Space Station Human Factors Research Review. Volume 4: Inhouse Advanced Development and Research

A variety of human factors studies related to space station design are presented. Subjects include proximity operations and window design, spatial perceptual issues regarding displays, image management, workload research, spatial cognition, virtual interface, fault diagnosis in orbital refueling, and error tolerance and procedure aids

Scientific, Legal, and Ethical Concerns About AI-Based Personnel Selection Tools: A Call to Action

Organizations are increasingly turning toward personnel selection tools that rely on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and machine learning algorithms that, together, intend to predict the future success of employees better than traditional tools. These new forms of assessment include online games, video-based interviews, and big data pulled from many sources, including test responses, test-taking behavior, applications, resumes, and social media. Speedy processing, lower costs, convenient access, and applicant engagement are often and rightfully cited as the practical advantages for using these selection tools. At the same time, however, these tools raise serious concerns about their effectiveness in terms of their conceptual relevance to the job, their basis in a job analysis to ensure job relevancy, their measurement characteristics (reliability and stability), their validity in predicting employee-relevant outcomes, their evidence and normative information being updated appropriately, and the associated ethical concerns around what information is being represented to employers and told to job candidates. This paper explores these concerns, concluding with an urgent call to industrial and organizational psychologists to extend existing professional standards for employment testing to these new AI and machine learning based forms of testing, including standards and requirements for their documentation

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN JUSTICE PERCEPTIONS, CONSCIENTIOUSNESS AND WORKPLACE BEHAVIORS AMONG OLD AND YOUNG EMPLOYEES

This research addressed the influence employee age has on organizational justice perceptions (OJPs) and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) through conscientiousness. Given the valuable contributions of older employees in the workforce, the aim of this study was to investigate the processes by which age affects justice perceptions, the expression of conscientiousness traits, and workplace behaviors. Additionally, a theoretical framework was provided where the conservation of resource, equity, fairness, socioemotional selectivity, and conscientiousness at work theorieshelp explain the linkages from the integrative model. A total of 179 MTurk workers participated in this study, which required participants to answer questions about their workplace perceptions and behaviors. The primary scales used in this study measuring OJPs, conscientiousness, and OCBs were obtained from previous studies that found these measures to be reliable and valid. Using those scales, three main hypotheses were tested: Hypothesis 1 predicted age would moderate the relationship between OJPs and OCBs; Hypotheses 2 predicted conscientiousness would mediate the relationship between OJPs and OCBs; and Hypothesis 3 predicted employee age (moderating variable) would interact with justice perceptions (independent variable) and predict organizational citizenship behaviors (dependent variable), through conscientiousness (mediating variable). Results suggested that age does not moderate the relationship between OJPs and OCBs; however, conscientiousness mediates the relationship between OJPs and OCBs; and employee age only moderates the mediating effects of conscientiousness in the relationship between distributive justice perceptions and OCBs. Overall, this research provides preliminary findings to a model that had never been researched before, provides theoretical and practical implications, as well as directions for future research

An Event-based Analysis Framework for Open Source Software Development Projects

The increasing popularity and success of Open Source Software (OSS) development projects has drawn significant attention of academics and open source participants over the last two decades. As one of the key areas in OSS research, assessing and predicting OSS performance is of great value to both OSS communities and organizations who are interested in investing in OSS projects. Most existing research, however, has considered OSS project performance as the outcome of static cross-sectional factors such as number of developers, project activity level, and license choice. While variance studies can identify some predictors of project outcomes, they tend to neglect the actual process of development. Without a closer examination of how events occur, an understanding of OSS projects is incomplete. This dissertation aims to combine both process and variance strategy, to investigate how OSS projects change over time through their development processes; and to explore how these changes affect project performance. I design, instantiate, and evaluate a framework and an artifact, EventMiner, to analyze OSS projects’ evolution through development activities. This framework integrates concepts from various theories such as distributed cognition (DCog) and complexity theory, applying data mining techniques such as decision trees, motif analysis, and hidden Markov modeling to automatically analyze and interpret the trace data of 103 OSS projects from an open source repository. The results support the construction of process theories on OSS development. The study contributes to literature in DCog, design routines, OSS development, and OSS performance. The resulting framework allows OSS researchers who are interested in OSS development processes to share and reuse data and data analysis processes in an open-source manner

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

Eine mikrosimulationsbasierte Methode zur Beurteilung der Leistungsfähigkeit von Shared Space

