ECSCW 2013 Adjunct Proceedings The 13th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 21 - 25. September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus

This volume presents the adjunct proceedings of ECSCW 2013.While the proceedings published by Springer Verlag contains the core of the technical program, namely the full papers, the adjunct proceedings includes contributions on work in progress, workshops and master classes, demos and videos, the doctoral colloquium, and keynotes, thus indicating what our field may become in the future

Eye-gaze interaction techniques for use in online games and environments for users with severe physical disabilities.

Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) and Massively Multi-player On- line Games (MMOGs) are a popular, immersive genre of computer game. For some disabled users, eye-gaze offers the only input modality with the potential for sufficiently high bandwidth to support the range of time-critical interaction tasks required to play. Although, there has been much research into gaze interaction techniques for computer interaction over the past twenty years, much of this has focused on 2D desktop application control. There has been some work that investigates the use of gaze interaction as an additional input device for gaming but very little on using gaze on its own. Further, configuration of these techniques usually requires expert knowledge often beyond the capabilities of a parent, carer or support worker. The work presented in this thesis addresses these issues by the investigation of novel gaze-only interaction techniques. These are to enable at least a beginner level of game play to take place together with a means of adapting the techniques to suit an individual. To achieve this, a collection of novel gaze based interaction techniques have been evaluated through empirical studies. These have been encompassed within an extensible software architecture that has been made available for free download. Further, a metric of reliability is developed that when used as a measure within a specially designed diagnostic test, allows the interaction technique to be adapted to suit an individual. Methods of selecting interaction techniques based upon game task are also explored and a novel methodology based on expert task analysis is developed to aid selection

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Improving Priority-Awareness Of Non-Functional Requirements During Decision-Making In Self-Adaptive Systems

Self-adaptive systems (SASs) exhibit autonomous decision-making to deal with uncertainty in their operating environments. A fundamental problem with SASs is to ensure that their requirements remain satisfied as they adapt. Trade-off analysis of the non-functional re-quirements (NFRs), based on their satisfaction priorities, is a key to establishing a balance among them. Such trade-off analysis is often based on optimization techniques comprising decision analysis and utility theory. A problem with these techniques is that they use a single-scalar utility value to specify a combined priority for all the NFRs. Nevertheless, this combined priority does not give any information about the impacts of the environmental contexts on the individual priorities of NFRs. Moreover, these separate NFR priorities may change according to the runtime environmental contexts. Therefore, there is a need to have an approach that supports the runtime, autonomous reasoning with the distinct priorities of NFRs during the decision-making process. This PhD thesis addresses this problem by presenting Pri-AwaRE, a self-adaptive architecture for decision-making in SASs. The approach uses Multi-Reward Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (MR-POMDP) as a runtime specification model to support the modelling of the individual NFRs’ priorities. The MR-POMDP model also provides runtime reasoning and autonomous tuning of these separate priorities. Therefore, it underpins priority-aware decisions. The approach has been evaluated using two substantial case studies from the different networking domains. A comparison with other state-of-the-art approaches has also been carried out. The results have shown that the priority-aware decisions offered by Pri-AwaRE provide compliance with the requirements for both the case studies even under the changing environmental contexts at runtim

Emergent narrative - towards a narrative theory of virtual reality

The recent improvements and developments on Intelligent Agents (IA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 3D visualisation, coupled with an increasing desire to integrate interactivity within virtual spaces bring concerns in regard to the articulation of narratives in such environments

The directive function of the English modals

The aim of this thesis is to provide a detailed account, within a 'systemic' framework of those properties of English sentences containing modal verbs, which will allow us to make predictions about the potential directiveness of some such sentences but not others, about ambiguity of communicative function, and about certain social properties of directives. Part I develops a model suitable for describing all the relevant aspects of modalised directives. We argue that no systemic model so far proposed Is, by itself, adequate for this task. We also show that the communicative function of an utterance is to be accounted for, not at the semantic level, but in terms of discourse function. Illocutionary properties are seen as relevant to the Interpretation of discourse function from the meanings of sentences uttered in contexts. A multi-level model, based on the principles of Hudson's 'daughter dependency' grammar, is proposed. Part II provides descriptions of three areas crucial to an account of modalised directives, using the framework set up in Part I. A network and realisation rules for the discourse level are proposed, and the role of directives in discourse discussed. There follows a formalised account of the semantic properties underlying mood, and the meanings of the modals. In Part III we predict, from the semantics of mood and modalisatlon, which modalised sentences will be acceptable as directives, and which of the acceptable sentences will be classified as orders, requests and suggestions, when used directively In a given social context. We also predict that, again in a given social context, certain forms of directive will be regarded as more polite than others. The results of an informant programme designed to test these hypotheses are then presented, and found to corroborate very strongly the predictions made

Studies in the linguistic sciences. 08 (1978)

MLA international bibliography of books and articles on the modern languages and literatures (Complete edition) 0024-821