Recipes for replication:Applying open science principles to research software development and data collection with cognitive tasks

During the past decade, science witnessed a replication crisis where many findings of published research could not be reproduced by other researchers. Attempts to address this "replication crisis" have identified several avenues for improvement, such as making science more open. This allows for more transparency in the scientific workflow, thus reducing a researcher's degrees of freedom and enabling researchers to check each other's work more extensively. Open science is a multifaceted concept, but in practice, there seems to be a strong focus on pre-registration of research designs, open data, and open access publications. However, between the research design and data/publication, there is the phase of data collection. So far, this phase has received relatively little attention even though it is an essential part of the scientific workflow. Hence, this dissertation focuses on open data collection in the behavioral domain, with an emphasis on cognitive tasks. In modern behavioral science, cognitive task procedures are often automated by software running on a computer. Hence, the focus is on research software development and data collection with cognitive tasks, which are evaluated from the perspective of five schools of thought on open science: the democratic, infrastructure, pragmatic, measurement, and public school. I discuss how applying open science principles to research software development and behavioral data collection with cognitive tasks may address the replication crisis and may improve the quality of science in general

Virtual reality interface for the PATIO user involvement tool

Abstract. The objective of this thesis was to explore, implement, and evaluate means to improve user participation using virtual reality. Thus, two applications were implemented: a VR client for user feedback collection, and a web tool that works as a moderator creation editor. These tools offer an approach to collecting feedback about activities taking place in VR 3D spaces and combine different functionalities such as geolocated points of interest and 3D user interfaces. Through these applications, users are able to explore spaces and answer geolocated surveys in an interactive and immersive way. These two clients were developed side by side with other clients of the same user involvement tool and thus involved several iterations to achieve a good user experience. In addition, related work was studied to research about building VR experiences and interactive 3D user interfaces. The VR client was tested with real users (n = 14) where their experiences were gathered using a five-point Likert scale questionnaire and an Adjective cards selection method, while also being watched and interviewed. The study conducted for evaluation shows that the VR solution is important to users because they can be involved in research and product development even when it is not possible to be in a certain location or when an environment does not exist, or it no longer exists. However, better interaction methods in the virtual environment, as well as additional graphics performance optimization are needed for a better experience in the user involvement process

The Case Manager: Driving Medical Reasoning in a Distributed Environment for Home Patient Monitoring.

The CAPABLE project has been funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme over the years 2020-24 to support home care. A system is being designed and implemented supporting remote monitoring and virtual coaching for cancer patients. The system is based on a distributed modular architecture involving many components encapsulating various knowledge. The Case Manager has been designed as a separate component with the aim of coordinating the problem solving strategies. A first version of the Case Manager has been released and used by the components in a prototypical scenario shown at the first project review

Proceedings of CELLmicrocosmos neXt 2014

Sommer B, ed. Proceedings of CELLmicrocosmos neXt 2014. Bielefeld: Bielefeld University; 2014.A primary vision of Integrative Bioinformatics is the creation of a virtual cell. Cell Modeling and Visualization is an immense interdisciplinary task, bridging the gap between Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Design, and Informatics. For this purpose, in the context of the German Conference of Bioinformatics (28.09. - 01.10.2014), the first CELLmicrocosmos neXt workshop has taken place in Bielefeld University at the 28.09.2014. During this event, 10 years of the CELLmicrocosmos project were celebrated by presenting CELLmicrocosmos X and an additional hands-on workshop session. To evaluate the potential of cell visualization and the prospects for future collaborations, seven talks were presented at the CELLmicrocosmos neXt workshop. In addition, two chapters were added here discussing some current and future work on the CELLmicrocosmos project. Each of the extended abstracts contains a maximum of two pages