Human Interface and the Management of Information: Supporting Learning, Decision-Making and Collaboration

We have previously proposed a problem-solving process model using logical expressions, based on the observation that legal statements can be described using logical expressions when considering the problem-solving process model used by engineering students in the study of law. However, propositional logic alone has a limited range of application to practice problems, and so here we examine the description of practice problems using predicate logic by extending propositional logic to first-order predicate logic, and consider the effectiveness of this approach.

Standard input methods for entering mathematical expressions on digital devices are cumbersome. Our goal is to develop an intelligent mathematical input method that allows users to input mathematical expressions using colloquial linear strings. This paper presents the evaluation of an improved predictive algorithm for converting linear strings into general mathematical formulae. The results of our evaluation show that the prediction accuracy of the top ten ranking for our method is 85.2%.

In mass teaching, the learning goal is often set focused on the average students. The advantage of this is that learning outcome can become homogenized and be reached a certain level. On the other hand, students above or below the level cannot get enough support. Information communication technology enable teachers look over the progress of learners. Learning management systems and classroom management systems collect learners’ answers to exercises, learners’ behavior on the systems and so on. These data are expected to lead information that teachers keep track of progress of learners and identify which learner need support. In addition to this, this study aims at develop a monitoring tool of understanding of learners in class exercise. The result of practical use of this shows teachers accept this tool and actually they have given individual guidance not depending on their usual understanding of students.

In science education, the model-building learning environment is one of the promising methods for promoting learners’ ability to make appropriate models of various phenomena with scientific concepts. However, it isn’t an easy task for most learners and some assistance is necessary. We have developed the function that detects difference between learners’ models and the correct models and gives feedback about errors to learners. We conducted an experiment for evaluating the function which revealed that: (1) the degree of model completion increased by using the function, (2) the degree of final model completion was correlated with the frequency of using the function, and the correlation was clearer for easier tasks, and (3) the learners who preferred mathematical explanation of errors thought more deeply about why their models were erroneous.

We propose that seminar activities should be a focus of university education in the future. Under this principle, we have been developing a seminar management system and a learning management system for traditional classroom instruction and e-learning environments for university education. The main point of seminar activities is not only acquiring knowledge and skills, but also the ability to mutually assess growth with appropriate instructor support and foster student self-learning. Recognizing the importance of seminar activities in university education, we discuss seminar activities that should be the center of university education five to ten years from now to consider policies and support methods now.

This paper presents the way to design the learning support system toward acquiring a creative skill on learning. The objective of this research is designing the learning goal space for a creative learner. There are two research goals. One is to establish designing the creative learning task. The other is to make clear the human sense of creativity. As the background of this research, the jobs having the difficulty for both AI and computer will remain in the future. Both AI and computer need high creativity or social skills. However, it is too difficult for computer to acquire human’s creativity. To solve this problem, we focus on the way to utilize higher creativity of human than that of computers. We proposed three kinds of the methods. First, it is the visualization of learning traces to support awareness of creativity on the learning. Second is the discovery support for unknown solutions by generating the derived achievement based on negation of his/her found solution. Third is generating the derived achievement by the justification of the found solution. We conducted the preliminary learning experiment by three human subjects. In addition, to evaluate the meaning of these results, we conducted the questionnaire and the hearing investigation. By the preliminary experimental results, we make the hypothesis that the proposed methods are effective to the motivation on creative learning.

In this paper, we propose a new educational curriculum of creating hazard map with tablet-type device for disaster prevention especially for schoolchildren and a application software as the educational tool. To create educational curriculum and application, we interviewed the elementary school teachers and found features schoolchildren. In addition, we experimented in order to evaluate the educational curriculum and the application, and reveal new features of schoolchildren. As a result, schoolchildren could learn about disaster prevention by an our educational curriculum. In addition, we revealed new two features of the schoolchildren. First, recognition of landmark is different from between schoolchildren and adults. In addition, schoolchildren frequently used landmarks that are familiar to them life such as related to the city and public facility. Second, schoolchildren can do operation of electronic map such as changing map scale and slide according to the purpose.

Reading the source code of software programs is an effective way of learning, but novice programmers need (1) exercises that involve reading programs by tracing execution manually, and (2) feedback when they interpret the program incorrectly. In this paper, we propose exercises in which students read programs, and we report on the development of a system that provides feedback on mistakes. Furthermore, we also report the results of a comparison, conducted in a laboratory environment, between the approach proposed here and the conventional approach of learning via creating programs, as well as the results of two teaching trials.

