Use of Landmarks to Improve Spatial Learning and Revisitation in Computer Interfaces

Efficient spatial location learning and remembering are just as important for two-dimensional Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) as they are for real environments where locations are revisited multiple times. Rapid spatial memory development in GUIs, however, can be difficult because these interfaces often lack adequate landmarks that have been predominantly used by people to learn and recall real-life locations. In the absence of sufficient landmarks in GUIs, artificially created visual objects (i.e., artificial landmarks) could be used as landmarks to support spatial memory development of spatial locations. In order to understand how spatial memory development occurs in GUIs and explore ways to assist users’ efficient location learning and recalling in GUIs, I carried out five studies exploring the use of landmarks in GUIs – one study that investigated interfaces of four standard desktop applications: Microsoft Word, Facebook, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Reader, and other four that tested artificial landmarks augmented two prototype desktop GUIs against non-landmarked versions: command selection interfaces and linear document viewers; in addition, I tested landmarks’ use in variants of these interfaces that varied in the number of command sets (small, medium, and large) and types of linear documents (textual and video). Results indicate that GUIs’ existing features and design elements can be reliable landmarks in GUIs that provide spatial benefits similar to real environments. I also show that artificial landmarks can significantly improve spatial memory development of GUIs, allowing support for rapid spatial location learning and remembering in GUIs. Overall, this dissertation reveals that landmarks can be a valuable addition to graphical systems to improve the memorability and usability of GUIs

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Scientific dissemination and professional practices through digital media: The study of pragmatic strategies in the communication of international research projects

La investigación científica hoy en día está ligada a los procesos de globalización y a la búsqueda de la innovación y la excelencia, lo cual favorece una creciente colaboración, internacionalización y multidisciplinariedad. Para llevar a cabo estas iniciativas ambiciosas y de gran escala, los investigadores necesitan la financiación externa que distintas organizaciones, instituciones y programas pueden proporcionar. Esta reconfiguración del trabajo académico va de la mano de la ubiquidad y popularidad de Internet. Un extenso abanico de géneros, plataformas y medios digitales permiten a los científicos y académicos difundir sus investigaciones a una audiencia amplia y heterogénea. La inversión de esfuerzo en la comunicación mediada digitalmente permite a los investigadores contribuir a una diseminación más efectiva del conocimiento generado, así como cumplir con su compromiso social. Por otra parte, este esfuerzo les puede permitir reforzar su reputación como investigadores y conseguir un mayor impacto. Un ejemplo destacado de este escenario académico cambiante donde se maximiza el discurso digital para propósitos investigadores es el de los proyectos de investigación internacionales. Se trata de consorcios compuestos de miembros provenientes de entornos socioculturales y profesionales distintos que hacen uso de sitios web y redes sociales para la diseminación de sus proyectos conjuntos y utilizan las características tecnológicas y comunicativas de estos espacios digitales para ofrecer actualizaciones periódicas de su trabajo e información sobre hallazgos en progreso y resultados de investigación. De este modo, rinden cuentas a los organismos que los financian y aumentan su visibilidad entre los lectores digitales. Las intenciones comunicativas de estos equipos de investigación para cumplir dichos objetivos se codifican y transmiten discursivamente a través de diversas estrategias pragmáticas, que se encuadran en determinados parámetros contextuales y que responden a las especificidades del medio y se ven constreñidas por estas. Estas estrategias revelan cómo los investigadores comparten la información, cómo publicitan sus hallazgos y cómo se dirigen a sus potenciales lectores.Así, esta tesis doctoral tiene como objetivo investigar las estrategias pragmáticas prominentes en lengua inglesa empleadas por grupos de investigación internacionales en sus prácticas digitales discursivas, que normalmente se materializan en sitios webs y redes sociales para sus proyectos. Con este propósito, se compiló y analizó el corpus digital EUROPRO, que contiene 30 sitios web de proyectos de investigación que recibieron financiación en el marco del programa Horizonte2020 (subcorpus EUROPROwebs) y las correspondientes cuentas de Twitter de aquellos proyectos (subcorpus EUROPROtweets). Dichos subcorpus han sido extraídos de la base de datos digital EUROPRO recopilada por el grupo de investigación InterGedi. En mi tesis doctoral propongo una taxonomía derivada de los datos como resultado del análisis del corpus, que comprende 27 estrategias organizadas en torno a tres macrocategorías: informativas, promocionales e interaccionales. Incido teórica y metodológicamente en el proceso de diseñar y revisar esta herramienta analítica para así demonstrar su solidez y viabilidad. Además, analizo el rango de ocurrencia, la frecuencia y el uso específico de estas estrategias en las secciones que aparecen de manera sistemática en los sitios web incluidos en el corpus y en las páginas web donde se aloja la mayor parte de la información sobre el proyecto (Homepage, About, Partners, News & Events), en las cuentas de Twitter y, de forma comparativa, entre las secciones web y los tuits, con el fin de observar tendencias significativas y en cuanto a similitudes y diferencias en su funcionamiento en estos medios digitales. Además, adopto un enfoque etnográfico mediante la inclusión de evidencias contextuales conseguidas a través de entrevistas semi-estructuradas con investigadores de los proyectos Horizonte2020, cuyos resultados ayudan a sustentar los hallazgos procedentes del análisis textual. También tomo una perspectiva multimodal sobre cómo se emplean las estrategias pragmáticas en los sitios web de proyectos de investigación en relación a la sección Homepages. Este análisis, en concreto, permite reconocer el potencial de los recursos verbales y visuales para la construcción de significado desde una perspectiva pragmática. En general, el presente estudio busca ahondar en nuestro entendimiento de prácticas académicas digitales que están evolucionando rápidamente y que tienen gran alcance, en particular adoptadas por grupos de investigación, que pueden beneficiarse de los resultados y las implicaciones de esta investigación para la futura comunicación y diseminación de sus proyectos científicos.<br /

