Evaluating advanced search interfaces using established information-seeking model

When users have poorly defined or complex goals search interfaces offering only keyword searching facilities provide inadequate support to help them reach their information-seeking objectives. The emergence of interfaces with more advanced capabilities such as faceted browsing and result clustering can go some way to some way toward addressing such problems. The evaluation of these interfaces, however, is challenging since they generally offer diverse and versatile search environments that introduce overwhelming amounts of independent variables to user studies; choosing the interface object as the only independent variable in a study would reveal very little about why one design out-performs another. Nonetheless if we could effectively compare these interfaces we would have a way to determine which was best for a given scenario and begin to learn why. In this article we present a formative framework for the evaluation of advanced search interfaces through the quantification of the strengths and weaknesses of the interfaces in supporting user tactics and varying user conditions. This framework combines established models of users, user needs, and user behaviours to achieve this. The framework is applied to evaluate three search interfaces and demonstrates the potential value of this approach to interactive IR evaluation

GEMINI: A Generic Multi-Modal Natural Interface Framework for Videogames

In recent years videogame companies have recognized the role of player engagement as a major factor in user experience and enjoyment. This encouraged a greater investment in new types of game controllers such as the WiiMote, Rock Band instruments and the Kinect. However, the native software of these controllers was not originally designed to be used in other game applications. This work addresses this issue by building a middleware framework, which maps body poses or voice commands to actions in any game. This not only warrants a more natural and customized user-experience but it also defines an interoperable virtual controller. In this version of the framework, body poses and voice commands are respectively recognized through the Kinect's built-in cameras and microphones. The acquired data is then translated into the native interaction scheme in real time using a lightweight method based on spatial restrictions. The system is also prepared to use Nintendo's Wiimote as an auxiliary and unobtrusive gamepad for physically or verbally impractical commands. System validation was performed by analyzing the performance of certain tasks and examining user reports. Both confirmed this approach as a practical and alluring alternative to the game's native interaction scheme. In sum, this framework provides a game-controlling tool that is totally customizable and very flexible, thus expanding the market of game consumers.Comment: WorldCIST'13 Internacional Conferenc

Computational Interpersonal Communication: Communication Studies and Spoken Dialogue Systems

With the advent of spoken dialogue systems (SDS), communication can no longer be considered a human-to-human transaction. It now involves machines. These mechanisms are not just a medium through which human messages pass, but now occupy the position of the other in social interactions. But the development of robust and efficient conversational agents is not just an engineering challenge. It also depends on research in human conversational behavior. It is the thesis of this paper that communication studies is best situated to respond to this need. The paper argues: 1) that research in communication can supply the information necessary to respond to and resolve many of the open problems in SDS engineering, and 2) that the development of SDS applications can provide the discipline of communication with unique opportunities to test extant theory and verify experimental results. We call this new area of interdisciplinary collaboration “computational interpersonal communication” (CIC)

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

SciTech News Volume 71, No. 3 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor.........................3 Division News Science-Technology Division....5 Chemistry Division....................8 Conference Report, Marion E, Sparks Professional Development Award Recipient..9 Engineering Division................10 Engineering Division Award, Winners Reflect on their Conference Experience..15 Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division .....18 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction, and Design Section of the Engineering Division................20 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews...22 Advertisements IEEE..........................................

Big Tech in a Small Pond: How the Internet Economy Became So Concentrated and What Sector-Specific Regulation Can Do to Reel It In

While the early days of the internet were marked by a proliferation of new internet platforms offering different services, over time much of the sector became dominated by the handful of internet giants we know today. Discomfort with the outsized role that these enormous companies play in the daily lives of billions has driven a growing consensus that they need to be reined in, culminating in federal and state agencies launching a slew of antitrust suits against Google and Facebook in late 2020. These renewed antitrust efforts will likely be insufficient to address competitive harms in the internet economy, given the enervated state of contemporary antitrust and structural features that make internet markets prone to concentration. Rather, to promote competition in this dynamic sector, sector-specific regulation in the vein of the 1996 Telecommunications Act is necessary. The Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching Act of 2019 (“ACCESS Act”) is a promising example of sector-specific regulation. Its core policy proposals, data portability, interoperability, and delegatability, are important steps toward correcting internet markets’ structural imbalances and restoring internet users’ autonomy, privacy, and security

Emotion Recognition using Fuzzy K-Means from Oriya Speech

Communication will be intelligible when conveyed message is interpreted in right-minded. Unfortunately, the rightminded interpretation of communicated message is possible for human-human communication but it’s laborious for humanmachine communication. It is due to the inherently blending of non-verbal contents such as emotion in vocal communication which leads to difficulty in human-machine interaction. In this research paper we have performed experiment to recognize emotions like anger, sadness, astonish, fear, happiness and neutral using fuzzy K-Means algorithm from Oriya elicited speech collected from 35 Oriya speaking people aged between 22- 58 years belonging to different provinces of Orissa. We have achieved the accuracy of 65.16% in recognizing above six mentioned emotions by incorporating mean pitch, first two formants, jitter, shimmer and energy as feature vectors for this research work. Emotion recognition has many vivid applications in different domains like call centers, spoken tutoring systems, spoken dialogue research, human-robotic interfaces etc