In this paper, we propose a prototype of an AR–VR (Augmented Reality-Virtual Reality) connected system in which users can enter a space in which they cannot go physically while emphasizing spatial consistency between the real and VR space. Museums have important collections that cannot be displayed, such as crumbling buildings, lost sceneries, and fragile trains. To display them, museums have used AR or VR systems. In AR systems, the visitors can appreciate the collections with their context because AR systems emphasize spatial consistency, and users can compare the current and past scenery around the collections. In VR systems, the visitors can interact with the collections with a high degree of freedom because VR systems have spatial extensibility and the users can ignore the physical limitations. Therefore, we connect the AR and VR systems to take advantage of the technology in appreciating collections with high comprehension of their context and degree of freedom. We implemented a prototype AR–VR connected system in which users can transition from the real space to the VR space seamlessly. In our system, they first superimpose mobile tablets onto the museums’ collections, such as a crumbling building. Then, the current scenery in the tablet will gradually change to a VR scenery where they cannot enter physically. Finally, they can move around the VR space using their own body. Through our experiments, we found that the concept of connecting the AR and VR systems could be acceptable, and the system could work well in actual exhibitions.

Prospective memory (PM) is defined be the capacity to remember to realize an intended action in the future. This is a very important cognitive function that permit to maximize autonomy in everyday life. Unfortunately, few assessment tool, valid, reliable and ecological is accessible for clinicians. To obtain a verisimilar and ecologically prospective memory assessment tool, virtual reality seems to be a promising way. A specific and sensible tool could help the clinician to detect subtle changes in the cognition of the elderly and, ideally detect pathological aging soon before the beginning of decline. Because older adults are not really at ease with technology, these (dis)abilities could be confounded with cognitive inefficacy and lead to false positives diagnostics. To avoid this, the psychometrician must consider the impact of human-computer interfaces (HMI) on cognition. This paper present three experiments that show the impact of HMI on stress, capacity to achieve a task and on cognitive load. The first pilot study shown that a “heavy to use” HMI generated stress and difficulty to achieve the task with healthy adults. The second pilot study revealed that VMT-2 is judged moderately challenging cognitively and it seems to be more for older participants. The third pilot study shown that a complex virtual environment (in terms of navigation and interaction) is more cognitively challenging than a simple virtual environment for older peoples compared to young participants. These results indicated the importance of considering HMI as a potential variable that could create bias in the cognitive measurement.

We report on an Augmented Reality interface to speed the workflow of food crop breeders. The goals of the interface are to make data collection in the field more efficient to accelerate the breeding cycle. For hardware combine the Recon Jet sports computer sunglasses and a Neutab N7 Android tablet. For software, we augment the Kansas State University open source Fieldbook application with barcode reading capability, a speech recognition interface, and information displays. We design and evaluate the application using a cohort of wheat breeders.

The present paper proposes a new virtual reality presentation of bodily re-living experience that is focused on reproduction of the experience of other person including his/her body sensation. The characteristics of the re-living experience are discussed in three aspects of visual, bodily and subjective (agency) presentation problems. Four kinds of duality in implementation of the re-living experience are explained as a basic condition of an intrinsic hybrid structure of a presentation system. A preliminary implementation was built to provide the re-living experience of walking in a virtual space. Avatar rendering was also evaluated in terms of bodily sensation.

The aim of this study was to explore the feature pattern of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) in a Virtual Reality based Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (VR-IADL) that runs on a tablet PC and requires touch interaction to complete the task. Twelve participants (MCI: 4, history of MCI: 2, healthy elderly: 6) were recruited from the region of Philadelphia in the USA to perform a VR-IADL task. We found that touch interaction in toast task and coffee task are more difficult than that of MCI patients with having history of MCI as well as healthy older adults. Also, we found that behavioral features using autoregressive model with finger velocity data calculated from finger position data measuring in VR-IADL. Several types of feature patterns were extracted from touch interaction and finger position data. Based on the feature pattern, Support Vector Machine (SVM) was performed to calculate the accuracy of the feature patter for characterization of MCI. As the result, the sensitivity and specificity were 83%.

