The Importance of Human Mental Workload in Web Design

The focus of this study is the introduction of the construct of Human Mental Workload (HMW) in Web design, aimed at supporting current interaction design practices. An experiment has been conducted using the original Wikipedia and Google web-interfaces, and using two slightly different versions. Three subjective psychological mental workload assessment techniques (NASA-TLX, Workload Profile and SWAT) with a well-established assessments usability tool (SUS) have been adopted. T-tests have been performed to study the statistical significance of the original and modified web-pages, in terms of workload required by typical tasks and perceived usability. Preliminary results show that, in one ideal case, increments of usability correspond to decrements of generated workload, confirming the negative impact of the structural changes on the interface. In another case, changes are significant in terms of usability but not in terms of generated workloads, thus raising research questions and underlying the importance of Human Mental Workload in Interaction Design

A decade of Portuguese research in e-government: Evolution, current standing, and ways forward

In this paper, we present an investigation of the Portuguese research on e-government. Bibliometric techniques are used to explore all the documents published by researchers affiliated to Portuguese institutions from 2005 to 2014 and listed in the Scopus® database. Research production, impact, source types, language used, subject areas, topics, scopes, methods, authors, institutions, networks, and international cooperation are analysed and discussed. We conclude that so that Portuguese research on e-government can evolve, more researchers should be involved, international cooperation should be developed, and more attention should be given to the study of the reasons behind the very good results of the country in the provision of e-government services, as measured by the international rankings. By establishing the evolution and current standing of e-government research in Portugal and exploring the ways forward, our conclusions may prove useful to e-government researchers, research managers, and research policy makers. © Copyright 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd

Analyzing tagged resources for social interests detection

National audienceThe social user is characterized by his social activity like sharing information, making relationships, etc. With the evolution of social content, the user needs more accurate information that reflects his interests. We focus on analyzing user's interests which are key elements for improving adaptation (recommendation, personalization, etc.). In this article, we are interested to overcome issues that influence the quality of adaptation in social networks, such as the accuracy of user's interests. The originality of our approach is the proposal of a new technique of user's interests detection by analyzing the accuracy of the tagging behaviour of the users in order to figure out the tags which really reflect the resources content. We focus on semi-structured data (resources), since they provide more comprehensible information. Our approach has been tested and evaluated in Delicious social database. A comparison between our approach and classical tag-based approach shows that our approach performs better

A survey of app store analysis for software engineering

App Store Analysis studies information about applications obtained from app stores. App stores provide a wealth of information derived from users that would not exist had the applications been distributed via previous software deployment methods. App Store Analysis combines this non-technical information with technical information to learn trends and behaviours within these forms of software repositories. Findings from App Store Analysis have a direct and actionable impact on the software teams that develop software for app stores, and have led to techniques for requirements engineering, release planning, software design, security and testing. This survey describes and compares the areas of research that have been explored thus far, drawing out common aspects, trends and directions future research should take to address open problems and challenges

Scene-Driven Exploration and GUI Modeling for Android Apps

Due to the competitive environment, mobile apps are usually produced under pressure with lots of complicated functionality and UI pages. Therefore, it is challenging for various roles to design, understand, test, and maintain these apps. The extracted transition graphs for apps such as ATG, WTG, and STG have a low transition coverage and coarse-grained granularity, which limits the existing methods of graphical user interface (GUI) modeling by UI exploration. To solve these problems, in this paper, we propose SceneDroid, a scene-driven exploration approach to extracting the GUI scenes dynamically by integrating a series of novel techniques including smart exploration, state fuzzing, and indirect launching strategies. We present the GUI scenes as a scene transition graph (SceneTG) to model the GUI of apps with high transition coverage and fine? grained granularity. Compared with the existing GUI modeling tools, SceneDroid has improved by 168.74% in the coverage of transition pairs and 162.42% in scene extraction. Apart from the effectiveness evaluation of SceneDroid, we also illustrate the future potential of SceneDroid as a fundamental capability to support app development, reverse engineering, and GUI regression testing

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC

Educational Technology and Related Education Conferences for June to December 2015

The 33rd edition of the conference list covers selected events that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until December 2015 are complete as dates, locations, or Internet addresses (URLs) were not available for a number of events held from January 2016 onward. In order to protect the privacy of individuals, only URLs are used in the listing as this enables readers of the list to obtain event information without submitting their e-mail addresses to anyone. A significant challenge during the assembly of this list is incomplete or conflicting information on websites and the lack of a link between conference websites from one year to the next