340 research outputs found
Customizing smart environments: a tabletop approach
Smart environments are becoming a reality in our society and the number of intelligent devices integrated in these spaces is in-creasing very rapidly. As the combination of intelligent elements will open a wide range of new opportunities to make our lives easier, final users should be provided with a simplified method of handling complex intelligent features. Specifying behavior in these environments can be difficult for non-experts, so that more efforts should be directed towards easing the customization tasks. This work presents an entirely visual rule editor based on dataflow expressions for interactive tabletops which allows be-havior to be specified in smart environments. An experiment was carried out aimed at evaluating the usability of the editor in terms of non-programmers understanding of the abstractions and concepts involved in the rule model, ease of use of the pro-posed visual interface and the suitability of the interaction mechanisms implemented in the editing tool. The study revealed that users with no previous programming experience were able to master the proposed rule model and editing tool for specifying be-havior in the context of a smart home, even though some minor usability issues were detected.We would like to thank all the volunteers that participated in the empirical study. Our thanks are also due to the ASIC/Polimedia team for their computer hardware support. This work was partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the National R&D&I Program within the project CreateWorlds (TIN2010-20488). It also received support from a postdoctoral fellowship within the VALi+d Program of the Conselleria d'Educacio, Cultura I Esport (Generalitat Valenciana) awarded to Alejandro Catala (APOSTD/2013/013). The work of Patricia Pons has been supported by the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia under the "Beca de Excelencia" program, and currently by an FPU fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports (FPU13/03831).Pons Tomás, P.; Catalá Bolós, A.; Jaén Martínez, FJ. (2015). Customizing smart environments: a tabletop approach. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments. 7(4):511-533. https://doi.org/10.3233/AIS-150328S51153374[1]C. Becker, M. Handte, G. Schiele and K. Rothermel, PCOM – a component system for pervasive computing, in: Proc. of the Second IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom’04), IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 2004, pp. 67–76.Bhatti, Z. W., Naqvi, N. Z., Ramakrishnan, A., Preuveneers, D., & Berbers, Y. (2014). Learning distributed deployment and configuration trade-offs for context-aware applications in Intelligent Environments. 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Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems
The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments
Exploring how workspace awareness cues affect distributed meeting outcome
Nowadays, using the online whiteboard to share knowledge in distributed meetings has become a common practice. Existing studies and practices have attempted to visualize attendees’ interactive activities in whiteboard tools to support the virtual team’s workspace awareness (WA). However, the impact of such visual cues on meeting success remains unclear. For this purpose, we primarily explore whether and to what extent WA cues are conducive to meeting outcome. This study applies activity theory to guide our prototype design and research analysis. A customized web-based whiteboard interface is implemented under two conditions. We conduct a study with 42 subjects in a distributed meeting scenario via a controlled experiment. Also, we analyze the system affordance via user experience. The results demonstrate that the benefits of WA cues to meeting outcome are especially embodied in goal attainment and quality of contributions, but not effectively supported in productivity and user satisfaction. Moreover, subjects report that they do not feel distracted by the system’s visual cues because they do not notice those cues most of the time and use them only when needed. Drawing upon findings from our trial work, we provide several implications for designing a collaborative knowledge-sharing environment to assist the visual support of WA in distributed meetings
Detach: design tool for smartphone application composition
Tese de mestrado em Engenharia Informática, apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa, através da Faculdade de Ciências, 2013A Terapia Comportamental Cognitiva (TCC) é uma forma de tratamento que se foca nas relações entre pensamentos, emoções e comportamentos. A TCC pode assim mudar a forma como pensamos (cognição) e como reagimos (comportamento), de maneira a que nos possamos sentir melhor. Para ter sucesso, esta intervenção psicológica usa processos sistemáticos, que são normalmente compostos pelo preenchimento de formulários em papel, com um determinado objectivo específico. Este objectivo poderá ser o tratamento de várias condições: humor, ansiedade, personalidade, obesidade, fobias, depressões, controle de dor, etc.
