Computers that smile: Humor in the interface

It is certainly not the case that wen we consider research on the role of human characteristics in the user interface of computers that no attention has been paid to the role of humor. However, when we compare efforts in this area with efforts and experiments that attempt to demonstrate the positive role of general emotion modelling in the user interface, then we must conclude that this attention is still low. As we all know, sometimes the computer is a source of frustration rather than a source of enjoyment. And indeed we see research projects that aim at recognizing a user’s frustration, rather than his enjoyment. However, rather than detecting frustration, and maybe reacting on it in a humorous way, we would like to prevent frustration by making interaction with a computer more natural and more enjoyable. For that reason we are working on multimodal interaction and embodied conversational agents. In the interaction with embodied conversational agents verbal and nonverbal communication are equally important. Multimodal emotion display and detection are among our advanced research issues, and investigations in the role of humor in human-computer interaction is one of them

The assessment of usability of electronic shopping: A heuristic evaluation

Today there are thousands of electronic shops accessible via the Web. Some provide user-friendly features whilst others seem not to consider usability factors at all. Yet, it is critical that the electronic shopping interface is user-friendly so as to help users to obtain their desired results. This study applied heuristic evaluation to examine the usability of current electronic shopping. In particular, it focused on four UK-based supermarkets offering electronic services: including ASDA, Iceland, Sainsbury, and Tesco. The evaluation consists of two stages: a free-flow inspection and a task-based inspection. The results indicate that the most significant and common usability problems have been found to lie within the areas of ‘User Control and Freedom’ and ‘Help and Documentation’. The findings of this study are applied to develop a set of usability guidelines to support the future design of effective interfaces for electronic shopping

Using Augmented Reality as a Medium to Assist Teaching in Higher Education

In this paper we describe the use of a high-level augmented reality (AR) interface for the construction of collaborative educational applications that can be used in practice to enhance current teaching methods. A combination of multimedia information including spatial three-dimensional models, images, textual information, video, animations and sound, can be superimposed in a student-friendly manner into the learning environment. In several case studies different learning scenarios have been carefully designed based on human-computer interaction principles so that meaningful virtual information is presented in an interactive and compelling way. Collaboration between the participants is achieved through use of a tangible AR interface that uses marker cards as well as an immersive AR environment which is based on software user interfaces (UIs) and hardware devices. The interactive AR interface has been piloted in the classroom at two UK universities in departments of Informatics and Information Science

Role-Playing Game and Learning for Young People About Sustainable Development Stakes: An Experiment in Transferring and Adapting Interdisciplinary Scientific Knowledge

The study refers to the interactions between socio-economic and natural dynamics in an island biosphere reserve by using companion modelling. This approach provides scientific results and involves interdisciplinarity. In the second phase of the study, we transferred knowledge by adapting the main research output, a role-playing game, to young people. Our goal was to introduce interactions between social and ecological systems, coastal dynamics and integrated management. Adapting the game required close collaboration between the scientists and educators in order to transform both its substance and form and to run it with an easy-to-handle ergonomic platform.Children Education, Multi-Agent Environment, Role-Playing Game

Using cognitive work analysis to explore activity allocation within military domains

Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) is frequently advocated as an approach for the analysis of complex sociotechnical systems. Much of the current CWA literature within the military domain pays particular attention to its initial phases; Work Domain Analysis and Contextual Task Analysis. Comparably, the analysis of the social and organisational constraints receives much less attention. Through the study of a helicopter Mission Planning System (MPS) software tool, this paper describes an approach for investigating the constraints affecting the distribution of work. The paper uses this model to evaluate the potential benefits of the social and organisational analysis phase within a military context. The analysis shows that, through its focus on constraints the approach provides a unique description of the factors influencing the social organisation within a complex domain. This approach appears to be compatible with existing approaches and serves as a validation of more established social analysis techniques

Embedding machine-readable proteins interactions data in scientific articles for easy access and retrieval

Extraction of protein-protein interactions data from scientific literature remains a hard, time- and resource-consuming task. This task would be greatly simplified by embedding in the source, i.e. research articles, a standardized, synthetic, machine-readable codification for protein-protein interactions data description, to make the identification and the retrieval of such very valuable information easier, faster, and more reliable than now.
We shortly discuss how this information can be easily encoded and embedded in research papers with the collaboration of authors and scientific publishers, and propose an online demonstrative tool that shows how to help and allow authors for the easy and fast conversion of such valuable biological data into an embeddable, accessible, computer-readable codification

Conversational Agents, Humorous Act Construction, and Social Intelligence

Humans use humour to ease communication problems in human-human interaction and \ud in a similar way humour can be used to solve communication problems that arise\ud with human-computer interaction. We discuss the role of embodied conversational\ud agents in human-computer interaction and we have observations on the generation\ud of humorous acts and on the appropriateness of displaying them by embodied\ud conversational agents in order to smoothen, when necessary, their interactions\ud with a human partner. The humorous acts we consider are generated spontaneously.\ud They are the product of an appraisal of the conversational situation and the\ud possibility to generate a humorous act from the elements that make up this\ud conversational situation, in particular the interaction history of the\ud conversational partners

Past, present and future of information and knowledge sharing in the construction industry: Towards semantic service-based e-construction

The paper reviews product data technology initiatives in the construction sector and provides a synthesis of related ICT industry needs. A comparison between (a) the data centric characteristics of Product Data Technology (PDT) and (b) ontology with a focus on semantics, is given, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. The paper advocates the migration from data-centric application integration to ontology-based business process support, and proposes inter-enterprise collaboration architectures and frameworks based on semantic services, underpinned by ontology-based knowledge structures. The paper discusses the main reasons behind the low industry take up of product data technology, and proposes a preliminary roadmap for the wide industry diffusion of the proposed approach. In this respect, the paper stresses the value of adopting alliance-based modes of operation

Decision-focussed resource modelling for design decision support

Resource management including resource allocation, levelling, configuration and monitoring has been recognised as critical to design decision making. It has received increasing research interests in recent years. Different definitions, models and systems have been developed and published in literature. One common issue with existing research is that the resource modelling has focussed on the information view of resources. A few acknowledged the importance of resource capability to design management, but none has addressed the evaluation analysis of resource fitness to effectively support design decisions. This paper proposes a decision-focused resource model framework that addresses the combination of resource evaluation with resource information from multiple perspectives. A resource management system constructed on the resource model framework can provide functions for design engineers to efficiently search and retrieve the best fit resources (based on the evaluation results) to meet decision requirements. Thus, the system has the potential to provide improved decision making performance compared with existing resource management systems