Delays at Freeway roadworks: safety and road user cost considerations

Freeway incidents are events which result in a temporary reduction in the capacity of the facility. Intelligent transport systems developments are primarily concerned with ‘random’ freeway incidents such as breakdowns, crashes, spilled loads etc. In contrast, relatively less attention has been given to ‘planned’ incidents such as maintenance activities. As part of a study aimed at predicting the delays associated with freeway incidents, this paper deals with issues associated with delays at major roadworks. A variety of data was collected as part of a case study of a major maintenance project on Melbourne’s M1 motorway. Vehicle delays were measured using a timed number plate survey. During periods of heavy delay, a number of vehicles were observed to execute illegal turns to avoid the traffic delays at the roadworks. There is evidence of a relationship between the occurrence of this behaviour and the corresponding level of delay at the roadworks. Road user delay costs were also estimated as part of the study. The potential role of an analytic delay model in maintenance planning is explored. This paper is to be presented at the 19th ARRB TR Conference to be held in Sydney, 6-11 December 1998

Looking for trouble:a description of oculomotor search strategies during live CCTV operation

Recent research has begun to address how CCTV operators in the modern control room attempt to search for crime (e.g., Howard et al., 2011). However, an often-neglected element of the CCTV task is that the operators have at their disposal a multiplexed wall of scenes, and a single spot-monitor on which they can select any of these feeds for inspection. Here we examined how 2 trained CCTV operators used these sources of information to search from crime during a morning, afternoon, and night-time shift. We found that they spent surprisingly little time viewing the multiplex wall, instead preferentially spending most of their time searching on the single-scene spot-monitor. Such search must require a sophisticated understanding of the surveilled environment, as the operators must make their selection of which screen to view based on their prediction of where crime is likely to occur. This seems to be reflected in the difference in the screens that they selected to view at different times of the day. For example, night-clubs received close monitoring at night, but were seldom viewed in mid-morning. Such narrowing of search based on a contextual understanding of an environment is not a new idea (e.g., Torralba et al., 2006), and appears to contribute to operator's selection strategy. This research prompts new questions regarding the nature of representation that operators have of their environment, and how they might develop expectation-based search strategies to countermand the demands of the large influx of visual information. Future research should ensure not to neglect examination of operator behavior “in the wild” (Hutchins, 1995a), as such insights are difficult to gain from laboratory based paradigms alone

How People Re-find Information When the Web Changes

This paper investigates how people return to information in a dynamic information environment. For example, a person might want to return to Web content via a link encountered earlier on a Web page, only to learn that the link has since been removed. Changes can benefit users by providing new information, but they hinder returning to previously viewed information. The observational study presented here analyzed instances, collected via a Web search, where people expressed difficulty re-finding information because of changes to the information or its environment. A number of interesting observations arose from this analysis, including that the path originally taken to get to the information target appeared important in its re-retrieval, whereas, surprisingly, the temporal aspects of when the information was seen before were not. While people expressed frustration when problems arose, an explanation of why the change had occurred was often sufficient to allay that frustration, even in the absence of a solution. The implications of these observations for systems that support re-finding in dynamic environments are discussed

From pattern to practice: evaluation of a design pattern fostering trust in Virtual teams

Rusman, E., Van Bruggen, J., Cörvers, R., Sloep, P. B., & Koper, R. (2009). From pattern to practice: evaluation of a design pattern fostering trust in Virtual teams. Computers in Human Behavior, 25(5), 1010-1019.This article describes the implementation and evaluation of a design pattern that fosters trust in mediated collaborative settings. The pattern proposed here should provide a profile with static and/or dynamic information about the participants of a collaborative environment. It aims to foster initial (in the first two to three weeks) trust in situations in which people don’t know each other and don’t have a chance to meet, but need to collaborate. A simple and low cost implementation of this pattern was realized by conducting a case study with participants of the European Virtual Seminar on Sustainable Development (EVS). They were asked to fill in a template with personal information about themselves. In the EVS, students collaboratively have to address sustainable development problems. Afterwards, students were questioned on the use of this template, called PEXPI, and their impressions of each other during and after the EVS; questionnaires and a semi-structured interview were used. The results show that the implementation of the static profile, derived from the pattern, initially helped students to form an impression of each other. After this initial period, however, students base their impression on factors such as the quality of work-related contributions, behaviour during collaboration (e.g. responsiveness), and communication style. This case study also shows that the pattern could easily be applied and transferred to a new context, as long as the conditions described in the ‘context’-section of the pattern, were met. The case study provided a means for evaluation of the pattern and a source for its refinement. We are also grateful for the collaboration with colleagues in the E-LEN project, which provided ample opportunities to learn about and elaborate on design patterns as a design construct. Last, but not least, we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback, which helped us to improve this article.We would like to gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the COOPER Project, that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority 2 IST. Contract no.: 027073 (www.cooper-project.org ) and which has part-funded this work

