decreased at higher speed.

We present a new information architecture based on one recently introduced to structure categorized but otherwise unstructured information. The new architecture is based on fuzzy set theory subset operations that define graph theory nodes. Two types of graph edges are defined such that a user interface based on this architecture can logically minimize the number of visible navigable edges and atoms of information. This minimization is understood to be one of the primary advantages of the architecture for human-computer interaction due to its mitigation of information overload. The advantages of hierarchical, organic, and sequential information architectures are fused by the new architecture and the dialectical method is also integrated—all of which are intended to enhance human-computer interaction. The new architecture can easily incorporate quantitative information, which can be converted into a fuzzy set theory representation with fuzzy clustering and other techniques. Moreover, traditionally qualitative information such as narrative, audio, and video, although naturally represented with crisp sets, can be represented with fuzzy sets. Therefore, the new architecture can fuse traditionally disparate types of information.

The intention of this paper is to develop and implement a user interface for the teach pendant of the new generation of robot controllers by Stäubli. The user interface is realized on the basis of an already existing visualization in the production of Miele in Bielefeld. In order to guarantee a structured development, the method of software-reengineering is used. In the first two steps it is necessary to analyze the tasks and functions of the existing software and to model the current state and the actual technical implementations. The requirements for the redesign of the software have to be compiled next. With the help of this requirements it is possible to develop a new user interface which includes the future layout and utilization [1, pp. 385–387]. The finished software helps to introduce the new technology into familiar operational procedures without any training of the employees.

This paper compares two different color lighting concepts (white and red) for the instrument cluster in mid-range cars while driving in urban areas under mesopic lighting. The main objective was to assess whether both concepts yielded similar results in terms of attention, interpretability and differentiability of information. For the experiment, 30 participants performed a Continuous Tracking Task as main task demanding continuous attention in order to model a real driving situation. The aim of the secondary task was to observe a cockpit display and perform a choice reaction time task. Statistical tests were performed to examine the error rates and reaction times for the CRT task. No significant differences were found. This study confirms that a white concept shows no disadvantages relative to a red color concept while driving under mesopic lighting conditions.

Affordance has been well discuss in HCI field since Gibson created this concept. Based on Kaptelinin and Nardi’s notion of instrumental affordance, we explore the influence of emotional attributes of effecter affordance on user experience, according to the data of experiment, we argue that (1) the effecter affordances have emotional attributes (e.g. Positive, negative, neutral) that can be pick up by user and impact user experiences. (2) Positive effecter affordance can provide emotional superiority to user experience. We propose several design guidelines according the result of experiment, we hope these principles can help designer avoid mistake and back those good designs up.

In the relevant researches on Kansei Engineering, the Kansei Vocabulary extraction has a vital significance. In previous time, the Kansei words are selected by experts’ focus interviews or customers’ giving marks. Such kind of method is easy, but it is difficult to explore the customers’ inner feeling, which seems to be so hasty. In this research, a method of selecting optimal Kansei Vocabulary is proposed to assist the designers establish the high correlation degree’s emotion cognition of customers. The factor analysis is used to classify the Kansei semantic style. Using the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process to make comparisons of each two specific Kansei words can get the final weight order. Through this method in the minicar’s case study, the modern factors’ “concise”, “smooth” words are defined as the words which can most arouse the customers’ emotional resonance. The research proves that the design method of extracting the optimal Kansei Vocabulary is the most effective one. Meanwhile, it can be applied into the modeling design of other industrial products.

Smart glass devices have become popular in our daily lives, and many people have applied its advantages to their application fields. In particular, smart glass has the advantage of receiving desired information by maintaining their context of the real world without dispersing their attention. Smart glass is also widely used to obtain information about points of interest with map interfaces. However, smart glass has an insufficient user interface with which to interact with its map applications via the smart glass. This problem restricts the map’s ability to provide specific functions and makes users feel constrained compared to handheld devices. In this paper, we focus on a map exploration method for smart glass to solve the limitations of map interaction via the smart glass. We propose an interaction design with zooming interface based on region’s point of interest density. This approach is intended for a region search without any other interaction tools. Users search and browse their regions of interest with the smart glass by using the proposed method.

Some art works need Kansei, such as a sense of beauty, to create. Kansei is implicit so that it is difficult for improving our artistic ability to create the art works. The objective of our research is to propose a method for improving Kansei for creating art works. Firstly, we define process of improving Kansei. Then, methods for supporting each steps in the process are proposed. Kansei improvement support system which embeds proposed methods is also developed, whose target art works are designs created only by circles. According to the example use of the system, our Kansei improvement process and its support methods are proved to be effective in broaden Kansei.