Virtual reality offers a highly interactive and flexible experience. It has the advantage of enhancing users’ understanding and interest as well as the disadvantage of overlooking the main features in a virtual environment. The excessive amount of information and interactive options in most virtual reality settings may cause users to quit exploring before experiencing the entire content of the virtual environment. In this paper, we propose a new method of inherently encouraging users to continue their experience in virtual environments while permitting free exploration through social interactions. The proposed method generates a joint attention by displaying the movement of the position and gaze direction of other concurrent/previous users. We introduced the proposed method into a virtual museum exploring system and demonstrated it in a real museum to evaluate the effectiveness of our method when used by a large number of people. The results showed that the proposed method enhances users’ interest and prolongs the experience time of virtual museum exploring.

Developments in virtual reality (VR) have advanced numerous applications in clinical settings in the areas of learning and treatment in neuropsychology. Emerging VR applications today focus on the challenge of diagnosis and cognitive training of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia patients and address navigation and orientation, face recognition, cognitive functionality, and other instrumental activities of daily living (IADL). The information recorded and captured by VR-based technology is real-time and can be advantageous for further analysis of patients’ characteristics. The present study sought to utilize the data collected from VR-based software and a leap-motion device for learning in MCI cases to generate the rules for errors and action slips based on finger-action transitions when performing IADL. The finger motion was recorded as a time-series database, then an induction technique called Inductive Logic Programming (ILP), which uses logical and clausal language to represent the training data, was used to discover a concise classification rule using logical programming.

Cognitive assessment and screening can be realized with virtual environments (VE). These VE reproduce ecological situation and give an overview of participants difficulties through scoring systems. The most variables used to qualify participants performance are number of errors and time completion. These variables are link to cognition and navigation skill in VEs. We assessed navigation of adult and elderly in a multitasking VE. Navigation patterns were elaborate with diagram to visually detect differences between the two age groups. Elderly have poorer performance than adults.

Source code completion assistance is a popular feature in modern IDEs. However, despite their popularity, there is little research about their key characteristics and limitations. There is also little research about the way software developers interact with code completion assistants, especially when considering the different techniques assistants use to populate the list of possible completions. This paper presents a study about the features of currently available code assistants and an experiment targeting professional Java developers familiar with the Eclipse platform that aims to collect and interpret usage data of two popular code completion assistants during the execution of three programming tasks. Results indicate that half the interactions with code assistants are either dismissed, interrupted or the completion proposals displayed have no direct contribution to the completion of the programming task. In that sense, we argue that code assistants still have a long road to pursue, since they seem to diminish the importance of the ultimate goals of the task at hand and also lack the ability of identifying and exploring the concepts of context-aware computing theory. The results of this paper can drive future HCI research to the design of adaptive code completion assistants that are able to respond to end user behaviors and preferences.

Agriculture is a major consumer of freshwater resources around the globe. This is especially true in Northern Texas and Oklahoma, where water withdrawl for agriculture purposes causes the continuous decline of aquifers. Information based irrigation management has the potential to conserve these vital resources. In this paper, we report on an interactive irrigation application that utilizes weather and LANDSAT data to calculate daily water needs for food crops. The work demonstrates that low-cost data can provide both basic, and advanced irrigation solutions via a web application.

Naturalistic Action Test (NAT) is a diagnostic tool that involves a participant completing a common, everyday task under the observation of a trained clinician. The clinician can identify and quantify the severity of an individuals cognitive impairments based on the his or her actions while carrying out the task. Individuals with cognitive impairments have been shown to commit errors such as performing an incorrect sequence of steps when completing a task at greater rates than individuals without cognitive impairments. This paper describes our initial experiences in developing a wearable computing-based system to support NATs. The system’s objective is to eventually help the clinician streamline the analysis of NATs by processing of the smartwatch collected sensor values to try and identify episodes that resemble errors.

As causality becomes non-linear, data-driven decision making becomes challenging because traditional Decision Support Systems (DSSs) do not support these environments. Existing analytical methods struggle in complex environments where variables that interact with each other as well as themselves. DEAR is a new framework that supports complex decision making. This framework performs change detection, evaluates causal relationships and interactions, assesses the risk of known interventions, and recommends action using a guided exploration strategy that blends historically successful solutions with possible alternatives.Fear of viral outbreaks drove the need for public policy to mitigate mosquito populations in Columbus, OH. Through monitoring environmental variables, this approach detected changes in precipitation and temperature. Using CCM to assess causality, this approach determined that temperature was the primary driver of the complex mosquito population ecosystem. It determined the probability that mosquito populations would also rise. Through forming a risk assessment based upon the historic success of mosquito control systems, this approach is able to offer real-time guidance as to which vector-based mitigation strategy to pursue.

