The effects of user-AI co-creation on UI design tasks

With the boost of GPU computation power and the developments of neural networks in the recent decade, a lot of AI technique are invented and show bright potential of improving human tasks. GAN (generative adversarial network) as one of recent AI technique has powerful ability to perform image generation tasks. Besides, many researchers are working on exploring the potentials and understand user-AI collaboration by developing prototype with the help of neural networks (such as GAN). Unlike previous works focus on simple sketch task, this work studied the user experience with UI design task to understand how AI could improve or harm the user experience within practical and complex design tasks. The findings are as follows: multiple-hint AI turned out to be more user-friendly, and it is im-portant to study and understand how AI’s presentation should be designed for user-AI col-laboration. Based on these findings and previous works, this research discussed about what factors should be taken into consideration when designing user-AI collaboration tool

Simulation of nonverbal social interaction and small groups dynamics in virtual environments

How can the behaviour of humans who interact with other humans be simulated in virtual environments? This thesis investigates the issue by proposing a number of dedicated models, computer languages, software architectures, and specifications of computational components. It relies on a large knowledge base from the social sciences, which offers concepts, descriptions, and classifications that guided the research process. The simulation of nonverbal social interaction and group dynamics in virtual environments can be divided in two main research problems: (1) an action selection problem, where autonomous agents must be made capable of deciding when, with whom, and how they interact according to individual characteristics of themselves and others; and (2) a behavioural animation problem, where, on the basis of the selected interaction, 3D characters must realistically behave in their virtual environment and communicate nonverbally with others by automatically triggering appropriate actions such as facial expressions, gestures, and postural shifts. In order to introduce the problem of action selection in social environments, a high-level architecture for social agents, based on the sociological concepts of role, norm, and value, is first discussed. A model of action selection for members of small groups, based on proactive and reactive motivational components, is then presented. This model relies on a new tagbased language called Social Identity Markup Language (SIML), allowing the rich specification of agents' social identities and relationships. A complementary model controls the simulation of interpersonal relationship development within small groups. The interactions of these two models create a complex system exhibiting emergent properties for the generation of meaningful sequences of social interactions in the temporal dimension. To address the issues related to the visualization of nonverbal interactions, results are presented of an evaluation experiment aimed at identifying the application requirements through an analysis of how real people interact nonverbally in virtual environments. Based on these results, a number of components for MPEG-4 body animation, AML — a tag-based language for the seamless integration and synchronization of facial animation, body animation, and speech — and a high-level interaction visualization service for the VHD++ platform are described. This service simulates the proxemic and kinesic aspects of nonverbal social interactions, and comprises such functionalities as parametric postures, adapters and observation behaviours, the social avoidance of collisions, intelligent approach behaviours, and the calculation of suitable interaction distances and angles

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 4: Learning, Technology, Thinking

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 4 includes papers from Learning, Technology and Thinking tracks of the conference

School district improvement through strategic planning: A case study

Strategic planning is one of the decision-making structures available to educational administrators. Given the myriad of social, educational, and economical forces impacting education and the national outcry to produce changes, urban school districts like Des Moines use strategic planning to gather and decipher information needed to make the best decisions. Failure of decision makers to utilize a structure to gain proper perspectives places the district in a posture to respond to those issues which engender the emotions of stakeholders. Without a structure, those with the loudest voices and the political prowess to achieve their special interests outcomes are more apt to be satisfied irrespective of organizational needs;This study describes the implementation of the strategic planning process used by the Des Moines Public Schools. Strategic planning in the district uniquely combines William Cook\u27s strategic planning framework and Robert Terry\u27s Human Action Model. An analysis of Cook\u27s planning definition serves as the basis for the procedures and components of the plan. Procedures includes a review of the research, selecting a central planning team to design the plan to plan. Staff development activities were designed to support the process and the components. Standard components includes, among others, a mission statement to narrow the focus of the organization with accompanying goals, objectives, and action plans to achieve desired results;Terry\u27s model focuses on the human action dimension within the organization. Its premise is that an understanding of how human action flows within an organization is a prerequisite to increasing the likelihood of successful implementation of strategic planning as well as many other educational initiatives;The research spans over a three-year period using a naturalistic orientation of inductively gathering data to discover answers to specific questions rather than attempting to verify established hypotheses. Some of the specific techniques includes participant observations, interviews, and document analysis. The findings disclose the pre-planning events, processes, district-wide goal development, and a discussion of the major outcomes of the strategic planning process for the Des Moines Public Schools