This study through surveying on the user’s operation process on the heater control by simulating driving environment and the evaluation of the operation feeling on the elements are related to the shape of button, ascertain users’ mental model to the user interface of heater control and the influence between the shape elements of button the operation feeling, provide theoretical support for the design for automatic driving direction of the heater control user interface.

Recently, Internet applications have been integrated in 3C hand-held intelligent products such as smart phones, vehicle navigation devices and driving recorders that help improve our living quality. Among these products, digital contents which displayed by a small screen plays an important role in displaying information. The research objective is to explore an optimum representation of character contents for hand-held intelligent products having a better viewing and operating interface. In this research, the character contents for study included typeface, size, distance between two words, distance between two lines and character and background color matching. The research first collected and analyzed existing character contents. Three Chinese and English typefaces were chosen. A threshold value was determined for each character attribute. Based on the defined character attributes, the research developed a user interface for experimental simulation. The experiment was implemented with 48 tested subjects and their experimental data were forwarded to the simulation process of back-propagation neural network for determining an optimum display of character characteristics. It is expected that the results will be helpful for developing better digital content interfaces for hand-held intelligent products.

The explosion of information has led to the proliferation of Big Data as an influential business and research domain. Data center infrastructure management is a sector largely affected by Big Data, however the visualization of, and interaction with, Big Data in the context of a data center room is a challenging endeavor. This paper presents the iterative design and development of a 3D Data Centre Visualization application featuring gesture-based interaction with a high resolution large screen display. As result of the design iterations three distinct system versions were developed, evolving the supported functionality, the User Interface and the interaction methods. The paper presents the evolution of the system, the results of an expert-based evaluation which was carried out during the development life-cycle, as well as the challenges faced and lessons learned regarding the User Experience design of a big data application deployed in a large display, supporting gestural interaction.

In this paper, we show a one-handed hardware keyboard with 4 $$\times $$ 3 grid slide keys, called a JoyKey. It can be used for Japanese text entry based on the flick input method. We conducted a user study to compare the accuracy and input speed of the JoyKey and a software keyboard on a touch screen under two conditions (eyes-free and non-eyes-free). Results show that the software keyboard cannot be used under the eyes-free condition because users cannot feel tactile feedback on a touch screen. In contrast, using the JoyKey, users can enter text under both the conditions with relative ease.

In recent years, many communication robots have been developed. To find the new direction of communication robots, a workshop was examined and the role of motion of communication robots was focused on. Based on the workshop, a robot called “hako” in the simple shape of a cube was fabricated as a platform of motion-based communication robot. In this paper, the flow of the workshop on communication robots and the development of a prototype robot are presented.

Through the analysis of major fatal accidents occurred within 30 years from 1986 to 2016 in China’s coal mines, it reflects that human errors accounting for up to 80% of the total accidents. The coal mines have set up a variety of safety signs that can alert miners to be careful with the insecurity in the workplace, and guide them to behave safely in accordance with legal standards. However, the human-induced accidents still occur. The problem is that although the safety signs have been adopted universally in the coal mines as a kind of management strategy, they are hard to play the safety signs’ due role in the practical application. The low effectiveness of safety signs is one of the important reasons for the coal mines accidents. In order to settle the practical problems and improve the safety level of coal mines, this research is designed to study the effectiveness of safety signs in coal mines.As a result of the previous researches, the author divided safety signs in coal mines’ practical application into four stages by utilize ‘communication-human’ information processing model and determined the effective factors of safety signs in accordance with the transfer characteristics of each stage. Thus the author had already established the effective factors system of safety signs and determined the weight of factors that influence the safety signs’ effectiveness by using the method of Analytic Hierarchy Process. The paper selected the setting positions of safety signs according to the importance ranking of safety signs’ effectiveness factors.In order to study the setting positions that affect the safety signs’ effectiveness, the author carried out an experiment of eye movement. Through the use of an experimental plat of eye-movement Tobii Studio 4.3.2, whose hardware service is an eye tracker Tobii T60XL, a series of experiments were performed. The attention in visual feature of experiment participants can be gotten quantificationally from the angle of visual. In this experiment, in the light of the most common scenes in coal mines’ daily producing activities, the belt transportation is selected as well as the mine opening, underground roadway and other four typical scenes as the visual stimulating materials, which used picture pattern to present. This experiment adopted 36 pictures totally to be the experimental materials that covered with four different scenes and safety signs set in different positions respectively, including 18 pictures on the ground of coal mines and 18 pictures under the ground of coal mines. The experiment began with the instructions and then participants conducted an experiment through clicking the buttons on their own. The presentation time of each picture was 2 s and before playing the picture, it should have five unit-vectors with eye-movement calibration. The eye tracker could record and gather eye-movement data of different participants automatically, such as the time of first fixation, the first fixation duration, and the first fixation count and other eye-movement data. After collecting the eye-movement data, it was necessary to set up the safety signs in selected scenes to be the regions of interest (RIO). With the purpose of studying thoroughly, the paper divided the plane visual stimulating images into nine regions that could cover the whole pictures and numbered for each region. No. 1 to No. 9 showed different setting positions of safety signs in simulative scenes and selected the setting positions as the control factors. Then the author stacked the experimental data of each participant and exported orbit diagrams of fixation point of different setting positions’ safety signs in the scenes of belt transportation, underground roadway and the mine opening. Finally, the experimental data was analyzed with the combination of the commercial software SPSS20.0, statistical methods and the theory of visual attention. It can be seen from the results of the homogeneity of variance that when safety signs set in the different positions, a significant test of the first fixation count in regions of interest is .000 < 0.05 and a significant test of the time of first fixation in regions of interest is .045 < 0.05, both reaching the significant level. The results indicate that there is significant difference among the eye-movement parameters of different setting positions. As for the safety signs on the ground of coal mines, the maximum number of the first fixation count is 0.850 and the minimum time of first fixation is 0.4015 s in the position of No. 5 and for the safety signs under the ground of coal mines, the maximum number of the first fixation count is 0.925 and the minimum time of first fixation is 0.508 s in the position of No. 2. Consequently, these results suggest that the position of No. 5 and No. 2 attract the most attention of participants. The position of No. 5 and No. 2 are proved to be the most effective setting position. The study can be helpful to the establishment and application of the safety signs in coal mines and ensure safety production.

