85 research outputs found
Proceedings of the First Annual Virginia Tech Center for Human-Computer Interaction Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Symposium
Virginia Tech's Center for Human-Computer Interaction presents the project abstracts for the REU ’06 symposium. The REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) program provides undergraduate students from various universities with the opportunity to spend eight weeks at Virginia Tech, working with our faculty and graduate students on research projects using the state-of-the-art technology and laboratories assembled here. The REU program is sponsored by a National Science Foundation grant IIS-0552732
Dialog systems and their inputs
One of the main limitations in existent domain-independent conversational agents is that the general and linguistic knowledge of these agents is limited to what the agents' developers explicitly defined. Therefore, a system which analyses user input at a deeper level of abstraction which backs its knowledge with common sense information will essentially result in a system that is capable of providing more adequate responses which in turn result in a better overall user experience. From this premise, a framework was proposed, and a working prototype was implemented upon this framework. These make use of various natural language processing tools, online and offline knowledge bases, and other information sources, to enable it to comprehend and construct relevant responses.peer-reviewe
Usability and Design of Personal Wearable and Portable Devices for Thermal Comfort
Conference paperPersonal comfort is important in the design of objects and environments. However, as comfort is a subjective experience, it is a very difficult aspect to design for. This paper presents an interrogation into the design for human thermal comfort, in particular the design of personal devices for use in shared work environments. The findings of two user studies are presented, in which wearable and portable, off-the-shelf personal heating and cooling devices were deployed in the field to explore the interaction with and use of these devices in everyday settings with the aim to uncover key aspects and requirements for the design of such devices. We found that functionality and affordances, i.e. the design for versatility, appropriation and mobility, as well as control, availability, effectiveness and efficiency of use were most important. Furthermore, individual preferences, foremost the preference for on-body versus off-body heating and cooling, and aspects related to wearable design of the devices, such as aesthetics, materiality, comfort of wear, mobility and unobtrusiveness, also need to be taken into account.This research was supported by the Media & Arts
Technology Programme at the School of Electronic
Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary
University of London, an EPSRC Centre for
Doctoral Training (EP/G03723X/1)
IFIP TC 13 Seminar: trends in HCI proceedings, March 26, 2007, Salamanca (Spain)
Actas del 13o. Seminario de la International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), celebrado en Salamanca el 26 de marzo de 2007, sobre las nuevas lÃneas de investigación en la interacción hombre-máquina, gestión del conocimiento y enseñanza por la Web
Connecting in the Kitchen:An Empirical Study of Physical Interactions while Cooking Together at Home
Recent research has explored the role technology might play in future kitchens, including virtually dining together, recipe sharing, augmented kitchen furniture, reactive cooking utensils and gestural interaction. When people come together in a kitchen to cook it is about more than just production of sustenance – it is about being together, helping each other, exchanging stories, and contributing to the gradual emergence of a shared meal. In this paper we present a digital ethnography of how people coordinate and cooperate in their kitchens when cooking together for the purpose of inspiring the design of social natural user interactions for technologies in the kitchen. The study is based on 61 YouTube videos of people cooking together analyzed using the frameworks of proxemics and F-formations. Our findings unfold and illustrate relationships between people’s spatial organization, their cooking activities and physical kitchen layouts. Based on these we discuss the kitchen as a design space and particularly the opportunities for social natural user interaction design. Author Keywords F-formations; proxemics; natural user interaction; cooking together; digital ethnography; digital kitchens; the home ACM Classification Keywords H5.3 Computer-supported cooperative wor
Butterfleye : supporting the development of accessible web applications for users with severe motor-impairment
Various accessibility standards and guidelines exist, targeting different disabilities. Nonetheless persons
suffering from Severe Motor Disabilities (SMD) are generally excluded from development efforts, mainly
because of a lack in accessibility regulations, standards and developer support. This work presents
Butterfleye, a novel developer-centric tool that facilitates the development of accessible gaze-driven web
applications for SMD users. Butterfleye relies and builds upon a widely-adopted open-source front-end
framework to incentivise frictionless developer adoption. Low cost eye-tracking devices are also examined
to lower barriers for end-user adoption. We present an open-source library developed iteratively over a series
of user-centric studies and report initial evidence of, and observations on, its effectiveness with SMD users.peer-reviewe
Designing acceptable user registration processes for e-services
User registration can have a serious impact on the success of online government services.
Different services require different levels of identity assurance, and different registration
processes are put in place to deliver them. But from the citizen’s perspective, these processes
often require a disproportionate amount of effort, which reduces users’ acceptance. Typically,
when sign-up to high-effort services is not mandatory, take-up is low; when it is compulsory, it
causes resentment, and neither is desirable. Designers of services requiring registration currently
have no way of assessing likely user acceptance at design time. We are introducing a tool that
allows system designers to identify the impact of registration processes on different groups of
users, in terms of workload and friction. Personas have been successfully applied to assist
security designers, and we extend the concept with statistical properties, and introduce the
Persona Group Calibration (PGC) exercise to calibrate the different personas for sensitivity to
specific identity-related elements.peer-reviewe
HIV Prevention in Care and Treatment Settings: Baseline Risk Behaviors among HIV Patients in Kenya, Namibia, and Tanzania.
HIV care and treatment settings provide an opportunity to reach people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV) with prevention messages and services. Population-based surveys in sub-Saharan Africa have identified HIV risk behaviors among PLHIV, yet data are limited regarding HIV risk behaviors of PLHIV in clinical care. This paper describes the baseline sociodemographic, HIV transmission risk behaviors, and clinical data of a study evaluating an HIV prevention intervention package for HIV care and treatment clinics in Africa. The study was a longitudinal group-randomized trial in 9 intervention clinics and 9 comparison clinics in Kenya, Namibia, and Tanzania (N = 3538). Baseline participants were mostly female, married, had less than a primary education, and were relatively recently diagnosed with HIV. Fifty-two percent of participants had a partner of negative or unknown status, 24% were not using condoms consistently, and 11% reported STI symptoms in the last 6 months. There were differences in demographic and HIV transmission risk variables by country, indicating the need to consider local context in designing studies and using caution when generalizing findings across African countries. Baseline data from this study indicate that participants were often engaging in HIV transmission risk behaviors, which supports the need for prevention with PLHIV (PwP). TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01256463
Giving a voice to personas in the design of e-government identity processes
Identity processes, such as enrolment and authentication, can have a negative impact on the
user’s experience. By using personas designers get a better understanding of the end-user during
the design process. Personas represent a user archetype to assist in the development of [digital]
products. However this technique involves a measure of subjective interpretation. Following a
qualitative empirical exercise we extend the persona concept to include statistical capabilities in
order to inform the decision making process through measurable and comparable feedback. This
feedback indicates how acceptable an identity mechanism is for a specific group of users. For this
purpose we propose calibrated personas, an extension of the persona design tool that
encapsulates the necessary regression coefficients which can help us predict perceived workload
and users’ willingness to complete a task given specific design decisions.peer-reviewe
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