Emotional tech

The Emotional Tech project applies emotional design as a research approach for investigating how people feel about state of the art and new emerging mobility technologies. How technology influences people at an emotional level and what factors can be improved in the design process has received little research attention and been rarely implemented in urban mobility. We explored the interactions and experiences of people and vehicles from the perspective of 'emotion as affective artefacts' which tackles 'emotion' as a conduit to help with problem-solving, decision-making and sense-making. The study focuses on subtle details of people's emotional transitions during, before and after journeys, and during long term use of mobility services. We created vehicle concepts to explore what innovation opportunities could be applied to bring cutting edge technologies into real world use

A Study of Accomodation of Prosodic and Temporal Features in Spoken Dialogues in View of Speech Technology Applications

Inter-speaker accommodation is a well-known property of human speech and human interaction in general. Broadly it refers to the behavioural patterns of two (or more) interactants and the effect of the (verbal and non-verbal) behaviour of each to that of the other(s). Implementation of thisbehavior in spoken dialogue systems is desirable as an improvement on the naturalness of humanmachine interaction. However, traditional qualitative descriptions of accommodation phenomena do not provide sufficient information for such an implementation. Therefore, a quantitativedescription of inter-speaker accommodation is required. This thesis proposes a methodology of monitoring accommodation during a human or humancomputer dialogue, which utilizes a moving average filter over sequential frames for each speaker. These frames are time-aligned across the speakers, hence the name Time Aligned Moving Average (TAMA). Analysis of spontaneous human dialogue recordings by means of the TAMA methodology reveals ubiquitous accommodation of prosodic features (pitch, intensity and speech rate) across interlocutors, and allows for statistical (time series) modeling of the behaviour, in a way which is meaningful for implementation in spoken dialogue system (SDS) environments.In addition, a novel dialogue representation is proposed that provides an additional point of view to that of TAMA in monitoring accommodation of temporal features (inter-speaker pause length and overlap frequency). This representation is a percentage turn distribution of individual speakercontributions in a dialogue frame which circumvents strict attribution of speaker-turns, by considering both interlocutors as synchronously active. Both TAMA and turn distribution metrics indicate that correlation of average pause length and overlap frequency between speakers can be attributed to accommodation (a debated issue), and point to possible improvements in SDS “turntaking” behaviour. Although the findings of the prosodic and temporal analyses can directly inform SDS implementations, further work is required in order to describe inter-speaker accommodation sufficiently, as well as to develop an adequate testing platform for evaluating the magnitude ofperceived improvement in human-machine interaction. Therefore, this thesis constitutes a first step towards a convincingly useful implementation of accommodation in spoken dialogue systems

Clique: Perceptually Based, Task Oriented Auditory Display for GUI Applications

Screen reading is the prevalent approach for presenting graphical desktop applications in audio. The primary function of a screen reader is to describe what the user encounters when interacting with a graphical user interface (GUI). This straightforward method allows people with visual impairments to hear exactly what is on the screen, but with significant usability problems in a multitasking environment. Screen reader users must infer the state of on-going tasks spanning multiple graphical windows from a single, serial stream of speech. In this dissertation, I explore a new approach to enabling auditory display of GUI programs. With this method, the display describes concurrent application tasks using a small set of simultaneous speech and sound streams. The user listens to and interacts solely with this display, never with the underlying graphical interfaces. Scripts support this level of adaption by mapping GUI components to task definitions. Evaluation of this approach shows improvements in user efficiency, satisfaction, and understanding with little development effort. To develop this method, I studied the literature on existing auditory displays, working user behavior, and theories of human auditory perception and processing. I then conducted a user study to observe problems encountered and techniques employed by users interacting with an ideal auditory display: another human being. Based on my findings, I designed and implemented a prototype auditory display, called Clique, along with scripts adapting seven GUI applications. I concluded my work by conducting a variety of evaluations on Clique. The results of these studies show the following benefits of Clique over the state of the art for users with visual impairments (1-5) and mobile sighted users (6): 1. Faster, accurate access to speech utterances through concurrent speech streams. 2. Better awareness of peripheral information via concurrent speech and sound streams. 3. Increased information bandwidth through concurrent streams. 4. More efficient information seeking enabled by ubiquitous tools for browsing and searching. 5. Greater accuracy in describing unfamiliar applications learned using a consistent, task-based user interface. 6. Faster completion of email tasks in a standard GUI after exposure to those tasks in audio

Evaluation of a driver interface: effects of control type (knob versus buttons) and menu structure (depth versus breadth)

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/1216/2/90529.0001.001.pd

Metafore mobilnih komunikacija ; Метафоры мобильной связи.