We planned and organized a museum exhibition and an experiential event with a related story, as a concrete example of an AR technology event. Specifically, an AR backyard tour “Godzilla meets ‘F’ museum” was conducted on August 2–6, 2016, as an event related to “Godzilla at the Museum: Creative Tracks of Daikaiju” exhibition in Fukuoka City Museum of Art, held from July 15 to August 31, 2016 [8]. In this paper, we describe the characteristics and implementation state of this event, using a questionnaire-based survey obtained from the event participants. From the results, we discuss the significance of holding AR technology-based art museum exhibitions and the novelty of related events.

Recently, studies on space evaluation using virtual reality (VR) are being performed for a wide range of subjects ranging from those for private houses through to cityscapes of entire towns, and their significance is becoming increasingly important. In addition, architects and interior designers are increasingly making use of simple VR kits to suggest new spaces to customers. However, such studies tend to be used for evaluation only upon personal sight of the virtual space, and joint ownership of the opinion with the designer is difficult to achieve, and there are occasions when there is a mismatch between the virtual reality and the actual reality. In this study, we conduct an experiment using the interior of a car space in which not only the impression of the space but also the operability of the space is evaluated by building a model having identical dimensions to those of the VR model so as to be able to gain an opinion of the sense of faithfulness the virtual space has to the actual (real) space. In addition, by means on an in-space experiment we receive feedback on differences in posture and confirm the usefulness of sense-of-touch feedback for each area of the vehicle’s operation panel. We propose this combination of VR and a physical model as a new design inspection technique through which a designer can share consciousness with an evaluator by conducting a usability evaluation rather than being tied to the concept and practice of a subjective evaluation using a virtual space created by VR.

Objective: Based on the result of users’ satisfaction survey of the neighborhood map, the classification of neighborhood information was studied.The 15 information carried by neighborhood maps were extracted from relative stansards. And then Kano questionnaire were made to analysis the attribute of 15 neighborhood information. Methods: 317 volunteers participated in the user satisfaction survey and the Kano questionnaire survey. Results: There were 4 must-be information, 7 one-dimensional information, 1 attractive information and 3 indifferent information. Conclusion: Based on the above discussion, a new national standard (GB/T 20501.4) on neighborhood map design has been developed, and is be issued.

Search engines play an important role in determining the success of e-commerce. Despite many efforts have been made to improve searching methods (SM) they remain mostly limited to semantic elaboration of keywords. This implies that the SM are not capable of supporting the research of products that best satisfy customers, according to their characteristics and background. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces an approach able to define a new ontological model that formalizes the knowledge necessary to implement a search engine capable to guide the customer to search the desired product or service according to his/her characteristics and needs. To this purpose, three essential aspects have been considered: a User Ontology (UO), a Product Ontology (PO) and rules (or properties) to link the user and product ontologies. The described approach is applied, as an example, to the products class known as Smart Objects that are part of the Internet of Things (IoT) market.

