Nutrapp

Treball desenvolupat dins el marc del programa 'European Project Semester'.It is the responsibility of one group from the European Project Semester based in Vilanova i la Geltrú to work on a brief supplied by the company Nutrapp, a Spanish based country. The company offers support and guidance in the form of nutritional advice for those that seek it- this mainly being people who suffer from weight issues or have restricted diets among other things. Throughout the duration of the European Project Semester, the team work on designing and programming an application that will enable Nutrapp to prescribe advice to their clients. The initial stages of the project focus on research and learning. Several different research methods are used in the project; it was found that there are a considerable number of similar applications on the market, as a result developing something that is innovative is difficult. At the start of the programming phase, it was deliberated and finally decided that Android Studios would be the chosen tool for the project. The process of the project is clearly outlined, from details on how the project was managed, including time management charts to layout designs and prototyping. The group is inexperienced in this field, had to learn about application design and programming, all of which is included

Connectivity and Continuity: New Fronts in the Platform War

Device interconnectivity in video conferencing, telephony, texting, file sharing, and application handoff has become a critical battleground for tech giants. This panel compared approaches to device connectivity and application continuity, reviewed current solutions, and shared projections for the future of connectivity. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are predictably focusing on connectivity across devices and applications rather than across platforms. Given the scope of impact of these innovations, tech giants will be under increasing pressure to architect a world wherein devices and platforms are secondary to what users want to achieve via technology. Participants examined competing approaches to connectivity and continuity, explored emergent issues for research and practice, and discussed the social and business impacts of these technologies

Improving User Involvement Through Live Collaborative Creation

Creating an artifact - such as writing a book, developing software, or performing a piece of music - is often limited to those with domain-specific experience or training. As a consequence, effectively involving non-expert end users in such creative processes is challenging. This work explores how computational systems can facilitate collaboration, communication, and participation in the context of involving users in the process of creating artifacts while mitigating the challenges inherent to such processes. In particular, the interactive systems presented in this work support live collaborative creation, in which artifact users collaboratively participate in the artifact creation process with creators in real time. In the systems that I have created, I explored liveness, the extent to which the process of creating artifacts and the state of the artifacts are immediately and continuously perceptible, for applications such as programming, writing, music performance, and UI design. Liveness helps preserve natural expressivity, supports real-time communication, and facilitates participation in the creative process. Live collaboration is beneficial for users and creators alike: making the process of creation visible encourages users to engage in the process and better understand the final artifact. Additionally, creators can receive immediate feedback in a continuous, closed loop with users. Through these interactive systems, non-expert participants help create such artifacts as GUI prototypes, software, and musical performances. This dissertation explores three topics: (1) the challenges inherent to collaborative creation in live settings, and computational tools that address them; (2) methods for reducing the barriers of entry to live collaboration; and (3) approaches to preserving liveness in the creative process, affording creators more expressivity in making artifacts and affording users access to information traditionally only available in real-time processes. In this work, I showed that enabling collaborative, expressive, and live interactions in computational systems allow the broader population to take part in various creative practices.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145810/1/snaglee_1.pd

Supporting Computer-Mediated Collaboration through User Customized Agents

This research investigated a neglected problem - interruption of groups by agent advisory systems. The question was whether interruption by the agent advisory system was beneficial. A survey of literature in four areas is included in this dissertation. The areas surveyed were Agents, Online Help, Computer Supported Cooperative Work(CSCW) and Awareness in CSCW. Based on the review, a human subject experiment was conducted. The study investigated whether the style of agent advisory interface improved the performance of group members. There were three sets of groups, a control set that did not have advisory agents, a set that had system provided advisory agents and a set that had group customized advisory agents. The groups worked together using a CSCW application developed with GroupKit, a CSCW toolkit. The groups with group customized advisory agents used an Agent Manager application to define advisory agents that would give them advice as they worked in the CSCW application. The findings showed that the type of advisory agents did not significantly influence the performance of the groups. The groups with customized agents performed slightly better than the other groups but the difference was not statistically significant. When notified that advice was issued, groups with customized agents and groups with provided agents seldom accessed the agent's advice. General design guidelines for agent interruption have not been solved. Future work is needed to finish the job. The definitive solution may be some mixture of the three known individual design solutions

Facebook Uses, Boundary Spanning Activities, and Social Capital

The goal of this paper is to examine whether the use of Facebook in the workplace impacts on employees’ boundary spanning activities (BSA) and social capital. Two types of social capital are examined: bonding and bridging. The sample consisted of 399 full-time white-collar workers in Taiwan. A snowball sampling technique was used to recruit participants to complete an online survey. The results indicated that employees who are allowed to use Facebook in the workplace did not have a higher level of overall BSA than the non-user group. In terms of the associations between Facebook use and social capital, the Facebook user group did not have a higher level of bonding social capital than the non-user group, but they did have a higher level of bridging social capital than the non-user group. In terms of the associations between BSA and social capital, the correlation results indicated positive significant relations between BSA and bonding social capital, and between BSA and bridging social capital

