Designing Attentive Information Dashboards

Information dashboards are a critical capability in contemporary business intelligence and analytics systems. Despite their strong potential to support better decision-making, the massive amount of information they provide challenges users performing data exploration tasks. Accordingly, dashboard users face difficulties in managing their limited attentional resources when processing the presented information on dashboards. Also, studies have shown that the amount of concentrated time humans can spend on a task has dramatically decreased in recent years; thus, there is a need for designing user interfaces that support users attention management. In this design science research project, we propose attentive information dashboards that provide individualized visual attention feedback (VAF) as an innovative artifact to solve this problem. We articulate theoretically grounded design principles and instantiate a software artifact leveraging users eye movement data in real time to provide individualized VAF. We evaluated the instantiated artifact in a controlled lab experiment with 92 participants. The results from analyzing users eye movement after receiving individualized VAF reveal that our proposed design has a positive effect on users attentional resource allocation, attention shift rate, and attentional resource management. We contribute a system architecture for attentive information dashboards that support data exploration and two theoretically grounded design principles that provide prescriptive knowledge on how to provide individualized VAF. Practitioners can leverage the prescriptive knowledge derived from our research to design innovative systems that support users information processing by managing their limited attentional resources

Steering data quality with visual analytics: The complexity challenge

Data quality management, especially data cleansing, has been extensively studied for many years in the areas of data management and visual analytics. In the paper, we first review and explore the relevant work from the research areas of data management, visual analytics and human-computer interaction. Then for different types of data such as multimedia data, textual data, trajectory data, and graph data, we summarize the common methods for improving data quality by leveraging data cleansing techniques at different analysis stages. Based on a thorough analysis, we propose a general visual analytics framework for interactively cleansing data. Finally, the challenges and opportunities are analyzed and discussed in the context of data and humans

Cyborgs as Frontline Service Employees: A Research Agenda

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Purpose This paper identifies and explores potential applications of cyborgian technologies within service contexts and how service providers may leverage the integration of cyborgian service actors into their service proposition. In doing so, the paper proposes a new category of ‘melded’ frontline service employees (FLEs), where advanced technologies become embodied within human actors. The paper presents potential opportunities and challenges that may arise through cyborg technological advancements and proposes a future research agenda related to these. Design/methodology This study draws on literature in the fields of services management, Artificial Intelligence [AI], robotics, Intelligence Augmentation [IA] and Human Intelligence [HIs] to conceptualise potential cyborgian applications. Findings The paper examines how cyborg bio- and psychophysical characteristics may significantly differentiate the nature of service interactions from traditional ‘unenhanced’ service interactions. In doing so, we propose ‘melding’ as a conceptual category of technological impact on FLEs. This category reflects the embodiment of emergent technologies not previously captured within existing literature on cyborgs. We examine how traditional roles of FLEs will be potentially impacted by the integration of emergent cyborg technologies, such as neural interfaces and implants, into service contexts before outlining future research directions related to these, specifically highlighting the range of ethical considerations. Originality/Value Service interactions with cyborg FLEs represent a new context for examining the potential impact of cyborgs. This paper explores how technological advancements will alter the individual capacities of humans to enable such employees to intuitively and empathetically create solutions to complex service challenges. In doing so, we augment the extant literature on cyborgs, such as the body hacking movement. The paper also outlines a research agenda to address the potential consequences of cyborgian integration

A Review and Characterization of Progressive Visual Analytics

Progressive Visual Analytics (PVA) has gained increasing attention over the past years. It brings the user into the loop during otherwise long-running and non-transparent computations by producing intermediate partial results. These partial results can be shown to the user for early and continuous interaction with the emerging end result even while it is still being computed. Yet as clear-cut as this fundamental idea seems, the existing body of literature puts forth various interpretations and instantiations that have created a research domain of competing terms, various definitions, as well as long lists of practical requirements and design guidelines spread across different scientific communities. This makes it more and more difficult to get a succinct understanding of PVA’s principal concepts, let alone an overview of this increasingly diverging field. The review and discussion of PVA presented in this paper address these issues and provide (1) a literature collection on this topic, (2) a conceptual characterization of PVA, as well as (3) a consolidated set of practical recommendations for implementing and using PVA-based visual analytics solutions

Innovating Pedagogy 2017: Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers. Open University Innovation Report 6

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This sixth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE). Themes: • Big-data inquiry: thinking with data • Learners making science • Navigating post-truth societies • Immersive learning • Learning with internal values • Student-led analytics • Intergroup empathy • Humanistic knowledge-building communities • Open Textbooks • Spaced Learnin

Visual Multi-Metric Grouping of Eye-Tracking Data

We present an algorithmic and visual grouping of participants and eye-tracking metrics derived from recorded eye-tracking data. Our method utilizes two well-established visualization concepts. First, parallel coordinates are used to provide an overview of the used metrics, their interactions, and similarities, which helps select suitable metrics that describe characteristics of the eye-tracking data. Furthermore, parallel coordinates plots enable an analyst to test the effects of creating a combination of a subset of metrics resulting in a newly derived eye-tracking metric. Second, a similarity matrix visualization is used to visually represent the affine combination of metrics utilizing an algorithmic grouping of subjects that leads to distinct visual groups of similar behavior. To keep the diagrams of the matrix visualization simple and understandable, we visually encode our eye- tracking data into the cells of a similarity matrix of participants. The algorithmic grouping is performed with a clustering based on the affine combination of metrics, which is also the basis for the similarity value computation of the similarity matrix. To illustrate the usefulness of our visualization, we applied it to an eye-tracking data set involving the reading behavior of metro maps of up to 40 participants. Finally, we discuss limitations and scalability issues of the approach focusing on visual and perceptual issues

Diverse perceptions of smart spaces

This is the era of smart technology and of ‘smart’ as a meme, so we have run three workshops to examine the ‘smart’ meme and the exploitation of smart environments. The literature relating to smart spaces focuses primarily on technologies and their capabilities. Our three workshops demonstrated that we require a stronger user focus if we are advantageously to exploit spaces ascribed as smart: we examined the concept of smartness from a variety of perspectives, in collaboration with a broad range of contributors. We have prepared this monograph mainly to report on the third workshop, held at Bournemouth University in April 2012, but do also consider the lessons learned from all three. We conclude with a roadmap for a fourth (and final) workshop, which is intended to emphasise the overarching importance of the humans using the spac