1,160 research outputs found
Bridging the Gap: An Exploration of Visual Design Criteria Found in the "Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005" (AODA)
Information and communication technology such as World Wide Web have gradually become implanted in every aspect of individuals life such as education and training, employment, government, health care, and more. Web provides valuable resources and information for web users including people with disabilities and help them tackle several tasks that would otherwise need much more effort to be done. Accordingly, web accessibility creates a guideline with the aim of making the content of each web page available for a wider range of people with disability, has reached a new level of importance. For this importance, the government of Ontario passed a law titled the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), 2005, in which all internet and digital services must comply with accessibility guideline by 2025.
Several researchers show a gap between professional design work and technically driven accessibility design guidelines. One of the reasons for this gap is an absence of concern for visual design during the process of implementing accessibility guidelines. The aim of this paper is to bridge the existing gap between accessibility and visual design to improve the overall usability and functionality of the system. In order to achieve this, I first identify and explain the visual design related criteria of AODA guidelines, their requirements and their impact on accessibility design. Then I demonstrate my experiment with utilizing visual design elements through the implementation of visual design principles on two selected websites to create an accessible web page that is not only usable but also has an aesthetically appealing interface
Human Factors in Agile Software Development
Through our four years experiments on students' Scrum based agile software
development (ASD) process, we have gained deep understanding into the human
factors of agile methodology. We designed an agile project management tool -
the HASE collaboration development platform to support more than 400 students
self-organized into 80 teams to practice ASD. In this thesis, Based on our
experiments, simulations and analysis, we contributed a series of solutions and
insights in this researches, including 1) a Goal Net based method to enhance
goal and requirement management for ASD process, 2) a novel Simple Multi-Agent
Real-Time (SMART) approach to enhance intelligent task allocation for ASD
process, 3) a Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) based method to enhance emotion and
morale management for ASD process, 4) the first large scale in-depth empirical
insights on human factors in ASD process which have not yet been well studied
by existing research, and 5) the first to identify ASD process as a
human-computation system that exploit human efforts to perform tasks that
computers are not good at solving. On the other hand, computers can assist
human decision making in the ASD process.Comment: Book Draf
Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructures 2nd Volume
The second volume of the book contains the manuscripts that were accepted for publication in the MDPI Special Topic "Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure" after a rigorous peer-review process. Authors from academia, government and industry contributed their innovative solutions, consistent with the interdisciplinary nature of cybersecurity. The book contains 16 articles, including an editorial that explains the current challenges, innovative solutions and real-world experiences that include critical infrastructure and 15 original papers that present state-of-the-art innovative solutions to attacks on critical systems
Supervising the giants of the seas
Rolls-Royce has embarked on a journey to develop unmanned surface vessels (USV) which will eventually revolutionize the way in which cargo will be transported worldwide. The USVs, while slower, will make up for the lack of speed with a reduction in crew-related costs. Additionally, being slower, they produce fewer emissions and require less fuel.
This thesis will be exploring a way in which multiple USVs can be supervised from a centralized location. A shipping company or any other instance that owns and operates a fleet of USVs in the future will need tools to keep the fleet under surveillance and control. This thesis does not go to explore the possible ways, in which the USVs can be remotely controlled.
A key factor that was identified during this thesis, was the portrayal of the situational awareness and status of multiple unmanned vessels. The goal of this thesis was to develop a user interface that would enable the remote operators to follow the fleet and address the situations where the automation cannot act on its own.
For this thesis, teachers of maritime navigation and flight control were interviewed together with technical experts and people who are working on building the system that will allow the USVs to be remotely operated and supervised.
This thesis aims to open up the field for the designing of a true centralized supervisory system user interface for unmanned surface vessels and to recognize some key of the possible key features.Rolls-Royce on matkalla, jonka tuloksena pyritään luomaan miehittämättömiä aluksia. Nuo miehittämättömät alukset tulevat mullistamaan tavan, jolla kuljetukset hoidetaan maailmanlaajuisesti. Vaikka miehittämättömät alukset kulkevat hitaammin, korvaavat ne nopeuden puutteen olemattomilla miehistökustannuksilla. Hitaampi vauhti takaa myös pienemmät päästöt.