Actualmente, esta área da terapia é normalmente dividida em dois tipos de sessões distintas com os pacientes. Se por um lado existe a sessão no consultório com o terapeuta, por outro, é muitas vezes pedido ao paciente que complete algumas tarefas no exterior, sem a presença do mesmo. Estas tarefas pretendem que este pratique as diversas situações analisadas com o terapeuta. Para isso são usados questionários e formulários em papel que permitem que o paciente registe os seus pensamentos e experiências. No entanto, a incapacidade de adaptação dos mesmos ao paciente e às diversas situações em que são na verdade utilizados resulta na falta de motivação, paciência e sentimento de acompanhamento pessoal para o paciente. Além disso, o tipo de suporte em que estes questionários e formulários assentam acabam por fazer com que o paciente muitas das vezes se esqueça deles em casa ou tenha vergonha de os transportar e preencher em público.
Assim, este trabalho vem propor, através das várias tecnologias presentes nos smartphones de hoje em dia, um melhoramento à vertente no exterior do processo terapêutico, que muitas vezes é desprezada pelo paciente ao fim de pouco tempo pondo em causa o sucesso do tratamento. Com isto, pretende-se que o paciente se sinta acompanhado, a todo o momento, por um terapeuta, através de uma aplicação presente no seu próprio smartphone. Idealmente esta aplicação seria criada especificamente para a pessoa em questão e conseguiria adaptar-se às várias situações em que iria ser usada, ajudando eficazmente o paciente.
A criação destas aplicações requer conhecimentos técnicos que não estão presentes em todas as pessoas. Se por um lado os especialistas da área de programação são capazes de tal criação, por outro são os especialistas da área da saúde, e neste caso em específico os terapeutas, que são capazes da sua idealização, consoante as necessidades dos seus pacientes. Surge então a necessidade da criação de aplicações móveis, adaptáveis ao contexto do utilizador, por pessoas que não sejam especialistas na área da programação. Assim, este projecto assenta sob três entidades distintas: a) Utilizadores não programadores, que utilizarão uma ferramenta de criação de aplicações móveis; b) Utilizadores das aplicações móveis, que utilizaram as aplicações criadas pelos anteriores; c) Utilizadores programadores, que irão desenvolver novas componentes para a ferramenta de autoria.
Nas fases iniciais do desenvolvimento tentámos perceber através de sessões de desenho participativo, como é que os utilizadores não programadores interagiam com um conjunto de elementos presentes num protótipo de baixa fidelidade. Usando algum material de desenho como post-its, folhas de papel, lápis e borracha, propusemos aos participantes que representassem uma determinada aplicação passível de ser utilizada num dispositivo móvel. Os resultados que obtivemos mostraram que a presença destas mesmas representações que foram fornecidas aos participantes permitiram que os mesmos criassem aplicações muito mais complexas e potentes. Adicionalmente estas sessões permitiram também que percebêssemos que a generalidade dos participantes preferiu organizar os elementos da aplicação sobre uma área de trabalho “infinita” e não apenas limitada a uma sequência linear. O método preferencial de relação entre estes mesmos elementos foi a utilização de setas que indicavam quando seria executada a transição entre eles.
Com os resultados anteriores construímos o primeiro protótipo funcional de DETACH (DEsign Tool for smarphone Application Composition - Ferramenta de Desenho para a Composição de Aplicações para Smartphones). De acordo com os resultados obtidos nas sessões anteriores com utilizadores, este protótipo continha uma área com alguns ecrãs padrão passíveis de serem usados num ambiente de trabalho “infinito”. Com este protótipo pedimos a alguns utilizadores não programadores que tentassem criar uma aplicação móvel adequada à sua área do conhecimento. Com este primeiro protótipo verificámos que nenhum dos participantes foi capaz de completar todos os passos com sucesso. O aspecto mais problemático que verificámos foi na maneira como os mesmos ligavam os vários ecrãs da aplicação. O facto de o protótipo disponibilizar num dado ecrã a possibilidade de criar dois tipos de ligações, uma que considerasse o mesmo como destino e outra como origem, acabou por confundir os participantes. Apesar de tudo verificámos que a maior parte intencionava usar ambos as ligações considerando o ecrã selecionado como origem.