Shared space is a concept of urban street design which implies the creation of a level surface within the whole road reserve and is aimed at encouraging different road users to interact spontaneously and to negotiate priority with each other. To build successful shared spaces, traffic engineers can rely at present on specific guidelines as well as technical reports. Nevertheless, there is no method available to compute the performance of shared spaces in terms of Level Of Service (LOS). In order to address this gap, a new indicator of traffic quality for pedestrians is being developed. This measure of performance considers aspects of comfort related to the crossing, which pedestrians use to go from one side of the roadway to the other. During this movement, discomfort is generated by the necessity to solve the conflicts with vehicles. Therefore, factors which potentially influence comfort are mathematically formulated. Later, the performance indicator can be calibrated on the basis of the opinion of a group of respondents, who evaluated real-world crossing movements in video sequences. The effectiveness and usability of the developed indicator is demonstrated in an exemplary case study. A shared street in the district of Bergedorf, Hamburg (D) is selected and filmed. To reproduce the interaction of road users and the mechanism of space negotiation, an innovative modeling approach based on social force model (SFM) is proposed. The model is calibrated and implemented in a Java-based simulation tool. Alternative shared space scenarios, as well as conventional ones with space segregation, are simulated. The goal of this dissertation is to establish a method to evaluate the performances of shared spaces through traffic microsimulation. This method includes the data survey and acquisition, the definition of performance indicators, the development of a microsimulation approach, the calibration of the motion model on the basis of real-world data and finally the execution of simulations to collect the results. In addition, this work shows the necessity to employ a comfort-based indicator for pedestrian traffic quality in shared spaces. The benefits of this approach, with respect to conventional efficiency-based indicators as time delay, is properly shown in real-world situations and successively demonstrated by help of statistical methods.Shared Space ist ein Konzept der urbanen Straßengestaltung, das die Schaffung von niveaugleichen Zonen im gesamten Straßenquerschnitt beinhaltet, und darauf abzielt, die verschiedenen Verkehrsteilnehmer zu ermutigen, spontan zu interagieren und den Vorrang untereinander auszuhandeln. Um erfolgreiche Shared Spaces zu gestalten, können sich Ingenieure derzeit auf spezifische Richtlinien, sowie auf technische Berichte stützen. Dennoch gibt es keine Methode, um die Qualität des Shared Space im Hinblick auf den Level of Service (LOS) zu kalkulieren. Daher wird ein neuer Verkehrsqualitätsindikator für Fußgänger entwickelt. Diese Erfolgsmessgröße berücksichtigt Komfortaspekte hinsichtlich der von Fußgängern zur Querung der Straßen benutzten Übergänge. Während der Überquerung wird durch das Aushandeln des Vorrangs mit den Fahrzeugen ein Unbehagen erzeugt. Daher werden potentiell komfortbeeinflussende Faktoren mathematisch formuliert. Später kann der Leistungsindikator auf Basis der Ansicht einer Umfragegruppe, die reale Straßenüberquerungen in Videosequenzen auswertet, kalibriert werden. Die Effektivität und Tauglichkeit des entwickelten Indikators wird in einer exemplarischen Fallstudie im Hamburger Bezirk Bergedorf demonstriert. Hierzu wird der dortige Shared Space gefilmt. Um die Interaktion von Verkehrsteilnehmern und die Wirkungsweise der Verkehrsraumaushandlung nachzustellen, wird ein innovativer Modellierungsansatz, der auf dem sozialen Kräftemodell basiert, empfohlen. Das Modell wird in einem Java-basierten Simulationstool kalibriert und implementiert. Verschiedene Shared Space Arten und konventionelle Szenarien mit Raumtrennung werden simuliert. Das Ziel dieser Dissertation ist es, ein Verfahren zur Auswertung der Performances von Shared Spaces durch Verkehrsmikrosimulation zu entwickeln. Dieses Verfahren beinhaltet die Datenerhebung und –erfassung, die Definition der Leistungsindikatoren, die Entwicklung eines Mikrosimulationsansatzes und die Kalibrierung des Bewegungsmodells auf Basis realer Daten. Zudem werden Simulationen durchgeführt, um Ergebnisse zu sammeln. Des Weiteren zeigt diese Arbeit die Notwendigkeit, einen komfortbasierten Indikator für die Verkehrsqualität der Fußgänger in Shared Spaces zu verwenden. Die Vorteile dieses Ansatzes, gegenüber konventionellen, effizienzbasierten Indikatoren wie z.B. Zeitverzögerungen, werden entsprechend in praxistauglichen Situationen dargestellt und sukzessiv mittels statistischer Verfahren veranschaulicht

Critical thinking skills in college students in Mexico: a mixed methods approach

2019 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.Mexico recently adopted Critical Thinking Skills (CTS) as one of its primary goals in higher education. From now on, institutions are required by Mexican legislation to foster CTS in college students. This condition has brought concerns among scholars and practitioners, who still debate about the meaning of CTS, regarding to the way to bridge this legislation to actual CTS. Mainly, due to the lack of empirical research studying the factors leading Mexican college students to develop CTS. This Mixed Methods study analyzed student-related variables (gender, age, GPA, parental education, enrollment status, and degree aspirations) that may be influential factors predicting CTS in college students, according to the current body of literature conducted in other populations. It also studied the effect of academic engagement and the association with critical thinking skills due to its emerging relevance in higher education literature. Moreover, it explored student perception regarding the academic experiences they had in college to better understanding of how perceptions may have contributed to developing CTS over college experience. Statistical analyses indicated only GPA and parental education as effective predictors of CTS in college student in Mexico. These variables were able to explain only 9% of the variance of the CTS. The qualitative analysis suggests low academic rigor, teacher-centered teaching, and teaching absence in classes are constraining CTS gains in college students

Leveraging facebook’s open graph to develop an environmental persuasive application

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaSocial networking sites persuade millions of users each day to adopt specific behaviors. Using the persuasive principles inherent to these sites to increase environmental awareness and reduce our ecological footprint can be challenging but certainly worthy. The DEAP project has already invested time and resources to address persuasion through different devices for a broad audience. However, there are still many obstacles when it comes to such a delicate subject as people’s routines. For many years, social factors have prevented people from adopting a way of living friendlier to our Environment. Whether it is due to lack of proper knowledge about this topic or simply because they are not willing to change, the truth is that we are eventually reaching a point where it will be too late to keep our planet as we know it. Consequently, the time has arrived when there is great need for a platform to bring existing efforts together no matter where they come from but the goal they share: change incorrect behaviors towards environmental sustainability. Towards this ambitious goal a board game was developed and integrated in Facebook capable of merging third-party applications and an important and valuable basis for future research in the field of persuasion