Information is an essential component for better emergency response. Although a lot of information being available at various places during any kind of emergency, many emergency responders (ERs) use only a limited amount of the available information. The reason for this is that the available information heterogeneously distributed, in different formats, and ERs are unable to get access to the relevant information. Moreover, without having access to the needed information, many emergency responders are not able to obtain a sufficient understanding of the emergency situation. Consequently, a lot of time is being used to search for the needed information and poor decisions may be made. Therefore, in this paper, our research focuses on bringing the available heterogeneously dispersed information together to improve the information accessibility for ERs. In this study, we present an approach for integration of heterogeneous databases in the Semantic Web context using a Model-driven data integration approach based on an information model. We propose an architecture using the Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) and web service technologies for facilitating knowledge sharing and data exchange between different ERs. Based on the proposed architecture, we developed a system prototype and presented it with an indoor fire emergency response scenario.

This paper presents a proposal for a Decision Support System sensitive to the user’s context in the area of investment. This area is especially complicated due to the complex nature of the stock market. Therefore, a context-sensitive decision support can be a great support for investors. In the literature survey on DSS for investments in the stock market could be found that very little has been explored regarding the investor profile in financial decisions-making systems. Any practical experiment was not found where the investor profile has been applied on the recommendations for investment in the stock market. The work emphasized the main points to be considered in the User Context implementation for decision support systems development. The main motivation for this work was to demonstrate how the performance of Decision Support Systems for investment in stock market could be improved through the application of user context to their recommendation models. A recommendation system for buying and selling of stocks, based on genetic algorithms, was implemented and measured the performance in various test scenarios, with user profiles and without user profile features. The system configured without user profile, often performed below results than the different profiles modeled and implemented. To confirm the preliminary results, the ANOVA test was conducted and the null hypothesis was refuted at 0.0001 level.

This paper presents the preliminary results of a pilot project to design a predictive coding system for electronic discovery (e-discovery) that will be able to handle potentially relevant evidence in a myriad of formats and that will have the features and functionality that lawyers and members of the legal team will find most useful. We developed our predictive coding system to combine available software tools with particular emphasis on usability and in making the user interface as intuitive, attractive and user-friendly as possible. Future work will include a survey and interviews with potential users, testing the system with larger sets of files and documents, and continued refinement of the user interface and backend processing.

The SMS requirements and implementation of ICAO, FAA, Transport Canada, EASA, CAAC, etc. are summarized, and the problems existing in the definition, classification and identification method of hazards put forward by ICAO, SMICG, ECAST, CAAC and FAA are analyzed. Based on the analysis to the definitions of system safety and safety attributes, the definition of system elements is put forward. Then, the hazard taxonomy is set up, which are procedure, responsibility, personnel, and equipment, supervision and inspection, operation environment and effect. Meanwhile, the secondary taxonomy is given. According to the established hazard taxonomy, three hazard identification methods are set up, which are system and job analysis, unsafe events analysis and safety information statistical analysis. For each method, applicable objects, working process and application example are given respectively. The hazard taxonomy and identification methods have been put into practice in a number of service providers in China, the results show that the taxonomy and identification methods have highly practicability.

Tourists tend to spend a significant amount of time engaging in information searches during their trip planning process. This research adds to the knowledge of tourism information presentation through studying different types of available online textual tourism information, examining their characteristics, and exploring their influence on tourists’ desires to visit a destination. Two studies were conducted in total, in which Study 1 employed a mixed-method approach to extract the values of online data. Study 2 employed a scenario-based experiment with a follow-up questionnaire and interview to obtain the perceived values of the different types of textual information. This research categorises the online textual tourism information into four types: blogs, reviews, messages, and articles. Blogs tend to present tourism information using first person narratives, displaying a strong sense of affection and positive emotions with a touch of sincerity and excitement. Reviews, as the easiest to understand and most useful type of textual tourism information, have a significant influence on tourists’ desires to visit a particular destination.