Parents and caregivers need to process large volumes of information regarding their children’s education. Effective parental management of this information is critical for parents to actively participate in their child’s educational development. However, existing educational information management tools are designed from the perspective of the educator or student, not the parent. The objectives of this research were to identify how parents currently manage their children’s educational information and identify areas where challenges are perceived and/or realized for parents managing information regarding their children’s education. Two surveys were designed and conducted to gather the data. The first survey was conducted to understand the types of information parents receive regarding their children, ascertain a high-level view of what is done with the data and if there were any perceived difficulties in managing any particular type of data. Based on the results of the first survey, another survey was conducted that focused primarily on parental management of their children’s educational information. The results confirm that parents must manage a large volume of information regarding their children. The majority of issues related to this information management are associated with educational and medical information. Regarding educational information management, web-based software applications used by school districts allow parents to keep track of their students’ academic progress for the school year, but do not effectively allow parents to compare progress across years, integrate educational information from other sources or organize information in ways that may better meet the needs of the parent. For these reasons parents find themselves interfacing with numerous data sources or tools to maintain a current understanding of their children’s academic progress. Few tools are available and/or used by parents to manage the data. The results support the fact that parents need technological solutions to improve their management and use of educational information regarding their children.

A research about motorcycle purchases customers and its customer financial transactions. Current motorcycle features traditional Cr-MQ steel new material added (Titanium, Carbon, Aluminum, etc.) of highlights is suitable for development and technological innovation, dramatically increase performance of the motorcycle and the machine is called a sophistication and precision. You can read from the manufacturing of motorcycles that are considered the role of its usage, such as use as a hobby not only as a way to travel when you purchase a motorcycle from this customer using the exhilaration and sense of speed and motorcycle is that each person and each needs for motorcycle production. Thought the motorcycle worth increasing as customers to choose installment payments by the customer to buy is on the rise. However, customers could not pay the prescribed payment period even installment payments by the Government and the economy that status quo. Firms selling motorcycle that customers will continue to increase, and no longer is the recovery of the cost of production, could lead to a deterioration in business conditions. The find criteria aiming to minimize these problems, with motorcycle purchase customer data based on non-payment of past customer data gathering and analysis, identify the characteristics of customers that we can’t continue to pay the customer. Customer’s primary income or occupation, purchased from a motorcycle purchase customer usage data for payment and also reads the characteristics of those who cannot as a research method, motorcycle products, how to split payment, loans, split payment of 6 months within or payment within 12 months or 18 months overdue status data than was analyzed and then each group products, engine, etc. You could take the theory as a result of difficult to recall what customers are buying and manufacturing costs. Increase in motorcycle buyers, and value of higher than the result this time led models, while a steady cost recovery environment, the uncollected laid out plans to break the company’s financial difficulties caused by possible related companies. Also led to started payment of product improvements, lower the rate of unpaid. I think it should create a model as any other leads from a variety of perspectives.

In the approach of the Yuzu-no-sato occupational therapy program (Yuzu-OTP), since each care receiver’s program is personalized, even care receivers with severe dementia can develop a feeling of accomplishment and pleasure. Reflection meetings after the program is administered are important because they allow staff to become aware of what they have observed, experienced, and felt during the work occupation sessions, with a view to creating personalized programs. However, it is difficult for other facilities that hope to adopt Yuzu-OTP to hold such meetings; one reason for this is that staff at other facilities do not know how to conduct the meetings. Therefore, in this paper, we analyzed meetings that were part of the Yuzu-OTP and showed how staff members generated new knowledge concerning what each care receiver should do during the next occupational therapy session to elicit enthusiasm and a feeling of accomplishment.

Digital content and online media have reached an unprecedented level of relevance and importance. In the context of a research and technology transfer project on Digital Curation Technologies for online content we develop a platform that provides curation services that can be integrated into concrete curation or content management systems. In this project, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) collaborates with four Berlin-based SMEs that work with and on digital content in four different sectors. The curation services comprise several semantic text and document analytics processes as well as knowledge technologies that can be applied to document collections. The key objective of this set of curation services is to support knowledge workers and digital curators in their daily work, i.e., to automate or to semi-automate processes that the human experts are normally required to do intellectually and without tool support. The goal is to help this group of information and knowledge workers to become more efficient and more effective as well as to enable them to produce high-quality content in their respective sectors. In this article we concentrate on the current state of a user interface that is currently under development at ART+COM, one of the SME partners in the project. A second, more generic, i.e., not domain-specific user interface is under development at DFKI. In this article we describe the technology platform and the two different interfaces. We also take a look at the different requirements for ART+COM’s domain-specific and DFKI’s generic user interface.