Perceptions of supervisory behaviors and supervisory needs among licensed speech-language pathology assistants

The purpose of this study was to identify supervisory behaviors that occurred and the extent to which they were perceived as necessary during supervisory interactions between licensed speech-language pathology assistants (SLPAs) and their supervising speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Surveys were mailed to the 173 licensed SLPAs in Louisiana, who were the population for this study, requesting information about the supervision received. Eighty-eight (51%) completed and returned the survey.;The survey consisted of three parts. Part I contained 29 statements that were each rated twice using a Likert-type scale. The first rating indicated the extent to which supervisory behaviors occurred and the second rating indicated the extent to which the behaviors were perceived as needed. Part II contained open-ended questions and Part III collected demographic data about the participants.;The items on Part I of the survey were grouped into three categories: instructional, interrelational and general. The instructional category contained items about technical and professional aspects of supervision, the interrelational category consisted of behaviors concerned with the interpersonal relationship between the assistant and the supervisor, and the general category included supervisory behaviors initiated by the assistants, e.g. requesting meetings with the supervisor, informing the supervisor when assistance was needed, and self-analyzing professional behavior.;Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, analysis of variance and content analysis. No significant differences were found between supervisory behaviors that occurred and those perceived as needed for the instructional and interrelational categories. General category behaviors occurred significantly more frequently than were perceived as needed. Significant differences were found on three individual items on Part I of the survey: supervisor dominance in the conference setting which occurred more than needed, and dyad communication via journal writing and email that occurred less than perceived as needed.;The content analysis supported the findings in the objective portion of the study. The majority of SLPAs (81%) reported their supervisory needs were being met. They described their supervisors as patient, knowledgeable, available, supportive, professional and open-minded. However, for some, the supervision was perceived as inadequate. For them, comments reflected a lack of supervisor patience, knowledge, availability, support, professionalism and open-mindedness

A proactive chatbot framework designed to assist students based on the PS2CLH model

Nowadays, universities are using new technologies to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of learning and to assist students to enhance their academic performance. In fact, for decades, new ways to convey the information required to teach and support students have slowly been integrated into education. This development started decades ago with the popularity of e-mails and the Web. A review of relevant literature revealed that learning requires more innovative and efficient technologies to cope with natural learning challenges, highlighting a need for more effective tools to establish the interaction between humans and machines, lecturers and students. In addition, the covid pandemic presented additional new challenges for the collaboration/interaction of lecturers and students at universities. This situation led to a great demand for such tools. Researchers have been trying to develop such tools for decades, and have made good progress, but they are still in their infancy. There has been a significant evolution in computer hardware in the last decade, leading to advances in AI machine learning and Deep Learning which have made tools such as chatbots more usable. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of the chatbot are still insufficient to meet many educational needs. According to our investigation, current chatbots are mainly based on subject knowledge and therefore assist users with answers which take no consideration of their personal circumstances, which is essential in education. This research aims to design a proactive chatbot framework to assist students. The new chatbot framework integrates students’ learning profiles and subject knowledge, making the chatbot more intelligent to improve student learning and interaction more effectively. The research consists of two main parts. The first part seeks to determine the most effective students’ learning profiles on the basis of the controllable academic factors which affect their performance. The second part develops a chatbot framework to which students’ learning profiles will be applied. Due to the different nature of these two endeavours, a hybrid methodology was used in this research. The literature on learners’ characteristics and the academic factors that affect their performance was reviewed in depth, and this formed the basis for developing a new PS2CLH (psychology, self-responsibility, sociology, communication, learning and health & wellbeing) model on which an individual’s web profile can be built. The PS2CLH model combines the perspectives of psychology, self-responsibility, sociology, communication, learning and health & wellbeing to build a student-controllable learning factor model. This study identifies the impact of students’ controllable factors on their achievement. It was found that the model was 94% accurate. In addition, this research raised participant students’ awareness of PS2CLH perspectives, which helped learners and educators to manage the factors affecting academic performance more effectively. A comprehensive investigation, including a survey, showed that the chatbot supported by AI technology performed better and more efficiently in various assistant situations, including education. However, there is still room for improvement in the effectiveness of the education chatbot. Therefore, the research proposes a new chatbot framework assistant which will integrate students’ learning profiles and develop components to improve student interaction. The new framework uses knowledge from the PS2CLH model AI - Deep Learning to build a proactive chatbot for assisting students’ learning of their academic subjects and their controllable factors that affects students’ performance. One of the principal novelties of the chatbot framework lies in the communication facilitator between student-lecturer/assistant. The proactive chatbot applies multimodality to the students’ learning process to retain their attention and explain the content in different ways using text, image, video and audio to assist the students and improve their learning experience effectively. Furthermore, the chatbot proactively suggests new controllable factors for students to work on, including related factors that influence their academic performance. Tests of the framework showed that the proactive chatbot demonstrated better question response accuracy than the current BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) chatbot and presented a more effective learning method for students