The development of information technology has stimulated an increasing number of researchers to investigate how to provide serendipitous experience to users in the digital environment, especially in the fields of information research and recommendation systems. Although a number of achievements have been made in understanding the nature of serendipity in the context of information research, few of these achievements have been employed in the design of information systems. This paper proposes a new serendipitous recommendation algorithm based on previous empirical studies by taking into considerations of the three important elements of serendipity, namely “unexpectedness”, “insight” and “value”. We consider our design of the algorithm as an important attempt to bridge the research fruits between the two areas of information research and recommendation systems. By applying the designed algorithm to a game-based application in a real life experiment with target users, we have found that comparing to the conventional designed method; the proposed algorithm has successfully provided more possibilities to the participants to experience serendipitous encountering.

Recently, Japan has been experiencing a declining birthrate and an increasingly aging population; as a result, the number of dementia patients is increasing. Current medical science has no way to treat dementia completely after onset. Therefore, it is necessary to detect mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in the early stage just before dementia develops. It is clear that MCI patients who exhibit subtle deficits in daily living behavior (in this study, micro-errors (MEs)) have declining cognitive function associated with cognitive impairment. Virtual reality (VR) technology has been actively utilized in rehabilitation and therapy, and here we use an application known as Virtual Kitchen (VK). In this work, we analyze how ME happens. We use finger movement data and subtask information from VK. Our methodology proposes a combination of inductive logic programming (ILP) and the sliding window algorithm. Because ILP can extract expressive rules but is susceptible to noise and memory hog, it is difficult to use sensor data directly for learning. Sliding window is used as its ability to reduce the amount of data while holding the shape of original time series data. From preliminary experiments, we obtained some rules of ME occurrence that are related to differences in speed, time interval, and subtask. We obtained results that explain how ME occurrence is generally related to subtask and finger speed. In the future, we will use more positive samples and conduct more experiments to obtain better and more accurate results.

Plagiarism detection in documents requires appropriate definition of document similarity and efficient computation of the similarity. This paper evaluates the validity of using vector representation of words for defining a document similarity in terms of the processing time and the accuracy in plagiarism detection. This paper proposes a plagiarism detection algorithm based on the score vector weighted by vector representation of words. The score vector between two documents represents the number of matches between corresponding words for every possible gap of the starting positions of the documents. The vector and its weighted version can be computed efficiently using convolutions. In this paper, two types of vector representation of words, that is, randomly generated vectors and a distributed representation generated by a neural network-based method from training data, are evaluated with the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that using the weighted score vector instead of the normal one for the algorithm can reduce the processing time with a slight decrease of the accuracy, and that randomly generated vector representation is more suitable for the algorithm than the distributed representation in the sense of a tradeoff between the processing time and the accuracy.

This research focuses on the problem of reducing the uncertainty rate of an environment in the context of surveillance. A human operator designates a set of locations to be checked by a team of autonomous quadcopters. The goal of this work is to minimize the uncertainty rate of the environment while penalizing solutions whose the total travelled distance is large. To cope with this issue, the A* algorithm is employed to plan the shortest path between each pair of points. Then, a simulated annealing algorithm is used to allocate tasks among the team of drones. This paper discusses three different objective functions to solve the problem whose cost-efficient and feasible solutions can be obtained after a few minutes. The presented work also deals with optimization of the simulated algorithms parameters by using Bayesian optimization. It is currently the state-of-the-art approach for the problem of hyper-parameters search, for expensive to evaluate functions, since it allows to save computation time by modeling the cost function. The Bayesian optimizer returns the best parameters within one day, while the use of grid search methods required weeks of computations.

Globally there has been a significant increase in the number of Fiber to the Home (FTTH) projects. These projects are very expensive, take a long time to complete and require vast amounts of communication and documentation. Standards and processes vary greatly per project. The impact of this variability on the above factors is exacerbated by the use of manual tools with varying levels of data creation and interaction. Existing tools utilize either a Geographic Information System (GIS) or a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) approach. Both rely on user expertise, bespoke data models and process. We present a data driven automated optimization software based approach which generates designs. This is compared to a manual alternative on the basis of time, quality, workflow and usability. Both are then broken down into their primitives. Whilst using existing interaction paradigms the software is able to shift the user’s role from intensive input to minimal input and review. The new approach is able to reduce the time taken by 34% and the material construction costs by 28% for the FTTH design.

Describing phenomena of interest as a system is valuable to analyze using system science methodologies. The boundary is considered as the necessary component of a system, through which the system interacts with its environment. Although system based analysis is applicable, not all phenomena seem to present boundaries. We discuss boundary description of two phenomena, namely the lifestyle disease and the music composition process. The hypernetwork model homogenizes boundaries and relationships, and boundaries can be treated as an instance of relationships.