IT service management is the prevailing standard for IT operations in practice. It is rooted in the so-called Information Technology Infrastructure Library, a best practice standard that proposes to look upon IT functions as a service provider that delivers IT services to the business. This idea of a service orientation has also attracted academic attention since the turn of the century. Although, the core concept of ITSM, the IT service itself, is still not clearly defined, and thus practitioners still struggle with this concept. Therefore, based on the ITIL and the academic literature, we developed an IT service definition that contains six unique characteristics. This definition has been tested in a case study that we conducted with the IT department of a German university. In this paper, we elaborate on the empirical validation and its results.

The purpose of this paper is to predict the demand for local public goods by local residents and to consider ways to promote diversification of cost burden on supply. We employ a questionnaire survey on issues of current interest from the viewpoint of the cost burden associated with the operation of a community bus service. From the survey results, it was established that there was almost no use of non-contact IC cards in the context of mobile phone usage. It was revealed that there was a certain level of support for collecting expenses through fares rather than through annual payments.

Now, in Japan business of clothes with E-commerce(EC) is done activity. Sales of direct sales store and outlets is decreasing, so a number of its store to close are increasing. It’s expected that Sales with EC site and market size continue to increase from now on. In this circumstance, in order to develop EC site which scale shows a great growth, we have done a calculation of the factor score through the questionnaire items, and classification of customer with questionnaire date and customer’s record to purchase. After this, we have grasped the characteristics of classified customer information, and compared some clusters. As a result, the characteristics of customer cluster regarded as “fashionable” must be gotten close to its not customer cluster. “Not fashionable” customers have higher average value of “frequency of purchase” and “expenses of purchase” per customers, therefore, it’s expected increasing of sales and expand of its size.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the prevailing standard for managing Information Technology (IT) operations in practice. What is revolutionary about the ITIL is that it proposes to conceive of IT not (only) as a technology, but rather as a means of providing services to businesses. This idea has gained considerable attention in academia, and has given rise to identifying “IT Service Management (ITSM)” as a new management paradigm and field of research. Unfortunately, the concept of an IT service has been poorly elaborated the within ITIL, and remains elusive in the academic debate surrounding ITSM. With this paper, we set out to resolve the vagueness surrounding the notion of an IT service based on an extensive literature review. We conclude a set of six defining features that we believe, if taken together, fully capture the concept of an IT service. We also substantiate these features with underlying theories. Finally, we illustrate the potential of our definition with an exemplary IT service that we defined for a German publishing company in the context of an ITSM research project we recently conducted.

In 2015, Internet use rate in Japan exceeded 82%, smartphone penetration rate exceeded 64%. And, utilization of online shopping was the third in the Japanese ICT services usage. In all ages, its utilization rate exceeded 68%. In the 2011 data that smartphones like iPhone and Android mobile phones began to spread, the use of net shopping was also the third most common. However, attention to utilization ratio, it is 64% in the 20s to 40s, slightly lower than in 2015. In the 50s, it is 51.5%, more than 10% lower. In the 60s and over, it is 36.7%, which is about half as low as 2015. Internet and smartphones popularized, and online shopping became familiar. Net business has become a big market in Japan. To the extent it can not be ignored. This report used purchase data of the Internet shopping site. From the basic statistics we found the following. Users are 65.9% for females and 34.1% for men. There are so many women to use. About the user’s age, the over 40’s (21.9%) is the most. Next was the result of early 30s (20.2%) and late 20s (19.2%). The population of Japan in 2015 is 59.00% in the over 40s. On the other hand, 5.99% in the early 30s and 5.40% in the latter half of the 20s. It is thought that users increase if the population number is large. Therefore, the main target is not over 40’s, it is considered to be in the early 30’s and the latter half of 20’s. About the time when it is selling. The month with the highest sales is January which accounts for 13.4% of the total. The month with second sales is 11.1% in February, the third is 9.2% in December. Conversely, the month with the lowest sales is May and September, 5.8% of the total. The second is 6.2%, which is April. From this fact, it would be considered sell well are those in the winter season. About customer information. By prefecture, the largest number of Tokyo is 17.5%. It is about 50% of the total in the top six prefectures including that Tokyo. (Kanagawa prefecture 8.4%, Osaka prefecture 7.9%, Saitama prefecture 5.5%, Aichi prefecture 5.5%, Chiba prefecture 4.9%). This is the same ranking as the population ranking by prefecture in Japan. The largest number of registrants to the population is Tokyo. Besides, Kanagawa, Osaka and Kyoto prefectures were more than other prefectures. These four prefectures are the center of the west and east city. The method used covariance analysis and factor analysis. We modeled it about seasonal consumption behavior. The axis of analysis is “When do people buy things?”