Mobilne komunikacije su polje informacione i komunikacione tehnologije koje karakteriše brzi razvoj i u kome se istraživanjem u analitičkim okvirima kognitivne lingvistike, zasnovanom na uzorku od 1005 odrednica, otkriva izrazito prisustvo metafore, metonimije, analogije i pojmovnog objedinjavanja. Analiza uzorka reči i izraza iz oblasti mobilnih medija, mobilnih operativnih sistema, dizajna korisničkih interfejsa, terminologije mobilnih mreža, kao i slenga i tekstizama koje upotrebljavaju korisnici mobilnih naprava ukazuje da pomenuti kognitivni mehanizmi imaju ključnu ulogu u olakšavanju interakcije između ljudi i širokog spektra mobilnih uređaja sa računarskim sposobnostima, od prenosivih računara i ličnih digitalnih asistenata (PDA), do mobilnih telefona, tableta i sprava koje se nose na telu. Ti mehanizmi predstavljaju temelj razumevanja i nalaze se u osnovi principa funkcionisanja grafičkih korisničkih interfejsa i direktne manipulacije u računarskim okruženjima. Takođe je analiziran i poseban uzorak od 660 emotikona i emođija koji pokazuju potencijal za proširenje značenja, imajući u vidu značaj piktograma za tekstualnu komunikaciju u vidu SMS poruka i razmenu tekstualnih sadržaja na društvenim mrežama kojima se redovno pristupa putem mobilnih uređaja...Mobile communications are a fast-developing field of information and communication technology whose exploration within the analytical framework of cognitive linguistics, based on a sample of 1005 entries, reveals the pervasive presence of metaphor, metonymy analogy and conceptual integration. The analysis of the sample consisting of words and phrases related to mobile media, mobile operating systems and interface design, the terminology of mobile networking, as well as the slang and textisms employed by mobile gadget users shows that the above cognitive mechanisms play a key role in facilitating interaction between people and a wide range of mobile computing devices from laptops and PDAs to mobile phones, tablets and wearables. They are the cornerstones of comprehension that are behind the principles of functioning of graphical user interfaces and direct manipulation in computing environments. A separate sample, featuring a selection of 660 emoticons and emoji, exhibiting the potential for semantic expansion was also analyzed, in view of the significance of pictograms for text-based communication in the form of text messages or exchanges on social media sites regularly accessed via mobile devices..

Ferocious Logics

Contemporary power manifests in the algorithmic. And yet this power seems incomprehensible: understood as code, it becomes apolitical; understood as a totality, it becomes overwhelming. This book takes an alternate approach, using it to unravel the operations of Uber and Palantir, Airbnb and Amazon Alexa. Moving off the whiteboard and into the world, the algorithmic must negotiate with frictions—the ‘merely’ technical routines of distributing data and running tasks coming together into broader social forces that shape subjectivities, steer bodies, and calibrate relationships. Driven by the imperatives of capital, the algorithmic exhausts subjects and spaces, a double move seeking to both exhaustively apprehend them and exhaust away their productivities. But these on-the-ground encounters also reveal that force is never guaranteed. The irreducibility of the world renders logic inadequate and control gives way to contingency

Ferocious Logics: Unmaking the Algorithm

Contemporary power manifests in the algorithmic. And yet this power seems incomprehensible: understood as code, it becomes apolitical; understood as a totality, it becomes overwhelming. This book takes an alternate approach, using it to unravel the operations of Uber and Palantir, Airbnb and Amazon Alexa. Moving off the whiteboard and into the world, the algorithmic must negotiate with frictions - the 'merely' technical routines of distributing data and running tasks coming together into broader social forces that shape subjectivities, steer bodies, and calibrate relationships. Driven by the imperatives of capital, the algorithmic exhausts subjects and spaces, a double move seeking to both exhaustively apprehend them and exhaust away their productivities. But these on-the-ground encounters also reveal that force is never guaranteed. The irreducibility of the world renders logic inadequate and control gives way to contingency