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 Semantic Storytelling prototype. The approach is based on the semantic analysis of document collections, in which, among others, individual analysis results are, if possible, mapped to external knowledge bases. We interlink key information contained in the documents of the collection, which can be essentially conceptualised as automatic hypertext generation. With this semantic layer on top of the set of documents in place, we attempt to identify interesting, surprising, eye-opening relationships between different concepts or entities mentioned in the document collection. In this article we concentrate on the current state of the user interfaces of our Semantic Storytelling prototype.

This paper focuses on how cognitive loads of air traffic controllers can be reduced when optimizing both aircraft route and landing order in the airport landing problem (ALP), and proposes its method which can adaptively change the optimized aircraft landing order according to the aircraft routes partially fixed by air traffic controllers as human intervention. Though the intensive simulation on Haneda Airport in ALP, the following implications have been revealed: (1) our proposed optimization method succeeded to mostly maintain the same level of the results without fixing some of aircraft routes (i.e., the mostly same total distance of all aircrafts from the start position to the destination airport) even if air traffic controllers fixed some of aircraft routes; and (2) this result indicates that our proposed method has a great potential of reducing the cognitive loads of air traffic controllers by reducing the number of aircrafts that should be watched with fixing some of aircraft routes.

The investigation of related research is very important for research activities. However, it is not easy to choose an appropriate and important academic paper from among the huge number of possible papers. The researcher searches by combining keywords and then selects an paper to be checked because it uses an index that can be evaluated. The citation count is commonly used as this index, but information about recently published papers cannot be obtained. This research attempted to identify good papers using only the words included in the abstract. We constructed a classifier by machine learning and evaluated it using cross validation. As a result, it was found that a certain degree of discrimination is possible.

The purpose of this study is to develop a user-friendly web application that follows human computer interaction design guidelines and principles and is used to recognize patterns in datasets and to predict outputs of instances that it hasn’t previously encountered. The application design follows human computer interaction design guidelines and principles and it employs supervised machine learning algorithms linear regression, logistic regression, and backpropagation for prediction. Java is used in the backend to create a model that maps the input and output data based on any of the machine learning algorithms while Play Framework and Bootstrap are used to display content in frontend. The application allows users to upload datasets that will be used to train and test the system. Each column of an uploaded dataset represents an attribute and each row represents an instance. The system is also developer friendly and allows changes be made to the source code for a more customized interaction.

A number of prior research have revealed that emotion and literature intertwine with each other during humans’ reading experience. However, there have been yet still in dearth of research efforts in an attempt to understanding and modeling temporal emotional changes in literary texts which motivates this study. Through computerized mood emotion visualization, we are able to probe into he general emotional changes of a single character in literary texts. The research results adds to the richness of understanding of emotion changes in literature and provides directions for future development of computer algorithm in testing emotional dimensions in literature reading.

Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), a well-known e-infrastructure provides open data to study the future anthropogenic climate change. Data are accessed by the research communities to produce sophisticated simulations of the Earth system. This study is based on the survey questionnaire taken by 357 researchers (end-users) who interact with the interfaces provided by ESGF e-infrastructure. Despite the evolution as well as development in the components, applications and user interfaces provided by the e-Science infrastructure, the barriers exist and they limit and delay the research process of scientists while they interact with the e-infrastructure. Hence, the full benefit of the terabytes of data projects hosted by the e-infrastructure is not realized. This study suggests a dire need to do improvements in the e-infrastructure particularly in the human computer interaction (HCI) components such as user interfaces of applications, webpages, ingestion of/access to large volumes of scientific data, collaborative tools, web documentation and others. If these improvements are made the user’s research process using an e-infrastructure will be quadrupled and due to better researchers’ experience using e-infrastructures e-research can thrive. Thus, bringing in timely research results and scientific discoveries.