Design and Development of Widgets for a Corporate Security Application

Aquest projecte es lliura com a Treball Final del Grau d'Enginyeria Informàtica de la Facultat d'Informàtica de Barcelona. L'objectiu és posar en pràctica els coneixements adquirits durant l'especialitat d'enginyeria del Software. El projecte consisteix a dissenyar i desenvolupar widgets per a una aplicació móvil corporativa de seguretat que permet als usuaris interaccionar amb una de les funcionalitats principals de la aplicació, sempre mantenint la perspectiva de la seguretat i la usabilitat.This project is delivered as the Bachelor Thesis of the Informatics Engineering Degree of the Barcelona Faculty of Computer Science. The objective is to put into practice the knowledge acquired during the Software engineering specialty. The project consists of designing and developing widgets for a corporate security mobile application that allows users to interact with one of the main functionalities of the application, always maintaining the perspective of security and usability

電視動態訊息呈現之人因研究(II)

[[abstract]]電視畫面上使用動態文字訊息的現象已很普遍，其中以新聞和購物頻道出現的頻率最多。那些流竄在畫面上的「即時動態訊息」伴隨著各種不同的速度、位置和呈現方式呈現。例如電視畫面之動態文字訊息以不同的速度、不同的位置與不同的字體同時呈現在畫面右方 (或左方) 與下方。這些多變之訊息顯示方式已漸漸形成，但都可能影響著使用者訊息讀取的理解力與視覺舒適度。鑑於新聞節目是大多數民眾每天接收國內外時事的主要資訊來源，為提供電視資訊設計之參考，本計劃以國內新聞節目作為研究對象。主要探討 (1)水平與垂直動態訊息之呈現方式組合與速度組合之動態訊息呈現對於觀看者之閱讀績效與視覺疲勞的影響 (2)垂直與水平雙行動態訊息之距離與速度因子對於讀取理解績效與視覺疲勞的影響。其研究結果將可完整地提供電視媒體動態資訊製作與相關研究之參考，以提升電視畫面上動態訊息之視覺呈現品質與使用者的訊息讀取績效。 Displaying dynamic information on television develops gradually recent years, especially on news and shopping channels. The instant dynamic information shows with various speeds, positions and display ways -- the dynamic information displays on the right of the screen (or on the left) and bottom of the screen in the meanwhile for examples. The various display ways may influence users’ reading comprehension and visual comfort. Therefore, identifying appropriate display of speeds, position and display way is important for information design. The news program is the general and main source for users to receive news around the local and the world, hence, this study takes news channels as the survey subject. The aim of this study is to investigate (1) the performance of reading comprehension and visual comfort on crawling displays with various speeds and display combinations, (2) the performance of reading comprehension and visual comfort on two-line crawling displays with various speeds and display distances. The experimental results provide the design guidelines for information, and the evaluation criterions of information design

The Mind's Eye on Personal Profiles - How to inform trustworthiness assessments in virtual project teams