In this paper, we propose a high fidelity haptic interface based on biofeedback. When we interact with a very stiff virtual object in the virtual world by a haptic interface, the haptic interface frequently becomes unstable. We cannot feel the virtual object stably. On the other hand, when we interact with a real object in the real world, the dynamics of our fingers and arm always change and adjust to the appropriate value for the real object. We can feel the real object stably. By using the adaptation, we aimed for achieving the high fidelity haptic interface. In this study, the proposed system measured the grasping force generated by the user interacting with a virtual object by the haptic interface. The system also controlled the coupling impedance between the virtual object and the haptic interface by using the grasping force as biofeedback. In order to measure the grasping force, we developed a new end effector for a string based impedance haptic device SPIDAR-G. We conducted evaluation experiments about the proposed system. The experimental results indicate that the proposed system improved the maximum stiffness of the virtual coupling, and achieved both stability and fidelity by using biofeedback.

In this study we explore the concept of gesture-based robot control for maneuver and manipulation, using a prototype system by AnthroTronix [1]. For the task, 24 Soldier-participants were asked to tele-operate the robot through a course containing several tight turns and obstacles. They were then asked to simulate “planting a breaching charge” by approaching a target with a marker attached to the end of the manipulator arm. They were provided with video feedback via a camera mounted to the chassis of the robot. Performance on the task was defined as time to navigate to the intended target, time to manipulate the arm to the target, and accuracy of the manipulation task. Results suggested that the use of the instrumented glove reduced the time needed to maneuver the manipulator arm as compared to the use of the handheld controller.

In addition to efforts to increase the intelligence and perception capabilities of robots to enable collaboration with human counterparts, there is also a focus towards improving interaction mechanics. Multimodal communication is one such tool under investigation due to its dynamic ability to select explicit and implicit communication modalities with the aim of facilitating robust exchanges of information. Although there is extensive research in the domain of explicit communication using auditory, visual, and tactile interfaces, investigations into systems that incorporate implicit methods, or actually adapt and select appropriate modalities for reporting data from a robot to human is limited. Furthermore, a missing piece is identifying how and when to trigger these changes. A novel strategy to accomplish adaptation is through identification of teammate’s physiological state. From the literature, one can find examples of researchers using high fidelity systems to measure physiological response and predict user workload, but many of these technologies are prohibitively expensive or not suitable for use in many domains of interest for human robot interaction such as dismounted infantry operations. Recent advancements in wearable consumer technologies, specifically fitness trackers supporting integration with third party software, are making it possible for incorporation of low cost systems in a variety of novel applications. A logical extension of these applications being physiological state measurement to drive adaptive automation in the form of multimodal interfaces. This paper describes the results of a study to assess the feasibility of using data from a wearable fitness tracker in an adaptive multimodal interface for squad-level human-robot interaction.

This paper presents a wearable, wireless tactile display system which consists of individually controllable vibrotactile actuator devices, called Vibropixels. The design of the system is easily scalable and reconfigurable, allowing for implementation in a variety of applications. The system removes any limit on the number of actuator devices by avoiding both hand-shaking and packet acknowledgement functionality. The number of control messages required is minimized through the use of a exible two-part addressing scheme as well as functions allowing for the generation of multiple actuator envelopes on the devices. Created within an interdisciplinary art-science research project, 145 Vibropixels were utilized in the premier of the artistic installation Haptic Field. Recognizing that the artistic creation process often involves utilizing systems beyond their intended application, we designed our system to allow our collaborators to interact with and potentially modify the system on a hardware, firmware, or software level. Through interviews with our collaborators, we evaluated our system’s ability to support the artistic creation process in light of Shneiderman’s principles for creativity support tools. While our collaborators mostly used and modified the highest level software tools provided to them, we argue that supporting lower level modifications may still be useful depending upon available time and the knowledge of the user.

This study has proposed an idea of remote individuals’ connection through augmented tele-presence systems called ARM-COMS (ARm-supported eMbodied COmmunication Monitor System). ARM-COMS is composed of a tablet PC and a desktop robotic arm. The table PC in ARM-COMS is a typical ICT (Information and Communication Technology) device and the desktop robotic arm works as a manipulator of the tablet. ARM-COMS has three types of functions; namely, autonomous positioning (AP), autonomous entrainment movement (AEM), and autonomous entrainment positioning (AEP), which are the key to connect the remote individuals. This paper mainly focuses on AEM function, which was implemented using a three-steps of control approach, including face detection, landmark detection and face orientation estimation. Reviewing the experimental results using a prototype system based on the three-step approach, the feasibility of this control procedure will be discussed.

