Performance and …

In titling our chapter 'Performance and...' our intention is not to privilege performance studies over theatre studies or drama but rather to call to attention the longstanding proposition that performance (studies) 'resists or rejects definition' (Schechner, Richard, 1998, 'What Is 'Performance Studies' Anyway?' in: P. Phelan and J. Lane (eds.), The Ends of Performance, NYU Press, p. 360) and as such highlight the potential it holds for interdisciplinary scholarship and the way in which the idea of performance has been conceived fluidly and expansively, both key concerns of all the volumes reviewed here. We are, we hope, at a point in the development of performance and theatre studies where there is an understanding, acceptance and exploration of the mutually constructive and beneficial interweaving of these two 'traditions' of scholarship within the broader field of drama. In the books we look at, both 'theatre' and 'performance' are brought to bear on the matters at hand almost interchangeably, with established text-based dramas taking their place alongside works in the performance art tradition to further arguments pertaining to a variety of disciplines. Such plurality of approach is a defining feature of the works we have chosen to discuss and binds them to a common purpose: the exploration of drama/theatre/performance in, with and between other disciplines and discourses in the pursuit of illuminating the world around us in more meaningful ways

Usability Engineering and PPGIS - Towards a Learning-improving Cycle

July 21 - 2

Designing Attention-Centric Notification Systems: Five HCI Challenges

Through an examination of the emerging domain of cognitive systems, with a focus on attention-centric cognitive systems used for notification, this document explores the human-computer interaction challenges that must be addressed for successful interface design. This document asserts that with compatible tools and methods, user notification requirements and interface usability can be abstracted, expressed, and compared with critical parameter ratings; that is, even novice designers can assess attention cost factors to determine target parameter levels for new system development. With a general understanding of the user tasks supported by the notification system, a designer can access the repository of design knowledge for appropriate information and interaction design techniques (e.g., use of color, audio features, animation, screen size, transition of states, etc), which have analytically and empirically derived ratings. Furthermore, usability evaluation methods, provided to designers as part of the integrated system, are adaptable to specific combinations of targeted parameter levels. User testing results can be conveniently added back into the design knowledge repository and compared to target parameter levels to determine design success and build reusable HCI knowledge. This approach is discussed in greater detail as we describe five HCI challenges relating to cognitive system development: (1) convenient access to basic research and guidelines, (2) requirements engineering methods for notification interfaces, (3) better and more usable predictive modeling for pre-attentive and dual-task interfaces, (4) standard empirical evaluation procedures for notification systems, and (5) conceptual frameworks for organizing reusable design and software components. This document also describes our initial work toward building infrastructure to overcome these five challenges, focused on notification system development. We described LINK-UP, a design environment grounded on years of theory and method development within HCI, providing a mechanism to integrate interdisciplinary expertise from the cognitive systems research community. Claims allow convenient access to basic research and guidelines, while modules parallel a lifecycle development iteration and provide a process for requirements engineering guided by this basic research. The activities carried out through LINK-UP provide access to and interaction with reusable design components organized based on our framework. We think that this approach may provide the scientific basis necessary for exciting interdisciplinary advancement through many fields of design, with notification systems serving as an initial model. A version of this document will appear as chapter 3 in the book Cognitive Systems: Human Cognitive Models in Systems Design edited by Chris Forsythe, Michael Bernard, and Timothy Goldsmith resulting from a workshop led by the editors in summer 2003. The authors are grateful for the input of the workshop organizers and conference attendees in the preparation of this document

Affect and believability in game characters:a review of the use of affective computing in games

Virtual agents are important in many digital environments. Designing a character that highly engages users in terms of interaction is an intricate task constrained by many requirements. One aspect that has gained more attention recently is the effective dimension of the agent. Several studies have addressed the possibility of developing an affect-aware system for a better user experience. Particularly in games, including emotional and social features in NPCs adds depth to the characters, enriches interaction possibilities, and combined with the basic level of competence, creates a more appealing game. Design requirements for emotionally intelligent NPCs differ from general autonomous agents with the main goal being a stronger player-agent relationship as opposed to problem solving and goal assessment. Nevertheless, deploying an affective module into NPCs adds to the complexity of the architecture and constraints. In addition, using such composite NPC in games seems beyond current technology, despite some brave attempts. However, a MARPO-type modular architecture would seem a useful starting point for adding emotions

A process-oriented approach to the science of human-computer interaction

Since the birth of the field, HCI has defined itself both as a theory of therelations between humans and numerical systems and as a practical activity that aimsat building new interactive systems. However, HCI has not yet succeeded in discoveringa unified theoretical framework nor in building a strong link between both activities.Based on an analysis from various fields, we show that most of the difficulties come fromthe computational paradigm that is still used as a foundation of most of the theories inHCI. This brings us to proposing a new philosophical view on the science of HCI, basedon a process ontology. We show how it accounts for several phenomena related to HCIand unifies them. This approach lends itself to new ways of thinking and programminginteraction at di↵erent scales, which may help HCI scientists in their modelling and designactivities

Towards engineering ontologies for cognitive profiling of agents on the semantic web

Research shows that most agent-based collaborations suffer from lack of flexibility. This is due to the fact that most agent-based applications assume pre-defined knowledge of agents’ capabilities and/or neglect basic cognitive and interactional requirements in multi-agent collaboration. The highlight of this paper is that it brings cognitive models (inspired from cognitive sciences and HCI) proposing architectural and knowledge-based requirements for agents to structure ontological models for cognitive profiling in order to increase cognitive awareness between themselves, which in turn promotes flexibility, reusability and predictability of agent behavior; thus contributing towards minimizing cognitive overload incurred on humans. The semantic web is used as an action mediating space, where shared knowledge base in the form of ontological models provides affordances for improving cognitive awareness

Progressive Analytics: A Computation Paradigm for Exploratory Data Analysis

Exploring data requires a fast feedback loop from the analyst to the system, with a latency below about 10 seconds because of human cognitive limitations. When data becomes large or analysis becomes complex, sequential computations can no longer be completed in a few seconds and data exploration is severely hampered. This article describes a novel computation paradigm called Progressive Computation for Data Analysis or more concisely Progressive Analytics, that brings at the programming language level a low-latency guarantee by performing computations in a progressive fashion. Moving this progressive computation at the language level relieves the programmer of exploratory data analysis systems from implementing the whole analytics pipeline in a progressive way from scratch, streamlining the implementation of scalable exploratory data analysis systems. This article describes the new paradigm through a prototype implementation called ProgressiVis, and explains the requirements it implies through examples.Comment: 10 page

A Review of Agent Emotion Architectures

This paper attempts to highlight some of the research that has been conducted worldwide in the area of computational models of emotions, with a particular emphasis on agent emotions suitable for simulations and games. The intended outcome is to both review some of the more prominent research in the field, and to also ascertain the level of formal psychology that may underpin such work with a view to proposing that there is scope for an architecture built from the ground up, that arises from non-conflicting theories of emotion