Web Search, Web Tutorials & Software Applications: Characterizing and Supporting the Coordinated Use of Online Resources for Performing Work in Feature-Rich Software

Web search and other online resources serve an integral role in how people learn and use feature-rich software (e.g., Adobe Photoshop) on a daily basis. Users depend on web resources both as a first line of technical support, and as a means for coping with system complexity. For example, people rely on web resources to learn new tasks, to troubleshoot problems, or to remind themselves of key task details. When users rely on web resources to support their work, their interactions are distributed over three user environments: (1) the search engine, (2) retrieved documents, and (3) the application's user interface. As users interact with these environments, their actions generate a rich set of signals that characterize how the population thinks about and uses software systems "in the wild," on a day-to-day basis. This dissertation presents three works that successively connect and associate signals and artifacts across these environments, thereby generating novel insights about users and their tasks, and enabling powerful new end-user tools and services. These three projects are as follows: Characterizing usability through search (CUTS): The CUTS system demonstrates that aggregate logs of web search queries can be leveraged to identify common tasks and potential usability problems faced by the users of any publicly available interactive system. For example, in 2011 I examined query data for the Firefox web browser. Automated analysis uncovered approximately 150 variations of the query "Firefox how to get the menu bar back", with queries issued once every 32 minutes on average. Notably, this analysis did not depend on direct access to query logs. Instead, query suggestions services and online advertising valuations were leveraged to approximate aggregate query data. Nevertheless, these data proved to be timely, to have a high degree of ecological validity, and to be arguably less prone to self-selection bias than data gathered via traditional usability methods. Query-feature graphs (QF-Graphs): Query-feature graphs are structures that map high-level descriptions of a user's goals to the specific features and commands relevant to achieving those goals in software. QF-graphs address an important instance of the more general vocabulary mismatch problem. For example, users of the GIMP photo manipulation software often want to "make a picture black and white", and fail to recognize the relevance of the applicable commands, which include: "desaturate", and "channel mixer". The key insights for building QF-graphs are that: (1) queries concisely express the user's goal in the user's own words, and (2) retrieved tutorials likely include both query terms, as well as terminology from the application's interface (e.g., the names of commands). QF-graphs are generated by mining these co-occurrences across thousands of query-tutorial pairings. InterTwine: InterTwine explores interaction possibilities that arise when software applications, web search, and online support materials are directly integrated into a single productivity system. With InterTwine, actions in the web browser directly impact how information is presented in a software application, and vice versa. For example, when a user opens a web tutorial in their browser, the application's menus and tooltips are updated to highlight the commands mentioned therein. These embellishments are designed to help users orient themselves after switching between the web browser and the application. InterTwine also augments web search results to include details of past application use. Search snippets gain before and after pictures and other metadata detailing how the user's personal work document evolved the last time they visited the page. This feature was motivated by the observation that existing mechanisms (e.g., highlighting visited links) are often insufficient for recalling which resources were previously helpful vs. unhelpful for accomplishing a task. Finally, the dissertation concludes with a discussion of the advantages, limitations and challenges of this research, and presents an outline for future work

