Creative User-Centered Visualization Design for Energy Analysts and Modelers

We enhance a user-centered design process with techniques that deliberately promote creativity to identify opportunities for the visualization of data generated by a major energy supplier. Visualization prototypes developed in this way prove effective in a situation whereby data sets are largely unknown and requirements open – enabling successful exploration of possibilities for visualization in Smart Home data analysis. The process gives rise to novel designs and design metaphors including data sculpting. It suggests: that the deliberate use of creativity techniques with data stakeholders is likely to contribute to successful, novel and effective solutions; that being explicit about creativity may contribute to designers developing creative solutions; that using creativity techniques early in the design process may result in a creative approach persisting throughout the process. The work constitutes the first systematic visualization design for a data rich source that will be increasingly important to energy suppliers and consumers as Smart Meter technology is widely deployed. It is novel in explicitly employing creativity techniques at the requirements stage of visualization design and development, paving the way for further use and study of creativity methods in visualization design

The Design of Interactive Visualizations and Analytics for Public Health Data

Public health data plays a critical role in ensuring the health of the populace. Professionals use data as they engage in efforts to improve and protect the health of communities. For the public, data influences their ability to make health-related decisions. Health literacy, which is the ability of an individual to access, understand, and apply health data, is a key determinant of health. At present, people seeking to use public health data are confronted with a myriad of challenges some of which relate to the nature and structure of the data. Interactive visualizations are a category of computational tools that can support individuals as they seek to use public health data. With interactive visualizations, individuals can access underlying data, change how data is represented, manipulate various visual elements, and in certain tools control and perform analytic tasks. That being said, currently, in public health, simple visualizations, which fail to effectively support the exploration of large sets of data, are predominantly used. The goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate the benefit of sophisticated interactive visualizations and analytics. As improperly designed visualizations can negatively impact users’ discourse with data, there is a need for frameworks to help designers think systematically about design issues. Furthermore, there is a need to demonstrate how such frameworks can be utilized. This dissertation includes a process by which designers can create health visualizations. Using this process, five novel visualizations were designed to facilitate making sense of public health data. Three studies were conducted with the visualizations. The first study explores how computational models can be used to make sense of the discourse of health on a social media platform. The second study investigates the use of instructional materials to improve visualization literacy. Visualization literacy is important because even when visualizations are designed properly, there still exists a gap between how a tool works and users’ perceptions of how the tool should work. The last study examines the efficacy of visualizations to improve health literacy. Overall then, this dissertation provides designers with a deeper understanding of how to systematically design health visualizations

Applications of Virtual Reality

Information Technology is growing rapidly. With the birth of high-resolution graphics, high-speed computing and user interaction devices Virtual Reality has emerged as a major new technology in the mid 90es, last century. Virtual Reality technology is currently used in a broad range of applications. The best known are games, movies, simulations, therapy. From a manufacturing standpoint, there are some attractive applications including training, education, collaborative work and learning. This book provides an up-to-date discussion of the current research in Virtual Reality and its applications. It describes the current Virtual Reality state-of-the-art and points out many areas where there is still work to be done. We have chosen certain areas to cover in this book, which we believe will have potential significant impact on Virtual Reality and its applications. This book provides a definitive resource for wide variety of people including academicians, designers, developers, educators, engineers, practitioners, researchers, and graduate students

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs

DHRS 2009 Proceedings of the Ninth Danish Human-Computer Interaction Research Symposium.

Since 2001 the annual Danish Human-Computer Interaction Research Symposium has been a platform for networking, and provided an opportunity to get an overview across the various parts of the Danish HCI research scene. This years symposium was held in Aarhus, Denmark on December 14, 200