Knowing the main characteristics of a scientific community, how it reaches all stakeholders, and understanding how individuals engage around a subject is needed in order to support decision makers to plan strategies to maintain and nurture the community. This work presents a new way of interpreting the reach of a scientific community by incorporating Web access data to the co-author network commonly considered. The case presented involves the Brazilian Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community and the access to the website of the XV Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computer Systems, the main HCI conference in Brazil. The proposed method is grounded on Organizational Semiotics and differs from the existing works because it considers a wider population than the conference authors. Inspired by the Organizational Onion, it considers three different levels of connection: Informal, Formal, and Technical. In the presented case, the reach commonly used (i.e., author-author network) counts on 257 authors while the total of people orbiting the event involved 5,432 unique visitors, in other words, the co-author network represents approximately 5% of the population orbiting the event. The presented method shows that data originated from Web accesses support a different way of representing a scientific community reach, including multiple segments that are commonly not considered as the target-audience, resulting in a more inclusive approach in the sense of considering the plurality of people orbiting an event, mediated or not by a computer. Our contribution shows a data informed approach of expanding the scientific community reach in order to characterize people orbiting the conference.

Research Data Management (RDM) receives more and more attention as a core component of scientific work. This importance equally stems from the scientific work with ever-increasing amounts of data, the value of this data for subsequent use, and the formal requirements of funding agencies. While these requirements are widely accepted among the research communities in general, the individual acceptance depends on many factors. In particular, we found that the ratio between the benefits achieved by RDM and the burdens imposed is not equal among the different roles that participate in the scientific process. In consequence, we analyse how we can optimize this ratio by different factors. Despite these different factors, common to all solutions is the demand for accessible and persistent storage that suits the particular needs imposed by RDM. At the Universities of Aachen, Bochum, Dortmund, Duisburg-Essen, and Cologne, we started a joint project to build up a distributed storage infrastructure dedicated to the needs of RDM and to address some of the acceptance factors.

The Brazilian Public Administration (PA) intends to turn its business process transparent, but the language choice was BPMN. Current research observes that the declarative language can partially fit the PA’s constraints. However declarative language is not easy for the citizen to understand. In our case study, we found evidence of it by using the Communicability Evaluation Method. Thus, in this paper, we propose a preliminary version of a new declarative language.

In this paper, we present a mobile-based participatory sensing method to engage citizens’ participation in the living quality evaluation. The system called City Probe consists of the APP and the platform to provide the location-based services. City Probe allows citizens to identify and assess the spatial issues. By using the rating function of City Probe APP, citizens can turn the qualitative spatial issues into measurable UGC data. In addition, the UGC data are visualized as (1) rating value map, (2) rating amount map, and (3) rating heat map to present the different quantitative patterns of city. The experiment of arcade survey verifies the value of City Probe by locating and assessing the OCCUPANCY issue.

In this paper, a new supporting system for brainstorming is proposed, and the effects are discussed based on the results of experiments. Brainstorming is a method for encouraging ideas generation and obtaining useful ideas in order to achieve a particular goal. In a process of brainstorming, the participants are required to submit their ideas as much as they possible. However, generating huge volumes of new ideas is not easy for ordinary participants. Diversity of submitted ideas is another problem. When the participants are biased by conventional ideas, it is difficult for them to escape from the ideas and submit novel ones. The proposed system helps participants of brainstorming to generate new ideas by showing related images for them. The results of the experiment shows that participants of brainstorming can discuss more actively with the proposed system.

The paper introduces the concept and feature set of online creative space and illustrates the development process of online creative space using three cases to seek design and building strategies for online creative community, with a view to facilitating the progress of urban information and intelligence, inspiring public perception, interaction and evolution on creative ideas and their diverse value, promoting productization and commercialization of creative design schemes and thus guiding future-oriented design innovation, technological innovation, cultural innovation and business innovation.

When the interface of a system targets various user groups, it will be designed on classifications ranging from novice to experienced based on the prospective users’ experience, knowledge, and skill levels. Since mobile devices are increasingly used to remotely operate various systems nowadays, it is possible to develop and provide a selection of interfaces for them. A comfortable and highly satisfying usage experience can be provided by giving users by means to choose their own preferred interface from a variety which has been prepared.In this study, we classified the users’ operational preferences (operational characteristics) and considered the types of user, alongside several Multi-Function Printer (MFP) interface patterns in order to investigate the relationship between the two.

The new media art exhibitions integrated animation is gradually replacing the traditional “static” trend. For example, the cooperation of two palace museums of Taiwan and China unveiled. “The Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” combined with sound, light, and video technology to extend original work. By integrating the animation into the static art work, it will reflect the sense of time and dynamic feeling. The animation can make clearer annotation of life condition then, as well as join the situation sound to influence and persuade the audience. The topic of our research is to explain how we can use new technology to transform traditional contents into popular media format while preserving the originality of the art and culture. We found a process to integrate art, culture, woodcut print and folk dance with technology and animation, by using motion capture, 3d animation and photo retouch technology.

