ScanGAN360: a generative model of realistic scanpaths for 360 images

Understanding and modeling the dynamics of human gaze behavior in 360° environments is crucial for creating, improving, and developing emerging virtual reality applications. However, recruiting human observers and acquiring enough data to analyze their behavior when exploring virtual environments requires complex hardware and software setups, and can be time-consuming. Being able to generate virtual observers can help overcome this limitation, and thus stands as an open problem in this medium. Particularly, generative adversarial approaches could alleviate this challenge by generating a large number of scanpaths that reproduce human behavior when observing new scenes, essentially mimicking virtual observers. However, existing methods for scanpath generation do not adequately predict realistic scanpaths for 360° images. We present ScanGAN360, a new generative adversarial approach to address this problem. We propose a novel loss function based on dynamic time warping and tailor our network to the specifics of 360° images. The quality of our generated scanpaths outperforms competing approaches by a large margin, and is almost on par with the human baseline. ScanGAN360 allows fast simulation of large numbers of virtual observers, whose behavior mimics real users, enabling a better understanding of gaze behavior, facilitating experimentation, and aiding novel applications in virtual reality and beyond

Biophilic design of building façades from an Evolutionary Psychology framework

Built environments that integrate representations of the natural world into façades and interiors benefit occupant psycho-physiological well-being and behavior. However, the biophilic quality of buildings does not de-pend exclusively on “green”, but also upon “organized complexity” in their structure. In this exploratory study we compare quantitative (Visual Atten-tion Software) and qualitative approaches (self-rating scales) in the perception of biophilic design of building façades. Eight façades varying in their degree of biophilic design (High, Medium, Low, No biophilic qualities) were assessed on the Perceived Restorativeness Scale-11, on preference, and on a series of physical aesthetic attributes. The eight façades were scanned with Visual At-tention Software (VAS). These measures show many overlapping points. VAS can be considered a way to operationalize the engagement of attention in the first 3-5 seconds of gaze in exploring building design, and self-ratings assess-ments a measure of to what extent the building is perceived as restorative. Higher perceived restorativeness and preference match a higher degree of bi-ophilic design, which corresponds to a building where vegetation is integrated in an organic structure. Vegetation is not the only biophilic characteristic to be considered in biophilic design and this emerges clearly from self-ratings and VAS. Exploring organized complexity is fundamental for understanding human responses to architecture

Message and Medium: The Role of Social and Individual Factors in Using Computer Mediated Communications

The proliferation of computers and technology has resulted in increased use of computer mediated communications. However, the effective use of technology like bulletin boards and e-mail based communications can only be obtained if we understand how to enhance employee usage. Although human-computer interface has been a topic of considerable studies, most research has been done with students and under controlled conditions. In addition, field research has been limited in its inclusion of both social and individual factors that affect usage. In order to expand this research we report the results of a longitudinal study conducted within an entrepreneurial software company that used an innovative bulletin-board communication system. Our study uses employee survey data to measure social and individual factors that encompass attitudes toward the computer system. In addition, we obtained actual employee usage (copies of all postings to the bulletin board system) for the 12-month period of time following our survey. In addition to reporting the results of our study, we discuss implications of this work for other forms of computer mediated communications

Second-Level Digital Divide: Mapping Differences in People's Online Skills

Much of the existing approach to the digital divide suffers from an important limitation. It is based on a binary classification of Internet use by only considering whether someone is or is not an Internet user. To remedy this shortcoming, this project looks at the differences in people's level of skill with respect to finding information online. Findings suggest that people search for content in a myriad of ways and there is a large variance in how long people take to find various types of information online. Data are collected to see how user demographics, users' social support networks, people's experience with the medium, and their autonomy of use influence their level of user sophistication.Comment: 29th TPRC Conference, 200

Search Interfaces for Mathematicians

Access to mathematical knowledge has changed dramatically in recent years, therefore changing mathematical search practices. Our aim with this study is to scrutinize professional mathematicians' search behavior. With this understanding we want to be able to reason why mathematicians use which tool for what search problem in what phase of the search process. To gain these insights we conducted 24 repertory grid interviews with mathematically inclined people (ranging from senior professional mathematicians to non-mathematicians). From the interview data we elicited patterns for the user group "mathematicians" that can be applied when understanding design issues or creating new designs for mathematical search interfaces.Comment: conference article "CICM'14: International Conference on Computer Mathematics 2014", DML-Track: Digital Math Libraries 17 page

Automatic Repair of Real Bugs: An Experience Report on the Defects4J Dataset

Defects4J is a large, peer-reviewed, structured dataset of real-world Java bugs. Each bug in Defects4J is provided with a test suite and at least one failing test case that triggers the bug. In this paper, we report on an experiment to explore the effectiveness of automatic repair on Defects4J. The result of our experiment shows that 47 bugs of the Defects4J dataset can be automatically repaired by state-of- the-art repair. This sets a baseline for future research on automatic repair for Java. We have manually analyzed 84 different patches to assess their real correctness. In total, 9 real Java bugs can be correctly fixed with test-suite based repair. This analysis shows that test-suite based repair suffers from under-specified bugs, for which trivial and incorrect patches still pass the test suite. With respect to practical applicability, it takes in average 14.8 minutes to find a patch. The experiment was done on a scientific grid, totaling 17.6 days of computation time. All their systems and experimental results are publicly available on Github in order to facilitate future research on automatic repair

Psychological Safety and Norm Clarity in Software Engineering Teams

In the software engineering industry today, companies primarily conduct their work in teams. To increase organizational productivity, it is thus crucial to know the factors that affect team effectiveness. Two team-related concepts that have gained prominence lately are psychological safety and team norms. Still, few studies exist that explore these in a software engineering context. Therefore, with the aim of extending the knowledge of these concepts, we examined if psychological safety and team norm clarity associate positively with software developers' self-assessed team performance and job satisfaction, two important elements of effectiveness. We collected industry survey data from practitioners (N = 217) in 38 development teams working for five different organizations. The result of multiple linear regression analyses indicates that both psychological safety and team norm clarity predict team members' self-assessed performance and job satisfaction. The findings also suggest that clarity of norms is a stronger (30\% and 71\% stronger, respectively) predictor than psychological safety. This research highlights the need to examine, in more detail, the relationship between social norms and software development. The findings of this study could serve as an empirical baseline for such, future work.Comment: Submitted to CHASE'201