Temporary Territories and Persistent Places: A Bioarchaeological Evaluation of the Association between Monumentality and Territoriality for Foraging Societies of the Prehistoric Ohio Valley

abstract: Federal legislation prioritizes the repatriation of culturally unidentifiable human remains to federally-recognized Indian tribes that are linked geographically to the region from which the remains were removed. Such linkages are typically based on a Eurocentric notion of the exclusive use and occupancy of an area of land - a space-based approach to land use. Contemporary collaborations between anthropologists and indigenous communities suggest, however, that indigenous patterns of land use are better characterized as place-based and are therefore more complex and fluid than is reflected in current legislation. Despite these insights, space-based approaches remain common within archaeology. One example is the inference of territorial behavior from the presence of monuments within the archaeological record. Drawing on osteological and mortuary data derived from a sample of Adena mounds located in northern Kentucky, this dissertation adopts a place-based approach in order to evaluate the archaeological association between monumentality and territoriality. The relative amounts of skeletal and phenotypic variability present at various spatial scales are quantified and compared and the degree to which mortuary and phenotypic data exhibit spatial structure consistent with the expectations of an isolation-by-distance model is assessed. Results indicate that, while burial samples derived from some mounds exhibit amounts of phenotypic variability that are consistent with the expectations of a territorial model, data from other mounds suggest that multiple groups participated in their construction. Further, the general absence of spatial structure within the phenotypic data suggests that the individuals interred in these mounds are perhaps better characterized as representing an integrated regional population rather than localized groups. Untested archaeological inferences of territoriality may therefore mischaracterize regional population dynamics. In addition, these results suggest that the prioritization criteria for the repatriation of culturally unidentifiable human remains may merit revision.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Anthropology 201

Drawing out interaction: Lines around shared space.

PhdDespite advances in image, video, and motion capture technologies, human interactions are frequently represented as line drawings. Intuitively, drawings provide a useful way of filtering complex, dynamic sequences to produce concise representations of interaction. They also make it possible to represent phenomena such as topic spaces, that do not have a concrete physical manifestation. However, the processes involved in producing these drawings, the advantages and limitations of line drawings as representations, and the implications of drawing as an analytic method have not previously been investigated. This thesis explores the use of drawings to represent human interaction and is informed by the prior experience and abilities of the investigator as a practising visual artist. It begins by discussing the drawing process and how it has been used to capture human activities. Key drawing techniques are identified and tested against an excerpt from an interaction between architects. A series of new drawings are constructed to depict one scene from this interaction, highlighting the contrasts between each drawing technique and their impact on the way shared spaces are represented. A second series of original drawings are produced exploring new ways of representing these spaces, leading to a proposal for a field-based approach that combines gesture paths, fields, and human figures to create a richer analytic representation. A protocol for using this approach to analyse video in practice is developed and evaluated though a sequence of three participatory workshops for researchers in human interaction. The results suggest that the field based process of drawing facilitates the production of spatially enriched graphical representations of qualitative spaces. The thesis concludes that the use of drawing to explore non-metric approaches to shared interactional space, has implications for research in human interaction, interaction design, clinical psychology, anthropology, and discourse analysis, and will find form in new new approaches to contemporary artistic practice.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)

The Development of a Semantic Model for the Interpretation of Mathematics including the use of Technology

The semantic model developed in this research was in response to the difficulty a group of mathematics learners had with conventional mathematical language and their interpretation of mathematical constructs. In order to develop the model ideas from linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, formal languages and natural language processing were investigated. This investigation led to the identification of four main processes: the parsing process, syntactic processing, semantic processing and conceptual processing. The model showed the complex interdependency between these four processes and provided a theoretical framework in which the behaviour of the mathematics learner could be analysed. The model was then extended to include the use of technological artefacts into the learning process. To facilitate this aspect of the research, the theory of instrumentation was incorporated into the semantic model. The conclusion of this research was that although the cognitive processes were interdependent, they could develop at different rates until mastery of a topic was achieved. It also found that the introduction of a technological artefact into the learning environment introduced another layer of complexity, both in terms of the learning process and the underlying relationship between the four cognitive processes