Tais resultados levaram-nos à criação de um novo protótipo com as preferências verificadas pelos utilizadores. Após apresentarmos este último a um novo grupo de utilizadores, para a criação da mesma aplicação, verificámos que mais de metade deles concluiu a mesma com sucesso e em cerca de metade do tempo verificado no protótipo anterior. Tais resultados indicavam que claramente ainda havia espaço para melhoramentos ao protótipo. A visibilidade de algumas das funcionalidades, que ainda não estava clara para alguns dos utilizadores, foi um dos factores negativos apontados.
A utilização destes dois protótipos iniciais de DETACH permitiu-nos perceber alguns padrões usados pelos nossos participantes aquando da ligação entre ecrãs, a funcionalidade verificada mais crítica. Enquanto a maior parte dos utilizadores preferiu criar ligações considerando o ecrã selecionado como origem, verificamos também a utilização de outros padrões que se assemelhavam aos usados em ferramentas complexas de programação. Para o produto final decidimos seguir assim a abordagem mais utilizada pelos utilizadores, melhorando o último protótipo.
Através dos requisitos reunidos nestas sessões com utilizadores, no trabalho relacionado e em algumas reuniões que tivemos com terapeutas, definimos algumas métricas que a ferramenta DETACH seguiria. De maneira a ser de fácil utilização por qualquer utilizador, proporcionando também o seu alcance através de qualquer plataforma, desktop ou móvel (em tablets por exemplo), seria criada uma ferramenta web. Esta recorreria a um servidor para guardar os projectos criados, para que os mesmos pudessem ser carregados remotamente para os dispositivos móveis destino. De maneira a criar uma ferramenta robusta que possa ser melhorada no futuro com novos tipos de ecrãs ou variáveis de contexto utilizáveis, era necessário também desenvolver a mesma de uma maneira altamente modular para ser então continuada por programadores profissionais.
A versão final da ferramenta DETACH nasceu de todo o conjunto de requisitos que verificámos anteriormente. Através de melhoramentos à última versão do protótipo de alta-fidelidade usado chegámos a uma ferramenta que pode até ser usada para além da área da terapia, como para a área de jogos ou do ensino. Para uma correcta avaliação da ferramenta, recorremos a utilizadores distintos daqueles que tinham testado os protótipos iniciais de alta-fidelidade. Os resultados mostraram que todos os participantes conseguiram criar, testar e atribuir a aplicação proposta aos utilizadores destino.
Para além da avaliação realizada com os utilizadores finais da ferramenta, pedimos também a alguns programadores para tentarem estender a mesma adicionando um novo ecrã. Os resultados mostraram que também todos os programadores conseguiram realizar a tarefa com sucesso numa média de cerca de 35 minutos.
O processo de desenvolvimento deste projecto contribuiu com a publicação de três artigos para conferências na área da saúde e da interacção.This thesis focuses on the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) area. This type of therapy is normally subdivided in two kinds of sessions: the ones where the therapist and the patient are both inside an office, and the ones where the patient is outside the therapist office and has to follow some homework tasks, alone. These tasks intend patients to practice the situations analyzed in the sessions with therapists and are normally supported with simple paper forms. The inexistent ability for these homework tasks to adapt themselves to the patient or different use contexts compromises the success of the treatment. It is hence important to find a way where the patient, while outside the office, doesn’t feel that difference, because he carries a virtual therapist inside his smartphone.
The usage of modern mobile phones can address the previous problem. Existing solutions encompass replacing traditional treatment methods with a mobile application that is provided to the patients. However, the application content is the same for every patient, regarding the age or treatment focus. Therapists lack the knowledge to create their own mobile applications and information technologies professionals lack the ability to personalize their contents properly.
This work aims at circumventing this situation with the introduction of DETACH (DEsign Tool for smartphone Application Composition), a system that comprises: a) a flexible enough platform that allow developers to easily add new components and enables non-programmer users to create powerful mobile applications; b) a framework that runs previously created mobile applications. Particularly important was the user-centered development process of this system.
We conducted a series of participatory design and thinking aloud trials with non-programmer users aiming to understand how they conceptualized programming. The results of interacting with low and high fidelity prototypes provided us with a set of interaction patterns and behaviors which we capitalized on in order to design the final DETACH product.