This paper proposed a methodology which allows the detection of characteristic postural sways which relate to the invasion to preferred interpersonal distance. The result of empirical study revealed that, at least in most cases under the condition of standing posture, the characteristic change points of postures which are caused by bodily sway can be identified based on the analysis of body pressure distribution using the biomechanical reference models. This methodology based on non-verbal behavior is also expected to be helpful to analyze problematic phenomena of the invasion to personal space of individuals who have the difficulties of linguistic behavior.

Vibration patterns are used for presentation by tactile interfaces such as those of mobile phones. Our previous research clarified the perceptual characteristics of perceivable vibration patterns for the elderly. Then, we proposed application software for creating on/off controlled vibration patterns by tapping the touch screen of a smartphone to enable the user to create identifiable customized vibration patterns. Although Japanese elderly persons found the user interface difficult to use because of their reduced motor ability, our study concluded that the vibration patterns characterized by the pronunciation of the message were easily recognizable by users regardless of their age. This prompted us to develop an easy way to create vibration patterns based on the user’s speech. The voice-based vibration pattern, which includes characteristics of the user’s pronunciation, was more effective from the viewpoint of the memorability and learnability of the vibration pattern. However, the memorability of a voice-based vibration pattern could be reduced by specific characteristics of pronunciation such as monotonous speech. Hence, this study proposes two additional types of modified voice-based vibration patterns by emphasizing the characteristics of the user’s pronunciation. Further, these two new types of vibration patterns were evaluated experimentally in comparison with the conventional type from in respect of memorability. As a result, we found that the user’s pronunciation and/or recognition ability rather than the characteristics of the type of vibration patterns could affect the user’s performance.

Orientation and balance can be disrupted by a sensory integration or sensorimotor challenge of exogenous origin, including rhythmic alterations in G-force and direction that occur during turbulent flight or travel by sea, as well as a visual-vestibular-somatosensory rearrangement caused by exposure to a moving vehicle simulator or virtual environments. Balance can also be disrupted by an endogenous challenge associated with an inner-ear disease or a head injury affecting peripheral or central balance systems. We sought to determine whether operationally relevant psychomotor performance (a dynamic simulated shooting task) was sensitive to a functional balance challenge caused by the aftereffect of unusual vestibular stimulation or blast/concussion. Seventy healthy subjects and 30 mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) patients were evaluated with a shooting simulator used for military training. They performed four new shooting tests designed to quantify marksmanship speed and accuracy during tasks similar to established clinical gait challenges. Our exploratory tasks were assessed for their sensitivity to a temporary exogenous challenge (the aftereffect of spinning healthy subjects in a rotating chair to simulate vestibular vertigo) and their sensitivity to imbalance associated with the lingering effect of mTBI. The task that was the most reliable and most sensitive to an exogenous balance challenge was kneeling while shooting at targets to the left and right of the frontal visual field. This test merits further development. We present recommendations for developing this test further and for making the large testing apparatus portable, robust, and capable of expanded quantification of shooting performance, rifle kinematics, and postural sway.

In recent years, the hazards of operating on the smartphone while walking has become common knowledge today, and the behavior has become an object of public concern, frequently causing collisions between individuals and bicycles or cars. People operating on the smartphones while walking will inevitably gaze downward. Not being able to see what is in the front, they become involved in collisions.In this study, we will make it possible to operate smartphones using umbrellas. For this purpose, we will develop a system and interaction that will turn the umbrella into smartphones (allow the umbrella to perform the input and output operations of the smartphones). Our aim is to suggest and validate the interaction between the user and his/her umbrella. By using the umbrella as a display, users will be able to face forward while walking. We will validate through several apps whether it is possible to operate the smartphone using an umbrella.

The sense that one’s own body belongs to oneself is called “Body Ownership”. Until now, body ownership is investigated in a psychology field. However, the investigation of the origins and functional role of the sense of one’s own body not only explores the philosophical question, but it also examines the issues that should be investigated before VR becomes widely used in our daily life. In this paper, we surveyed the existing literature on body ownership and categorized factors into bottom-up and top-down processes. We also identified the perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral influences of body ownership. We then discussed some promising areas for future research in the VR field. As for factors, it is promising to consider the interaction between the body and the external world, and to develop a unified evaluation standard and theoretical framework for research in this field. As for influences, it is promising to consider the higher, longer-term cognitive influences in the social context, and to apply them in the context of body augmentation in the real world.