Rusman, E. (2011). The Mind's Eye on Personal Profiles - How to inform trustworthiness assessments in virtual project teams (Doctoral dissertation). June, 17, 2011, Open University in the Netherlands (CELSTEC), Heerlen, The Netherlands.The central research question of this thesis is: How to inform trustworthiness assessments of virtual project team members in the initial phase of collaboration?There is common agreement that the availability of personal information and the possibility to interact informally at the start of a project accelerates the trust formation process. This goes for face-to-face as well as for virtual project teams. However, there is no shared understanding as to what information is critical for this acceleration and why it is so. Acceleration of the trust formation process is beneficial, as interpersonal trust is one of the key factors influencing performance in face-to-face as well as virtual teams. When little or no trust exists within a team, serious collaboration problems are bound to occur. Virtual project teams experience more problems with interpersonal trust formation than face-to-face teams. This is likely to be due to the diminished availability of information and its computer-mediated character. Once we know what information is important for trustworthiness assessments and why it is so, we could use it for the design of measures to accelerate the formation of interpersonal trust. To investigate the central research question we combined a theoretical (top-down) with a practical, design-oriented (bottom-up) research approach. We concluded our research with an evaluation.Open Universiteit Nederland; SIKS research school (dissertation serie No. 2011-19); Cooper Project (Contract 027073

A design space for social object labels in museums

Taking a problematic user experience with ubiquitous annotation as its point of departure, this thesis defines and explores the design space for Social Object Labels (SOLs), small interactive displays aiming to support users' in-situ engagement with digital annotations of physical objects and places by providing up-to-date information before, during and after interaction. While the concept of ubiquitous annotation has potential applications in a wide range of domains, the research focuses in particular on SOLs in a museum context, where they can support the institution's educational goals by engaging visitors in the interpretation of exhibits and providing a platform for public discourse to complement official interpretations provided on traditional object labels. The thesis defines and structures the design space for SOLs, investigates how they can support social interpretation in museums and develops empirically validated design recommendations. Reflecting the developmental character of the research, it employs Design Research as a methodological framework, which involves the iterative development and evaluation of design artefacts together with users and other stakeholders. The research identifies the particular characteristics of SOLs and structures their design space into ten high-level aspects, synthesised from taxonomies and heuristics for similar display concepts and complemented with aspects emerging from the iterative design and evaluation of prototypes. It presents findings from a survey exploring visitors' mental models, preferences and expectations of commenting in museums and translates them into requirements for SOLs. It reports on scenario-based design activities, expert interviews with museum professionals, formative user studies and co-design sessions, and two empirical evaluations of SOL prototypes in a gallery environment. Pulling together findings from these research activities it then formulates design recommendations for SOLs and supports them with related evidence and implementation examples. The main contributions are (i) to delineate and structure the design space for SOLs, which helps to ground SOLs in the literature and understand them as a distinct display concept with its own characteristics; (ii) to explore, for the first time, a visitor perspective on commenting in museums, which can inform research, development and policies on user-generated content in museums and the wider cultural heritage sector; (iii) to develop empirically validated design recommendations, which can inform future research and development into SOLs and related display concept. The thesis concludes by summarising findings in relation to its stated research questions, restating its contributions from ubiquitous computing, domain and methodology perspectives, and discussing open issues and future work

Pervasive Personal Information Spaces

Each user’s electronic information-interaction uniquely matches their information behaviour, activities and work context. In the ubiquitous computing environment, this information-interaction and the underlying personal information is distributed across multiple personal devices. This thesis investigates the idea of Pervasive Personal Information Spaces for improving ubiquitous personal information-interaction. Pervasive Personal Information Spaces integrate information distributed across multiple personal devices to support anytime-anywhere access to an individual’s information. This information is then visualised through context-based, flexible views that are personalised through user activities, diverse annotations and spontaneous information associations. The Spaces model embodies the characteristics of Pervasive Personal Information Spaces, which emphasise integration of the user’s information space, automation and communication, and flexible views. The model forms the basis for InfoMesh, an example implementation developed for desktops, laptops and PDAs. The design of the system was supported by a tool developed during the research called activity snaps that captures realistic user activity information for aiding the design and evaluation of interactive systems. User evaluation of InfoMesh elicited a positive response from participants for the ideas underlying Pervasive Personal Information Spaces, especially for carrying out work naturally and visualising, interpreting and retrieving information according to personalised contexts, associations and annotations. The user studies supported the research hypothesis, revealing that context-based flexible views may indeed provide better contextual, ubiquitous access and visualisation of information than current-day systems