Challenges in using cryptography - End-user and developer perspectives

"Encryption is hard for everyone" is a prominent result of the security and privacy research to date. Email users struggle to encrypt their email, and institutions fail to roll out secure communication via email. Messaging users fail to understand through which most secure channel to send their most sensitive messages, and developers struggle with implementing cryptography securely. To better understand how to support actors along the pipeline of developing, implementing, deploying, and using cryptography effectively, I leverage the human factor to understand their challenges and needs, as well as opportunities for support. To support research in better understanding developers, I created a tool to remotely conduct developer studies, specifically with the goal of better understanding the implementation of cryptography. The tool was successfully used for several published developers studies. To understand the institutional rollout of cryptography, I analyzed the email history of the past 27 years at Leibniz University Hannover and measured the usage of email encryption, finding that email encryption and signing is hardly used even in an institution with its own certificate authority. Furthermore, the usage of multiple email clients posed a significant challenge for users when using S/MIME and PGP. To better understand and support end users, I conducted several studies with different text disclosures, icons, and animations to find out if users can be convinced to communicate via their secure messengers instead of switching to insecure alternatives. I found that users notice texts and animations, but their security perception did not change much between texts and visuals, as long as any information about encryption is shown. In this dissertation, I investigated how to support researchers in conducting research with developers; I established that usability is one of the major factors in allowing developers to implement the functions of cryptographic libraries securely; I conducted the first large scale analysis of encrypted email, finding that, again, usability challenges can hamper adoption; finally, I established that the encryption of a channel can be effectively communicated to end users. In order to roll out secure use of cryptography to the masses, adoption needs to be usable on many levels. Developers need to be able to securely implement cryptography, and user communication needs to be either encrypted by default, and users need to be able to easily understand which communication' encryption protects them from whom. I hope that, with this dissertation, I show that, with supporting humans along the pipeline of cryptography, better security can be achieved for all

Approved Mental Health Professionals and Mental Health Act Assessments: A Study of Power, Structures, Communication and (Shared?) Decision-Making

Approved Mental Health Professionals (AMHPs) undertake Mental Health Act (MHA) assessments and have overall responsibility for deciding to detain, or indeed to not detain, an individual in hospital without their consent. They are required by law to act autonomously and make independent decisions, free from the influence of others, whilst working in complex and changing systems. Outcomes of MHA assessments are understood to be inconsistent, variable and influenced by many factors and, further, the MHA is known to disproportionately affect some groups or to indirectly discriminate (DoH, 2015b; DHSC, 2018). Within psychiatry, any focus on power has generally been on the overt, structural or ‘macro’ aspects of control and coercion rather than the more subtle forms of manipulation at the ‘micro’, individual level of negotiated decisions. Yet AMHPs are required to embed the statutory guiding principle of ‘Empowerment and Involvement’ (DoH, 2015a) into their practice whereby service users should be ‘fully involved in decisions about care, support and treatment’ (para.1.8) and little is known about this in practice. The forthcoming reforms to the MHA are understood to have the new set of guiding principles on the face of the MHA (not just within guidance) and the new ‘Choice and Autonomy’ principle speaks of a ‘move to mandatory recording of shared decision-making’ in order to improve outcomes, acknowledging that culture change is required to ensure that it becomes routine practice (DHSC, 2018 p.36). Yet if MHA assessments are to be a place for shared decision-making (SDM), more needs to be understood about effective techniques and aspects of communication and involvement. This, along with the many variables influencing AMHPs’ practice and decision-making has, to date, attracted very little research. This study was conducted with AMHPs and service users from one Local Authority area in England. A qualitative methodology was employed, within a social constructionist paradigm, to gather in-depth information about AMHPs’ experiences and perspectives and to consider the impact of the surrounding imperatives on their practice in general, and on their decision-making more specifically. An ethnographical study was undertaken within an AMHP service where a variety of different AMHP team structures provided an opportunity to consider their respective influences on practice. This was followed by observations and audio-recording of MHA assessments. Conversation Analysis was used to analyse aspects of the content and style of communication within interactions, with particular regard to power relations and the extent to which Empowerment and Involvement and SDM is (or is not) enabled in MHA assessments. AMHPs and people with lived experience were interviewed and a thematic analysis of the data was undertaken. As the study was adversely impacted by the global COVID pandemic, the research was augmented with a reinterrogation and thematic analysis of findings from a national research project with similar research questions, led by myself, focusing on people with lived experience of MHA assessment and detention (a further under-researched area). The study addresses both a research gap and a gap between policy aspirations and current practice. Findings offer a refined understanding of the influences on AMHP practice and decision-making and specific ways to enhance involvement with people with lived experience to improve subjective outcomes. This study is original in its combination of qualitative methods using Conversation Analysis to study the in-situ dynamics of the MHA assessment process. Different AMHPs both perceive and apply their power and authority in different ways and perceive the empowerment and involvement aspects of the role to be enacted in different ways, leading to an inconsistency in both objective and subjective outcomes