Wrist worn fitness trackers have become ubiquitous in recent years. Economies of scale have drastically reduced the cost of these devices while concurrent advances in technology have expanded their physiological recording capabilities. These devices now contain numerous sensors capable of monitoring and collecting various physiological attributes. Additionally, some of these devices provide access to the application programming interface (API), allowing researchers direct access to the data. The use of these devices offers a wide-ranging benefit to the scientific research community. However, there are several factors to consider when selecting a fitness tracker for use in research. Data rights, data protection, and data quality are all important considerations that must be addressed. In addition, other factors, such as sensor types, capabilities, and sampling rates, can directly affect the utility of a wearable device for use in research. In this paper, the Microsoft Band 2 fitness tracker was selected to evaluate participant mental workload during task performance in a simulated nuclear nower plant (NPP) Main Control Room (MCR) as well as training effectiveness in UH-60A/L simulated environments. The Microsoft Band 2 fitness tracker was selected specifically for its optical hear rate sensor, API access to RR intervals (interval between two continuous heartbeats), and direct access to real-time streaming data from the device. To validate the utility of using the Microsoft Band 2 fitness trackers in scientific research, the RR interval and heart rate sensor readings need to be directly compared to FDA medical approved sensor readings. This paper discusses considerations when using a fitness tracker for psychophysiology research and compares data collected from the Microsoft Band 2 to two different FDA approved medical grade ECG devices.

Line-of-sight such as gaze and eye-contract plays an important role to enhance the embodied interaction and communication through avatars. In addition, many gaze models and communication systems with the line-of-sight using avatars have been proposed and developed. However, the gaze behaviors by generating the above-mentioned models are not considered to enhance the embodied interaction such as activated communication, because the models stochastically generate the eyeball movements based on the human gaze behavior. Therefore, we analyzed the interaction between the human gaze behavior and the activated communication by using line-of-sight measurement devices. Then, we proposed an eye gaze model based on the above-mentioned analysis. In this study, we develop an advanced avatar-mediated communication system in which the proposed eye gaze model is applied to speech-driven embodied entrainment characters called “InterActor.” This system generates the avatar’s eyeball movements such as gaze and looking away based on the activated communication, and provides a communication environment wherein the embodied interaction is promoted. The effectiveness of the system is demonstrated by means of sensory evaluations of 24 pairs of subjects involved in avatar-mediated communication.

This paper proposes a model of mutual acceptance between a patient, his/her family members and medical staff by sharing information through indirect biofeedback. For upcoming a so-called super aging society, it has been becoming a serious problem how effective and high-quality care support for aged persons could be achieved in Japan. Here we focus on psychological aspect of this problem. That is, it would be a possible way to tackle the problem if an aged patient, his/her family members and medical staff could deepen their mutual understanding and mutual acceptance by sharing indirect biofeedback information of the patient. This paper describes and discusses two mechanisms; indirect biofeedback of a user’s sleep state based on analysis and measurement of his/her sleep data, and sharing information of his/her indirect biofeedback with a plant-type indicator through experiments. We conducted an experiment using the elderly people in the facility and healthy people. The participants see the virtual plants which is visualized their own sleep state and the participants try to do mutual understanding and mutual acceptance. We evaluated the measured data as well as the answers to a questionnaire filled out before and after the experiment. The results indicated that the study participants could properly promote mutual understanding and mutual acceptance by using proposed system.

This research goal is to establish a new design theory of co-creative expression interface for promoting interpersonal relationship with others, from the conviction that Hand contact improvisation, which is to touch their hands and create embodied improvisational expression together, is useful for deepening relationship with heavily developmentally disabled children who are handicapped about symbolical and oral communication skills. In this paper, inspired by co-creation with movement and touching interaction in music basically, we developed sound-expression Hand contact improvisation interface to motivate children toward bodily expression. This interface is cylindrical device that has contact parts on its both ends that have an ability to measure internal load of each hand, and it present sound from inner device. Sounds are generated by the system using multi phases that represent melodic lines. Interactions of these phases are manipulated by hand load data that are emerged among bodily expressers. When we conducted experiments of bodily expression with this interface, we observed increase tendency of interactions about hand load. Additionally, once we bring the interface to the practical field, we found people including autistic children can interact and bodily express using this interface. We discuss with these results about usefulness of our design method for making inclusive interface that supporting awareness toward bodily expression and induce diverse co-creative expression.

In recent years, the need for remote communication that can provide a greater sense of presence to the communicating parties has been felt. In this study, we propose a framework for forwarding a user’s presence via a robot to a partner during video communication. We developed a prototype of a oneself robot, which is a robot personalized to resemble a user and can be easily assembled by the communication partner. We conducted a public demonstration and an evaluation experiment; the results of which demonstrate the effectiveness of the robot. The participants enjoyed remote communication by using the prototype of oneself robot.