75,069 research outputs found

    A teaching and support tool for building formal models of graphical user-interfaces

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    In this paper we propose the design of a tool that will allow the construction of a formal, textual description of a software system even if it has a graphical user-interface as a component. An important aspect of this design is that it can be used for two purposes-the teaching of first-order logic and the formal specification of graphical user-interfaces. The design has been suggested by considering a system that has already been very successful for teaching first-order logic, namely Tarski's World

    Liberate your avatar; the revolution will be social networked

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    This paper brings together the practice-based creative research of artists Charlotte Gould and Paul Sermon, culminating in a collaborative interactive installation that investigates new forms of social and political narrative in multi-user virtual environments. The authors' artistic projects deal with the ironies and stereotypes that are found within Second Life in particular. Paul Sermonā€™s current creative practice looks specifically at the concepts of presence and performance within Second Life and 'first life', and attempts to bridge these two spaces through mixed reality techniques and interfaces. Charlotte Gouldā€™s Ludic Second Life Narrative radically questions the way that users embody themselves in on-line virtual environments and identifies a counter-aesthetic that challenges the conventions of digital realism and consumerism. These research activities and outcomes come together within a collaborative site-specific public installation entitled Urban Intersections for ISEA09, focusing on contested virtual spaces that mirror the social and political history of Belfast. The authors' current collaborative practice critically investigates social, cultural and creative interactions in Second Life. Through these practice-based experiments the authors' argue that an enhanced social and cultural discourse within multi-user virtual environments will inevitably lead to growth, cohesion and public empowerment, and like all social networking platforms, contribute to greater social and political change in first life

    Massive ontology interface

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    This paper describes the Massive Ontology Interface (MOI), a web portal which facilitates interaction with a large ontology (over 200,000 concepts and 1.6M assertions) that is built automatically using OpenCyc as a backbone. The aim of the interface is to simplify interaction with the massive amounts of information and guide the user towards understanding the ontologyā€™s data. Using either a text or graph-based representation, users can discuss and edit the ontology. Social elements utilizing gamification techniques are included to encourage users to create and collaborate on stored knowledge as part of a web community. An evaluation by 30 users comparing MOI with OpenCycā€™s original interface showed significant improvements in user understanding of the ontology, although full testing of the interfaceā€™s social elements lies in the future

    Smart Conversational Agents for Reminiscence

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    In this paper we describe the requirements and early system design for a smart conversational agent that can assist older adults in the reminiscence process. The practice of reminiscence has well documented benefits for the mental, social and emotional well-being of older adults. However, the technology support, valuable in many different ways, is still limited in terms of need of co-located human presence, data collection capabilities, and ability to support sustained engagement, thus missing key opportunities to improve care practices, facilitate social interactions, and bring the reminiscence practice closer to those with less opportunities to engage in co-located sessions with a (trained) companion. We discuss conversational agents and cognitive services as the platform for building the next generation of reminiscence applications, and introduce the concept application of a smart reminiscence agent

    Home Energy Consumption Feedback: A User Survey

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    Buildings account for a relevant fraction of the energy consumed by a country, up to 20-40% of the yearly energy consumption. If only electricity is considered, the fraction is even bigger, reaching around 73% of the total electricity consumption, equally divided into residential and commercial dwellings. Building and Home Automation have a potential to profoundly impact current and future buildings' energy efļ¬ciency by informing users about their current consumption patterns, by suggesting more efļ¬cient behaviors, and by pro-actively changing/modifying user actions for reducing the associated energy wastes. In this paper we investigate the capability of an automated home to automatically, and timely, inform users about energy consumption, by harvesting opinions of residential inhabitants on energy feedback interfaces. We report here the results of an on-line survey, involving nearly a thousand participants, about feedback mechanisms suggested by the research community, with the goal of understanding what feedback is felt by home inhabitants easier to understand, more likely to be used, and more effective in promoting behavior changes. Contextually, we also collect and distill users' attitude towards in-home energy displays and their preferred locations, gathering useful insights on user-driven design of more effective in-home energy display

    A generalized strategy for building resident database interfaces

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    A strategy for building resident interfaces to host heterogeneous distributed data base management systems is developed. The strategy is used to construct several interfaces. A set of guidelines is developed for users to construct their own interfaces

    Evaluating Relevance Feedback: An Image Retrieval Interface for Children

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    Studies on information retrieval for children are not yet\ud common. As young children possess a limited vocabulary\ud and limited intellectual power, they may experience more\ud difficulty in fulfilling their information need than adults.\ud This paper presents an image retrieval user interface that\ud is specifically designed for children. The interface uses relevance feedback and has been evaluated by letting children\ud perform different search tasks. The tasks were performed\ud using two interfaces; a more traditional interface - acting as a control interface - and the relevance feedback interface. \ud One of the remarkable results of this study is that children\ud did not favor relevance feedback controls over traditional\ud navigational controls

    Affordances and Feedback in Nuance-Oriented Interfaces

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    Virtual Environments (VEs) and perceptive user interfaces must deal with complex users and their modes of interaction. One way to approach this problem is to recognize usersā€™ nuances (subtle conscious or unconscious actions). In exploring nuance-oriented interfaces, we attempted to let users work as they preferred without being biased by feedback or affordances in the system. The hope was that we would discover the usersā€™ innate models of interaction. The results of two user studies were that users are guided not by any innate model but by affordances and feedback in the interface. So, without this guidance, even the most obvious and useful components of an interface will be ignored

    Relative authenticity : abstraction and the digital domain

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    This paper intends to offer a preliminary investigation of what will be referred to as the notion of ā€˜abstractionā€™ in relation to Sigmund Freudā€™s ideas of ā€˜condensationā€™ and ā€˜displacementā€™, together with Ferdinand de Saussureā€™s theory of signification. Abstraction, then, shall be defined as one process through which a ā€˜signifierā€™ is created. The argument shall aim to trace and retrace the cognitive process of abstraction by discussing its role across different facets and layers of contemporary society, with particular attention being paid to the effects of the digital on this role. Abstractions shall be discussed regarding how they occur both in principle and in practice, and in how they might be perceived. This shall lead to a series of hypotheses concerning reflections and reactions which the omnipresence of the digital domain in every-day life might be prompting in contemporary society. The paper shall also focus on the parallel phenomena of ā€˜relative realityā€™ and ā€˜relative authenticityā€™, which can be understood as the hypothetical middle ground or gradient existing between ā€˜realā€™ and ā€˜fakeā€™, and which shall be argued to be direct implications of abstraction.peer-reviewe
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