A goal-oriented user interface for personalized semantic search

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, February 2006.Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 280-288).Users have high-level goals when they browse the Web or perform searches. However, the two primary user interfaces positioned between users and the Web, Web browsers and search engines, have very little interest in users' goals. Present-day Web browsers provide only a thin interface between users and the Web, and present-day search engines rely solely on keyword matching. This thesis leverages large knowledge bases of semantic information to provide users with a goal-oriented Web browsing experience. By understanding the meaning of Web pages and search queries, this thesis demonstrates how Web browsers and search engines can proactively suggest content and services to users that are both contextually relevant and personalized. This thesis presents (1) Creo, a Programming by Example system that allows users to teach their computers how to automate interactions with their favorite Web sites by providing a single demonstration, (2) Miro, a Data Detector that matches the content of a Web page to high-level user goals, and allows users to perform semantic searches, and (3) Adeo, an application that streamlines browsing the Web on mobile devices, allowing users to complete actions with a minimal amount of input and output.(cont.) An evaluation with 34 subjects found that they were more effective at completing tasks when using these applications, and that the subjects would use these applications if they had access to them. Beyond these three user interfaces, this thesis also explores a number of underlying issues, including (1) automatically providing semantics to unstructured text, (2) building robust applications on top of messy knowledge bases, (3) leveraging surrounding context to disambiguate concepts that have multiple meanings, and (4) learning new knowledge by reading the Web.by Alexander James Faaborg.S.M

Reciprocal Teaching: An Exploration of its Effectiveness in Improving the Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension of Key Stage Two Pupils with and without English as an Additional Language

Background: The English National Curriculum identifies the acquisition of vocabulary as key to learning (DfE, 2015). Rich contexts provided by text produce robust vocabulary learning (National Reading Panel, 2000). Considering this, as well as evidence that teaching metacognition and reading comprehension are low cost and high impact approaches (Higgins, Katsipataki, Kokotsaki, Coleman, Major, & Coe, 2014), a Reciprocal Teaching intervention (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) was selected for a group of children with known vocabulary and reading comprehension difficulties. A systematic literature search indicated that little research has focused on the effectiveness of Reciprocal Teaching on vocabulary development. The current study aimed to address this gap and to explore the impact of Reciprocal Teaching on the vocabulary development and reading comprehension of monolingual pupils and children with English as an Additional Language (EAL) in the context of the English education system. Method: A purposive sample of 22 participants (aged 8-11) from two mainstream primary schools were selected by teachers according to vocabulary and reading comprehension needs. Nine pupils were monolingual and 13 spoke English as an additional language. All took part in a Reciprocal Teaching intervention, based on approaches devised by Palincsar and Brown. A convergent mixed methods design was employed; whereby quantitative data were collected pre- and post-intervention to measure vocabulary and reading comprehension. Qualitative measures were conducted post-intervention to gain participants’ perspectives. Results: Educationally significant gains were observed in vocabulary for participants who received the greatest number of Reciprocal Teaching sessions and for monolingual children overall. No improvement was observed for reading comprehension. Thematic analysis produced themes related to child engagement and Reciprocal Teaching implementation. Implications: This study contributes to the developing evidence-base regarding the effectiveness of Reciprocal Teaching in England. Implications for Educational Psychologists in facilitating implementation of interventions in schools are discussed