Intentions behind the use of social network sites and its association with peronality, job performance and psychological well-being of employees in China and Pakistan : qualitative and quantitative approaches

Social networking sites (SNSs) are becoming our focus of attention to fulfill our basic need to associate and communicate with other beings. During the last few years, there has been a drastic increase in SNSs users and statistics represent a huge number of people and even workers who log in to SNSs at least once during their office hours. Many studies have explored the SNSs use in students, but limited literature is available that studied employees’ use of SNSs during their working hours. The present study is divided into three phases: scale development, survey, and a quasi-experiment. The first phase was scale development, in which we focused on developing a scale to measure employees’ attitude towards use of social network sites specifically intention behind the use of SNSs. Focus groups were conducted to gather the information related to employee intention to use social network sites during office hours. Based on the focus group findings, themes were generated. A scale to measure the attitudes of employees’ toward use of SNSs, specifically intentions behind the use of SNSs, was developed from two countries: China and Pakistan. Psychometric properties of the scale were established by explanatory factor analysis. In the second phase, we conducted a survey study in China and Pakistan respectively. In the surveys, we investigate the relationship among personality traits, use of social network sites and how it affects the psychological well-being and employee’s job performance. The data was collected from employees in China (n=380) and Pakistan (n=450). SEM was used to analyze the data and the results revealed positive relations between employees’ use of social network sites and performance and also showed some differences between the two country samples. In the third phase, an experimental study was conducted, in which the main focus was to decrease self-interruptions caused by SNSs among employees during office hours. To conduct the experiment, a quasi-experimental design was used to mitigate the effect of interruptions by using a mindfulness intervention. In the experiment, control and experimental groups were recruited. The results showed significant decreases in interruption and increases in mindfulness level in the experimental group. Findings from the present research would add to existing literature and bridge the gap of knowledge by highlighting employees’ attitudes towards SNSs use, specifically intentions behind the use of SNSs, during office hours. This thesis has also provided recommendations to help employers enhance their employees’ job performance through policies and training that support overall well-being while managing SNS use at work

ALIGNING SECURITY AND USABILITY OBJECTIVES FOR COMPUTER BASED INFORMATION SYSTEMS

With extensive use of information systems in day-to-day business operations, many organizations are facing challenges to develop robust computer-based information systems that are secure and widely used by the user community. In order to develop information systems that are secure and useful, understanding what stakeholders consider important and value about the security and usability is critical. Security refers to confidentiality, integrity and availability and usability refers to efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfaction. Using Value Focused Thinking approach, this research first proposes the usability objectives based on the values of system developers and users. Using the security objectives proposed by Dhillon & Torkzadeh (2006) and the usability objectives, this research proposes hierarchies with the overall/over-arching goals of security (confidentiality, integrity, availability) and/or usability (efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction). This research also analyzes a case of computer hacking and identifies which of the security and usability objectives that have not been met in that case study. The research contributions which include the usability objectives and security and usability hierarchies can be useful for theoretical as well as practical purposes

Frameworks for enhancing temporal interface behaviour through software architectural design

The work reported in this thesis is concerned with understanding aspects of temporal behaviour. A large part of the thesis is based on analytical studies of temporal properties and interface and architectural concerns. The main areas covered include: i. analysing long-term human processes and the impact of interruptions and delays ii. investigating how infrastructures can be designed to support synchronous fast pace activity iii.design of the Getting-to-Know (GtK) experimental notification server The work is motivated by the failure of many collaborative systems to effectively manage the temporal behaviour at the interface level, as they often assume that the interaction is taking place over fast, reliable local area networks. However, the Web has challenged this assumption and users are faced with frequent network-related delays. The nature of cooperative work increases the importance of timing issues. Collaborative users require both rapid feedback of their own actions and timely feedthrough of other actions. Although it may appear that software architectures are about the internals of system design and not a necessary concern for the user interface, internal details do show up at the surface in non-functional aspects, such as timing. The focus of this work is on understanding the behavioural aspects and how they are influenced by the infrastructure. The thesis has contributed to several areas of research: (a)the study of long-term work processes generated a trigger analysis technique for task decomposition in HCI (b)the analysis of architectures was later applied to investigate architectural options for mobile interfaces (c)the framework for notification servers commenced a design vocabulary in CSCW for the implementation of notification services, with the aim of improving design (d)the impedance matching framework facilitate both goal-directed feedthrough and awareness In particular, (c) and (d) have been exercised in the development of the GtK separable notification server