I Probe, Therefore I Am: Designing a Virtual Journalist with Human Emotions

By utilizing different communication channels, such as verbal language, gestures or facial expressions, virtually embodied interactive humans hold a unique potential to bridge the gap between human-computer interaction and actual interhuman communication. The use of virtual humans is consequently becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of areas where such a natural communication might be beneficial, including entertainment, education, mental health research and beyond. Behind this development lies a series of technological advances in a multitude of disciplines, most notably natural language processing, computer vision, and speech synthesis. In this paper we discuss a Virtual Human Journalist, a project employing a number of novel solutions from these disciplines with the goal to demonstrate their viability by producing a humanoid conversational agent capable of naturally eliciting and reacting to information from a human user. A set of qualitative and quantitative evaluation sessions demonstrated the technical feasibility of the system whilst uncovering a number of deficits in its capacity to engage users in a way that would be perceived as natural and emotionally engaging. We argue that naturalness should not always be seen as a desirable goal and suggest that deliberately suppressing the naturalness of virtual human interactions, such as by altering its personality cues, might in some cases yield more desirable results.Comment: eNTERFACE16 proceeding

Issues and techniques for collaborative music making on multi-touch surfaces

A range of systems exist for collaborative music making on multi-touch surfaces. Some of them have been highly successful, but currently there is no systematic way of designing them, to maximise collaboration for a particular user group. We are particularly interested in systems that will engage novices and experts. We designed a simple application in an initial attempt to clearly analyse some of the issues. Our application allows groups of users to express themselves in collaborative music making using pre-composed materials. User studies were video recorded and analysed using two techniques derived from Grounded Theory and Content Analysis. A questionnaire was also conducted and evaluated. Findings suggest that the application affords engaging interaction. Enhancements for collaborative music making on multi-touch surfaces are discussed. Finally, future work on the prototype is proposed to maximise engagement

Designing Robots for Care: Care Centered Value-Sensitive Design

The prospective robots in healthcare intended to be included within the conclave of the nurse-patient relationship—what I refer to as care robots—require rigorous ethical reflection to ensure their design and introduction do not impede the promotion of values and the dignity of patients at such a vulnerable and sensitive time in their lives. The ethical evaluation of care robots requires insight into the values at stake in the healthcare tradition. What’s more, given the stage of their development and lack of standards provided by the International Organization for Standardization to guide their development, ethics ought to be included into the design process of such robots. The manner in which this may be accomplished, as presented here, uses the blueprint of the Value-sensitive design approach as a means for creating a framework tailored to care contexts. Using care values as the foundational values to be integrated into a technology and using the elements in care, from the care ethics perspective, as the normative criteria, the resulting approach may be referred to as care centered value-sensitive design. The framework proposed here allows for the ethical evaluation of care robots both retrospectively and prospectively. By evaluating care robots in this way, we may ultimately ask what kind of care we, as a society, want to provide in the futur

COBRA framework to evaluate e-government services: A citizen-centric perspective

E-government services involve many stakeholders who have different objectives that can have an impact on success. Among these stakeholders, citizens are the primary stakeholders of government activities. Accordingly, their satisfaction plays an important role in e-government success. Although several models have been proposed to assess the success of e-government services through measuring users' satisfaction levels, they fail to provide a comprehensive evaluation model. This study provides an insight and critical analysis of the extant literature to identify the most critical factors and their manifested variables for user satisfaction in the provision of e-government services. The various manifested variables are then grouped into a new quantitative analysis framework consisting of four main constructs: cost; benefit; risk and opportunity (COBRA) by analogy to the well-known SWOT qualitative analysis framework. The COBRA measurement scale is developed, tested, refined and validated on a sample group of e-government service users in Turkey. A structured equation model is used to establish relationships among the identified constructs, associated variables and users' satisfaction. The results confirm that COBRA framework is a useful approach for evaluating the success of e-government services from citizens' perspective and it can be generalised to other perspectives and measurement contexts. Crown Copyright © 2014.PIAP-GA-2008-230658) from the European Union Framework Program and another grant (NPRP 09-1023-5-158) from the Qatar National Research Fund (amember of Qatar Foundation

Web 2.0 and folksonomies in a library context

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 ElsevierLibraries have a societal purpose and this role has become increasingly important as new technologies enable organizations to support, enable and enhance the participation of users in assuming an active role in the creation and communication of information. Folksonomies, a Web 2.0 technology, represent such an example. Folksonomies result from individuals freely tagging resources available to them on a computer network. In a library environment folksonomies have the potential of overcoming certain limitations of traditional classification systems such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Typical limitations of this type of classification systems include, for example, the rigidity of the underlying taxonomical structures and the difficulty of introducing change in the categories. Folksonomies represent a supporting technology to existing classification systems helping to describe library resources more flexibly, dynamically and openly. As a review of the current literature shows, the adoption of folksonomies in libraries is novel and limited research has been carried out in the area. This paper presents research into the adoption of folksonomies for a University library. A Web 2.0 system was developed, based on the requirements collected from library stakeholders, and integrated with the existing library computer system. An evaluation of the work was carried out in the form of a survey in order to understand the possible reactions of users to folksonomies as well as the effects on their behavior. The broad conclusion of this work is that folksonomies seem to have a beneficial effect on users’ involvement as active library participants as well as encourage users to browse the catalogue in more depth

SymbolDesign: A User-centered Method to Design Pen-based Interfaces and Extend the Functionality of Pointer Input Devices

A method called "SymbolDesign" is proposed that can be used to design user-centered interfaces for pen-based input devices. It can also extend the functionality of pointer input devices such as the traditional computer mouse or the Camera Mouse, a camera-based computer interface. Users can create their own interfaces by choosing single-stroke movement patterns that are convenient to draw with the selected input device and by mapping them to a desired set of commands. A pattern could be the trace of a moving finger detected with the Camera Mouse or a symbol drawn with an optical pen. The core of the SymbolDesign system is a dynamically created classifier, in the current implementation an artificial neural network. The architecture of the neural network automatically adjusts according to the complexity of the classification task. In experiments, subjects used the SymbolDesign method to design and test the interfaces they created, for example, to browse the web. The experiments demonstrated good recognition accuracy and responsiveness of the user interfaces. The method provided an easily-designed and easily-used computer input mechanism for people without physical limitations, and, with some modifications, has the potential to become a computer access tool for people with severe paralysis.National Science Foundation (IIS-0093367, IIS-0308213, IIS-0329009, EIA-0202067

A Virtual Conversational Agent for Teens with Autism: Experimental Results and Design Lessons

We present the design of an online social skills development interface for teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The interface is intended to enable private conversation practice anywhere, anytime using a web-browser. Users converse informally with a virtual agent, receiving feedback on nonverbal cues in real-time, and summary feedback. The prototype was developed in consultation with an expert UX designer, two psychologists, and a pediatrician. Using the data from 47 individuals, feedback and dialogue generation were automated using a hidden Markov model and a schema-driven dialogue manager capable of handling multi-topic conversations. We conducted a study with nine high-functioning ASD teenagers. Through a thematic analysis of post-experiment interviews, identified several key design considerations, notably: 1) Users should be fully briefed at the outset about the purpose and limitations of the system, to avoid unrealistic expectations. 2) An interface should incorporate positive acknowledgment of behavior change. 3) Realistic appearance of a virtual agent and responsiveness are important in engaging users. 4) Conversation personalization, for instance in prompting laconic users for more input and reciprocal questions, would help the teenagers engage for longer terms and increase the system's utility