In order to understand the structure of food image for “feeling appetite” when user sees the image, words related to “appetite” were extracted experimentally and clustered based on human information processing. Five scale evaluation for 33 items in four clusters, they are “feeling”, “first impression”, “estimation by vision”, “image of the meal scene”, were carried out. The result is obtained that “cool”, “fresh”, “healthy” are not influent to “appetite”.

“Scenarios” used for requirements definition in interaction design are usually depicted through words, formed as sentences. Through this study, we are trying to simplify the expression of such scenarios using digital manga so that more and more people can produce comics based on these scenarios. For the study, a manga expert created comics from scenarios on a computer and studied the proposed production process. Based on the expert’s observations and suggestions, we evaluated the feasibility of automatic generation of comics using digital manga scenarios, and in this paper, we are presenting the proposed automatic comic generation system.

The number of smartphone appliances is increasing rapidly. However, it is divided into a popular application and an application not so popular. There must be some recipe for success in the application that is gaining popularity and continuously using by customers.We investigate the recipe for success below 4 steps.(1)Select multiple application categories and target applications to be surveyed(2)Each group conducted interviews with users of target applications,Extract hypotheses of value and goodness by comparing multiple selected applications(3)Perform questionnaire survey for users of target application and compare and verify hypotheses of value and goodness(4)Perform comparative measurement using the physiological index while using the target application, and extract differences unconscious but feeling.As a result of questionnaire survey, we can find popular application has value or strength and that is the reason people tend to use continuously.As a result of physiological measurement, we can find some hint related to value or strength we find from questionnaire survey.This result comes from half year workshop of Master’s Program, so we can find more useful and practical knowledge can get from more deeply study.

In Japan, the proportion of diseases leading to visual disorders such as cataract increases with age, and about 73% of people with visual impairment are over 60 years old. While it is predicted that an aging society will proceed, it is expected that people needing low vision care will increase in the future. In the presence of education, medical care, social support and various forms of low vision care, the purpose of this research is to obtain knowledge to support people with low vision from the perspective of design taking advantage of the idea of ergonomics. In this study, we conducted two types of experiments to investigate the relationship between the appearance of objects and the light environment. First, we examined how the change in light affects visibility. As a result, it was suggested that <contrast of two sides> and <crease line of the wall (boundary line)> influenced visibility. Furthermore, in the irradiation situation with low visibility, the difference in the color of the wall was observed, so it turned out that the factor of reflectance also influences the visibility in the difference of appearance by the boundary line. Next, we conducted a waling experiment to investigate how people actually act in movement. In this study, the following was shown. The confirmation of boundaries such as “wall and floor” and “wall and wall” becomes important clue for space recognition when low vision person walks indoors. The visibility of the edge is also related to the illuminance of the space.

In modern societies, we need to face with various pressure that could lead us to mental illnesses. Human relationship is one of the well-known stressors despite it is a quite important for our daily life. To overcome cruel situations come from human relationship problems, sometimes we need any supporting systems. Psychodrama is one of the effective counseling methods which are used for solving several human relationship problems. The method has many advantages, on another front it has problems. The first, before conducting a Psychodrama event, we have to adjust our schedules. The second, some people do not want to talk about their human relationship problems for other people. These factors make difficult for us to conduct Psychodrama events easily. In this paper, a self psychotherapy tool is proposed as a approach for the problems. The proposed tool aims to produce similar results with original group therapy sessions of Psychodrama. To evaluate the proposed tool, an experiment was conducted. The results show that the tool can provide some hints for the users who had troubles in current human relationships and want to improve the situations.

Does the number of additional participants affect the physical performance or the psychological evaluation of participants on carrying out a task? This paper examines the effects of group size, either individuals, two-party or five-party, using the furniture assembly task. We use three behavioral indexes, i.e. degree of completion, time-to-completion, and duration of interaction with materials, in a physical performance evaluation. Furthermore, we use three psychological indexes, i.e., degrees of contribution, satisfaction, and familiarity, in a psychological evaluation. In duration of interaction with materials, time-to-completion, and degree of contribution, the members of two-person groups take longer or feel more individually significant than do the members of five-person groups. These results suggest that social loafing effects have emerged by increasing the number of participants. We expect these findings to help in designing relationality among people as well as between people and artifacts.