Tämä opinnäytetyö etsii tapaa, jolla useampia miehittämättömiä aluksia pystytään valvomaan keskitetysti ja yhdestä paikasta. Kuljetusyhtiö, tai mikä muu tahansa taho, joka omistaa useampia miehittämättömiä aluksia tulee tarvitsemaan keinoja näiden alusten valvontaan ja hallintaan. Tämä opinnäytetyö ei tule etsimään tapoja, joilla miehittämättömiä aluksia liikutetaan etäyhteydellä.
Tässä opinnäytetyössä tunnistetaan tärkeäksi tekijäksi useamman miehittämättömän aluksen tilanteen ja tilannekuvan välittäminen käyttöliittymällä. Opinnäytetyön tavoitteena on luoda käyttöliittymä, jolla etäohjauskeskuksessa työskentelevät voivat seurata laivaston tilannetta ja puuttua tilanteisiin, joita automaatio ei kykene selvittämään. Tätä opinnäytetyötä varten haastateltiin merenkäynnin opettajia, lennonjohdon opettajia, ja etäohjausjärjestelmää visioivia teknisiä asiantuntijoita.
Tämä opinnäytetyö pyrkii tekemään avauksen keskitetyn valvontajärjestelmän käyttöliittymän suunnitteluun miehittämättömien alusten laivastotasolla ja tunnistamaan tärkeimpiä tekijöitä suunnittelussa
End-user composition of interactive applications through actionable UI components
Developing interactive systems to access and manipulate data is a very tough task. In particular, the development of user interfaces (UIs) is one of the most time-consuming activities in the software lifecycle. This is even more demanding when data have to be retrieved by accessing flexibly different online resources. Indeed, software development is moving more and more toward composite applications that aggregate on the fly specific Web services and APIs. In this article, we present a mashup model that describes the integration, at the presentation layer, of UI components. The goal is to allow non-technical end users to visualize and manipulate (i.e., to perform actions on) the data displayed by the components, which thus become actionable UI components. This article shows how the model has guided the development of a mashup platform through which non-technical end users can create component-based interactive workspaces via the aggregation and manipulation of data fetched from distributed online resources. Due to the abundance of online data sources, facilitating the creation of such interactive workspaces is a very relevant need that emerges in different contexts. A utilization study has been performed in order to assess the benefits of the proposed model and of the Actionable UI Components; participants were required to perform real tasks using the mashup platform. The study results are reported and discussed
A Semantics-Rich Information Technology Architecture for Smart Buildings
The design of smart homes, buildings and environments currently suffers from a low maturity of available methodologies and tools. Technologies, devices and protocols strongly bias the design process towards vertical integration, and more flexible solutions based on separation of design concerns are seldom applied. As a result, the current landscape of smart environments is mostly populated by defectively designed solutions where application requirements (e.g., end-user functionality) are too often mixed and intertwined with technical requirements (e.g., managing the network of devices). A mature and effective design process must, instead, rely on a clear separation between the application layer and the underlying enabling technologies, to enable effective design reuse. The role of smart gateways is to enable this separation of concerns and to provide an abstracted view of available automation technology to higher software layers.
This paper presents a blueprint for the information technology (IT) architecture of smart buildings that builds on top of established software engineering practices, such as model-driven development and semantic representation, and that avoids many pitfalls inherent in legacy approaches. The paper will also present a representative use case where the approach has been applied and the corresponding modeling and software tools
CPPS-3D: a methodology to support cyber physical production systems design, development and deployment
Master’s dissertation in Production EngineeringCyber-Physical Production Systems are widely recognized as the key to unlock the full potential benefits of the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Cyber-Physical Production Systems Design, Development and Deployment methodology is a systematic approach in assessing necessities, identifying gaps and then designing, developing and deploying solutions to fill such gaps. It aims to support and drive enterprise’s evolution to the new working environment promoted by the availability of Industry 4.0 paradigms and technologies while challenged by the need to increment a continuous improvement culture. The proposed methodology considers the different dimensions within enterprises related with their levels of organization, competencies and technology. It is a two-phased sequentially-stepped process to enable discussion, reflection/reasoning, decision-making and action-taking towards evolution. The first phase assesses an enterprise across its Organizational, Technological and Human dimensions. The second phase establishes sequential tasks to successfully deploy solutions. Is was applied to a production section at a Portuguese enterprise with the development of a new visual management system to enable shop floor management. This development is presented as an example of Industry 4.0 technology and it promotes a faster decision-making, better production management, improved data availability as well as fosters more dynamic workplaces with enhanced reactivity to problems
- …