Project Quality of Offshore Virtual Teams Engaged in Software Requirements Analysis: An Exploratory Comparative Study

The off-shore software development companies in countries such as India use a global delivery model in which initial requirement analysis phase of software projects get executed at client locations to leverage frequent and deep interaction between user and developer teams. Subsequent phases such as design, coding and testing are completed at off-shore locations. Emerging trends indicate an increasing interest in off-shoring even requirements analysis phase using computer mediated communication. We conducted an exploratory research study involving students from Management Development Institute (MDI), India and Marquette University (MU), USA to determine quality of such off-shored requirements analysis projects. Our findings suggest that project quality of teams engaged in pure off-shore mode is comparable to that of teams engaged in collocated mode. However, the effect of controls such as user project monitoring on the quality of off-shored projects needs to be studied further

A Planning Pipeline for Large Multi-Agent Missions

In complex multi-agent applications, human operators are often tasked with planning and managing large heterogeneous teams of humans and autonomous vehicles. Although the use of these autonomous vehicles broadens the scope of meaningful applications, many of their systems remain unintuitive and difficult to master for human operators whose expertise lies in the application domain and not at the platform level. Current research focuses on the development of individual capabilities necessary to plan multi-agent missions of this scope, placing little emphasis on the integration of these components in to a full pipeline. The work presented in this paper presents a complete and user-agnostic planning pipeline for large multiagent missions known as the HOLII GRAILLE. The system takes a holistic approach to mission planning by integrating capabilities in human machine interaction, flight path generation, and validation and verification. Components modules of the pipeline are explored on an individual level, as well as their integration into a whole system. Lastly, implications for future mission planning are discussed

A diversity-based approach to requirements tracing in new product development.

Production models emerged in recent times have stressed the need to face complex production contexts, characterized in particular by the rise in internal and environmental variability. In this work, a stylization of some elements concerning analysis and design of new products is given, and in particular those that involve definition and transfer phases in the development of innovative goods, where change and variability in requirements along development process are often high. This analysis has a twofold goal: first, to supply a conceptual frame for the close examination of some dynamics of requirement's integration into an artifact's design, in order to give account of their variability along development cycle; on the other side, to propose an approach based on simple similarity metrics, to be applied to linguistic descriptions of artifacts in the early phases of development process, in order to identify components in an artifact that undergo larger variability and therefore are to be paid more attention in the subsequent phases of life cycle.

Virtual Meeting Rooms: From Observation to Simulation

Virtual meeting rooms are used for simulation of real meeting behavior and can show how people behave, how they gesture, move their heads, bodies, their gaze behavior during conversations. They are used for visualising models of meeting behavior, and they can be used for the evaluation of these models. They are also used to show the effects of controlling certain parameters on the behavior and in experiments to see what the effect is on communication when various channels of information - speech, gaze, gesture, posture - are switched off or manipulated in other ways. The paper presents the various stages in the development of a virtual meeting room as well and illustrates its uses by presenting some results of experiments to see whether human judges can induce conversational roles in a virtual meeting situation when they only see the head movements of participants in the meeting

Interactive spaces for children: gesture elicitation for controlling ground mini-robots

[EN] Interactive spaces for education are emerging as a mechanism for fostering children's natural ways of learning by means of play and exploration in physical spaces. The advanced interactive modalities and devices for such environments need to be both motivating and intuitive for children. Among the wide variety of interactive mechanisms, robots have been a popular research topic in the context of educational tools due to their attractiveness for children. However, few studies have focused on how children would naturally interact and explore interactive environments with robots. While there is abundant research on full-body interaction and intuitive manipulation of robots by adults, no similar research has been done with children. This paper therefore describes a gesture elicitation study that identified the preferred gestures and body language communication used by children to control ground robots. The results of the elicitation study were used to define a gestural language that covers the different preferences of the gestures by age group and gender, with a good acceptance rate in the 6-12 age range. The study also revealed interactive spaces with robots using body gestures as motivating and promising scenarios for collaborative or remote learning activities.This work is funded by the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) and supported by the Spanish MINECO (TIN2014-60077-R). The work of Patricia Pons is supported by a national grant from the Spanish MECD (FPU13/03831). Special thanks are due to the children and teachers of the Col-legi Public Vicente Gaos for their valuable collaboration and dedication.Pons Tomás, P.; Jaén Martínez, FJ. (2020). Interactive spaces for children: gesture elicitation for controlling ground mini-robots. 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A Tool for the Automated Design and Evaluation of Habitat Interior Layouts

The objective of space habitat design is to minimize mass and system size while providing adequate space for all necessary equipment and a functional layout that supports crew health and productivity. Unfortunately, development and evaluation of interior layouts is often ignored during conceptual design because of the subjectivity and long times required using current evaluation methods (e.g., human-in-the-loop mockup tests and in-depth CAD evaluations). Early, more objective assessment could prevent expensive design changes that may increase vehicle mass and compromise functionality. This paper describes a new interior design evaluation method to enable early, structured consideration of habitat interior layouts. This interior layout evaluation method features a comprehensive list of quantifiable habitat layout evaluation criteria, automatic methods to measure these criteria from a geometry model, and application of systems engineering tools and numerical methods to construct a multi-objective value function measuring the overall habitat layout performance. In addition to a detailed description of this method, a C++/OpenGL software tool which has been developed to implement this method is also discussed. This tool leverages geometry modeling coupled with collision detection techniques to identify favorable layouts subject to multiple constraints and objectives (e.g., minimize mass, maximize contiguous habitable volume, maximize task performance, and minimize crew safety risks). Finally, a few habitat layout evaluation examples are described to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method and tool to influence habitat design