Afterwards DETACH was submitted to some tool evaluation tests, by asking non-programmer users to create a mobile application and developers to create a new component for the authoring tool. The results proved the tool success as every participant was able to complete the requested tasks
Communication, information, and knowledge in a coworking space
Since the early 2000s, a new type of working environment has developed in which individual workers--usually in a technology profession--share office space in a large, open, nontraditional environment that transcends traditional organizational boundaries. These new environments, called coworking spaces, present opportunities for communication, information sharing, and knowledge creation because of their open physical environments, the reduced presence of organizational barriers, and as a result of intentional efforts of the leaders of coworking spaces to encourage collaboration, While there is a substantial body of knowledge focused on how workers share information and build knowledge in traditional workplaces, there is little academic research on these novel coworking environments. This study examines the lived experiences of members of a specific coworking spaced located in the Phoenix, Arizona area in the United States. Through interviews with key informants, this study evaluates the communication channels that members of a coworking space use to share information and uses the Noaka SECI model to determine the types of information sharing and knowledge creation that happen at the space. This study finds that members of the coworking space heavily lean toward using in-person communication and next-generation instant messaging to share information, and that they primarily create knowledge through combining the explicit knowledge of members to create new explicit knowledge. The findings of this study lead to specific implications for researchers to further examine knowledge. The findings of this study lead to specific implications for researchers to further examine the communication channels used in coworking spaces, especially next-generation instant messaging tools. The researcher also recommends specific steps that leaders of coworking spaces can follow to improve the level of involvement of members of their spaces, and to position non-profit spaces favorably against competing for-profit coworking spaces
Customizing an Open Source Web Portal Framework in a Business Context : Integrating Participatory Design with an Agile Approach
In this thesis, we have investigated how an open source web portal can be used in a business context. This investigation required development of components for a web portal to meet the company’s needs. The motivation for this thesis was to design a web portal to organize the rapid growth of information and to improve the communication both internally and externally. The company that we collaborated with experienced expansion of the working staff, as well as in the customer base. Because the requirements for the web portal were uncertain, the development demanded a lot of communication and collaboration between us, as developers, and the company.
With help from the Agile methodology and Participatory Design we were able to clarify the requirements and to overcome the problems during the development. We have especially utilized Agile’s Extreme Programming method as the developing technique. We argue that by applying this method in the given context, we attained the necessary foundation needed for the successful realization of the project. In addition, in situations where we supplemented it with techniques from Participatory Design; we gained a better understanding of the components to be made
Designing and Evaluating Accessible E-Learning for Students with Visual Impairments in K-12 Computing Education
This dissertation explores the pathways for making K-12 computing education more accessible for blind or visually impaired (BVI) learners. As computer science (CS) expands into K-12 education, more concerted efforts are required to ensure all students have equitable access to opportunities to pursue a career in computing. To determine their viability with BVI learners, I conducted three studies to assess current accessibility in CS curricula, materials, and learning environments. Study one was interviews with visually impaired developers; study two was interviews with K-12 teachers of visually impaired students; study three was a remote observation within a computer science course. My exploration revealed that most of CS education lacks the necessary accommodations for BVI students to learn at an equitable pace with sighted students. However, electronic learning (e-learning) was a theme that showed to provide the most accessible learning experience for BVI students, although even there, usability and accessibility challenges were present in online learning platforms.
