Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

Pro-active Meeting Assistants: Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all. This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

The big picture? Video and the representation of interaction

Researchers who use video to record interactions usually need to translate the video data into another medium at some stage in order to facilitate its analysis and dissemination. This article considers some methodological issues that arise in this process by examining transcripts, diagrams and pictures as examples of different techniques for representing interaction. These examples are used to identify some general principles for the representation of data where video is the source material. The article presents an outline of guided interaction and this is used as a case for illustrating these principles in the context of young children, technology and adults in pre-school settings. Although the article focuses on a specific study and solution, the principles are applicable in all cases where video is used as a source of data for the representation of interaction, whether or not it is technologically mediated

Presentation Trainer, your Public Speaking Multimodal Coach

A paper describing an experiment on the Presentation TrainerThe Presentation Trainer is a multimodal tool designed to support the practice of public speaking skills, by giving the user real-time feedback about different aspects of her nonverbal communication. It tracks the user’s voice and body to interpret her current performance. Based on this performance the Presentation Trainer selects the type of intervention that will be presented as feedback to the user. This feedback mechanism has been designed taking in consideration the results from previous studies that show how difficult it is for learners to perceive and correctly interpret real- time feedback while practicing their speeches. In this paper we present the user experience evaluation of participants who used the Presentation Trainer to practice for an elevator pitch, showing that the feedback provided by the Presentation Trainer has a significant influence on learning.The underlying research project is partly funded by the METALOGUE project. METALOGUE is a Seventh Framework Programme collabo- rative project funded by the European Commission, grant agreement number: 611073 (http://www.metalogue.eu)

Traces on the Walls and Traces in the Air: Inscriptions and Gestures in Educational Design Team Meetings

Designers from various domains have relied extensively on the use of drawing and sketching to communicate their design ideas. Domains such as architecture and engineering design have well-established and refined visual languages. In these areas significant research is dedicated to the study of drawing and sketching. One design area that is lagging behind others is educational design. Very little is known in this field about how participants in teams use drawing and sketching to support their communication in design meetings. This study draws on an applied ethnomethodological perspective to investigate how participants in educational design meetings interact with each other, and with objects in their environment, while creating and attending to drawings. Two case studies involving four separate groups of designers were analysed. The first case involved the design of an educational blog and the second the design of an educational game. The meetings were conducted in the Design Studio, a purpose-built room for conducting research on educational design at the University of Sydney. The studio features two writable walls, which were widely used by the majority of participants in the study. The participants in this study created various types of inscriptions. Inscriptions are defined here as all types of drawings, sketches, and visual marks created in support of design activity. Inscriptions entail a shift from mental representations to social activity. A face-to-face design session often involves multimodal resources thus requiring the analysis of other modes such as gestures. In this study gestures were often used as an additional communicative channel. They functioned as complementary representational means through which the participants made sense of the inscriptions. Understanding the nuances involved in the way designers interact with inscriptions is a necessary step for building better tools, which may support more effective communication between experienced designers, and help novices as they learn to negotiate the design process. This thesis contributes to our understanding of multi-modal communication in educational design team meetings and has implications for the functioning of next-generation design tools and design environments, as well as for the training of educational designers

Arrow Symbols: Theory for Interpretation

People often sketch diagrams when they communicate successfully among each other. Such an intuitive collaboration would also be possible with computers if the machines understood the meanings of the sketches. Arrow symbols are a frequent ingredient of such sketched diagrams. Due to the arrows’ versatility, however, it remains a challenging problem to make computers distinguish the various semantic roles of arrow symbols. The solution to this problem is highly desirable for more effective and user-friendly pen-based systems. This thesis, therefore, develops an algorithm for deducing the semantic roles of arrow symbols, called the arrow semantic interpreter (ASI). The ASI emphasizes the structural patterns of arrow-containing diagrams, which have a strong influence on their semantics. Since the semantic roles of arrow symbols are assigned to individual arrow symbols and sometimes to the groups of arrow symbols, two types of the corresponding structures are introduced: the individual structure models the spatial arrangement of components around each arrow symbol and the inter-arrow structure captures the spatial arrangement of multiple arrow symbols. The semantic roles assigned to individual arrow symbols are classified into orientation, behavioral description, annotation, and association, and the formats of individual structures that correspond to these four classes are identified. The result enables the derivation of the possible semantic roles of individual arrow symbols from their individual structures. In addition, for the diagrams with multiple arrow symbols, the patterns of their inter-arrow structures are exploited to detect the groups of arrow symbols that jointly have certain semantic roles, as well as the nesting relations between the arrow symbols. The assessment shows that for 79% of sample arrow symbols the ASI successfully detects their correct semantic roles, even though the average number of the ASI’s interpretations is only 1.31 per arrow symbol. This result indicates that the structural information is highly useful for deriving the reliable interpretations of arrow symbols

Interaction in creative tasks: ideation, representation and evaluation in composition

The design of tools for creative activities affects the creative processes and output of users. In this paper we consider how an understanding of creative interaction can inform the design of support tools in a creative domain, and where creative needs cross domain boundaries. Using observations of musical composers we analyse the theoretical approaches to understanding creativity and their use to HCI. Cycles of ideation and evaluation are suggested as atomic elements of creative interactions, with the representation of ideas a central activity for individual and collaborating composers. A model of collaborative composition was developed, along with an analysis of the representational types used in the domain. This led to the design and evaluation of a prototype Sonic Sketchpad for musical idea representation

Multimodal Interactive DialOgue System

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-243).Interactions between people are typically conversational, multimodal, and symmetric. In conversational interactions, information flows in both directions. In multimodal interactions, people use multiple channels. In symmetric interactions, both participants communicate multimodally, with the integration of and switching between modalities basically effortless. In contrast, consider typical human-computer interaction. It is almost always unidirectional { we're telling the machine what to do; it's almost always unimodal (can you type and use the mouse simultaneously?); and it's symmetric only in the disappointing sense that when you type, it types back at you. There are a variety of things wrong with this picture. Perhaps chief among them is that if communication is unidirectional, it must be complete and unambiguous, exhaustively anticipating every detail and every misinterpretation. In brief, it's exhausting. This thesis examines the benefits of creating multimodal human-computer dialogues that employ sketching and speech, aimed initially at the task of describing early stage designs of simple mechanical devices. The goal of the system is to be a collaborative partner, facilitating design conversations. Two initial user studies provided key insights into multimodal communication: simple questions are powerful, color choices are deliberate, and modalities are closely coordinated. These observations formed the basis for our multimodal interactive dialogue system, or Midos. Midos makes possible a dynamic dialogue, i.e., one in which it asks questions to resolve uncertainties or ambiguities.(cont.) The benefits of a dialogue in reducing the cognitive overhead of communication have long been known. We show here that having the system able to ask questions is good, but for an unstructured task like describing a design, knowing what questions to ask is crucial. We describe an architecture that enables the system to accept partial information from the user, then request details it considers relevant, noticeably lowering the cognitive overhead of communicating. The multimodal questions Midos asks are in addition purposefully designed to use the same multimodal integration pattern that people exhibited in our study. Our evaluation of the system showed that Midos successfully engages the user in a dialogue and produces the same conversational features as our initial human-human conversation studies.by Aaron Daniel Adler.Ph.D

Freeform User Interfaces for Graphical Computing

報告番号: 甲15222 ; 学位授与年月日: 2000-03-29 ; 学位の種別: 課程博士 ; 学位の種類: 博士(工学) ; 学位記番号: 博工第4717号 ; 研究科・専攻: 工学系研究科情報工学専