My dissertation engaged in a human-centered approach across three studies towards designing, developing, and evaluating an online learning management system (LMS) with the critical design elements to improve navigation and interaction with BVI users. Study one was a survey exploring the perception of readiness for taking online courses between sighted and visually impaired students. The findings from the survey fueled study two, which employed participatory design with storytelling with K-12 teachers and BVI students to learn more about their experiences using LMSs and how they imagine such systems to be more accessible. The findings led to developing the accessible learning content management system (ALCMS), a web-based platform for managing courses, course content, and course roster, evaluated in study three with high school students, both sighted and visually impaired, to determine its usability and accessibility. This research contributes with recommendations for including features and design elements to improve accessibility in existing LMSs and building new ones
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Evaluating the Impact of Live Programming on Collaborative Software Development
Collaboration is tricky, but often beneficial in the context of numerous software related activities, from learning core concepts, to the design and implementation of large software products. The growth of online classes, from small structured seminars to massive open online courses (MOOCs), and the isolation and impoverished learning experience some students report in these, points to an urgent need for tools that support remote pair programming in a distributed educational setting. In “the real world” software developers and designers work together to solve common problems, and meaningful and effective designer-developer collaboration improves the user experience. Supporting these with today’s often distributed work model presents important challenges.Two key techniques which are believed to be effective in promoting better coordination and collaboration are collaborative coding and live programming. Collaborative coding allows all the team members to get involved in the development process, and live programming enables them to see what they are building effortlessly and in real time.In this work, we first describe Jimbo, an integrated development environment (IDE) based on collaborative and live programming techniques, and a set of user studies aimed at evaluating whether these techniques are effective in promoting better coordination and collaboration in two different settings; distance learning and design-focused software development. Our results show that these techniques can improve the learning experience through pair programming and a tight code-artifact feedback loop. We will show how collaborative coding and live programming can help designers and developers bridge their knowledge and language gaps and develop mutual understanding, allowing designers to join the development process as first-class citizens – not dependent on the coders to compile and share output – or being forced to become coders.Keywords: pair programming, collaborative learning, collaboration, educational tools, live programming, remote pair-programming, programming environment, MOOC, IDE, distance learning, designer-developer collaboration, collaborative software developmen
The Ambience of Innovation: a Material Semiotic Analysis of Corporate and Community Innovation Sites
There are unprecedented opportunities in professional and technical writing (PTW) and rhetoric research thanks to a contemporary expansion of rhetorical studies beyond the linguistic/symbolic and into the material, accounting for the rhetorical contributions of “nonhumans” (Latour Reassembling the Social). Material rhetoric frameworks such as Thomas Rickert’s ambient rhetoric and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, provide fertile grounds for PTW/rhetoric research that explores the diffusion of “rhetoric into material space” (Rickert xii) which has especially exciting implications for the study of place and how it embodies values and rhetorically shapes acting, thinking, and the entire spectrum of “human flourishing” (Rickert xii).
This renewed interest in the rhetoric of artifacts and how they unite to enact agency within material spaces correlates with an enduring PTW/rhetoric interest in the process that creates things: innovation. The rhetoric of innovation analyzes the complex communication process involved with generating, conveying, and transferring ideas into marketable technology products (Doheny-Farina; Akrich, Callon, and Latour).
This work, then, contributes to contemporary PTW/rhetoric research by applying commitments of rhetorical material-semiotics to innovation to understanding the context of innovation and the role of place in ideation. My underlying rhetorical interest within these spaces is the generation, communication, and dispersal of agency during ideation. I explore this process from three perspectives: how the designers of innovation spaces and workshop leverage material context to convey values of innovation; how the artifacts within innovation spaces enact agency upon facilitators and participants to shape their approaches to the innovation process; and how agency is symmetrically distributed across a network of human and nonhuman actants during real time ideation.
My project analyzes innovation workshops, brainstorming sessions, and strategic planning sessions, within eight material spaces designed to cultivate creativity through different material means. These spaces are diverse as are the sessions I observed, but, across all of them, I apply a mix of observation, interviews, and ambience descriptions in order to pursue the answers to my research questions and uncover insights about the dispersal of agency within innovation spaces.
My analysis of these spaces has numerous implications for PTW/Rhetoric scholars in its expansion of material rhetorics into space analysis; it also has implications PTW/Rhetoric teaching related to materially distribution of agency in the classroom space. Finally, it can help innovation practitioners such as interior designers, engineers, and industrial designers to rhetorically communicate their values of innovation and establish a culture of innovation in their companies through material-linguistic means
dbProlog: a Prolog/relational database interface
dbProlog is a prototype system that provides a C-Prolog user access to data in an external relational database via both loose and tight coupling. To the application programmer, dbProlog is a group of six built-in Prolog predicates that effect communication between a C-Prolog process and a database management system process. Prolog application program statements may be written using the six predicates to make the interface transparent to an end-user. The system is based on a driver process that must be customized to the interfaced DBMS and whose primary function is the translation of requests and replies between C-Prolog and the DBMS. dbProlog supports Prolog\u27s depth-first search on database retrievals by producing the next record when the retrieval predicate is encountered upon backtracking. dbProlog also supports multiple active database retrievals, as may be required by a Prolog rule that references two or more database retrievals, or by a recursive rule
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