A Visual Analytic Environment to Co-locate Peoples' Tweets with City Factual Data

Social Media platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc.) are used heavily by public to provide news, opinions, and reactions towards events or topics. Integrating such data with the event or topic factual data could provide a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying event or topic. Targeting this, we present our visual analytics tool, called VC-FaT, that integrates peoples' tweet data regarding crimes in San Francisco city with the city factual crime data. VC-FaT provides a number of interactive visualizations using both data sources for better understanding and exploration of crime activities happened in the city during a period of five years.Comment: 2 page

TECVis: A Visual Analytics Tool to Compare People's Emotion Feelings

Twitter is one of the popular social media platforms where people share news or reactions towards an event or topic using short text messages called "tweets". Emotion analysis in these tweets can play a vital role in understanding peoples' feelings towards the underlying event or topic. In this work, we present our visual analytics tool, called TECVis, that focuses on providing comparison views of peoples' emotion feelings in tweets towards an event or topic. The comparison is done based on geolocations or timestamps. TECVis provides several interaction and filtering options for navigation and better exploration of underlying tweet data for emotion feelings comparison.Comment: 2 page

First international workshop on usability and accessibility focused requirements engineering (UsARE 2012): summary report

Usability and accessibility issues are common causes why software fails to meet user requirements. However, requirements engineers still focus on functional requirements and might ignore to also elicit system usability and accessibility requirements. This is a high risk which can lead to project and software failure. Improving the usability and accessibility of a system in a later development stage is costly and time consuming. Targeting these concerns, the workshop envisioned that research must address the proper integration of system usability and accessibility requirements into the requirements engineering process and also must focus on how to manage and control the evaluation of these requirements in a systematic way. UsARE 2012 provided a platform for discussing issues which are relevant for both fields, the Requirements Engineering (RE) and the Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The workshop aim was to bring\ together people from these two communities (RE and HCI) to explore this integration. Researchers and practitioners were invited to submit contributions including problem statements, technical solutions, experience reports, planned work and vision papers. Envisioned results may help aligning RE and HCI processes in order to overcome open issues in these fields

From the web of data to a world of action

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 8.4 (2010): 10.1016/j.websem.2010.04.007This paper takes as its premise that the web is a place of action, not just information, and that the purpose of global data is to serve human needs. The paper presents several component technologies, which together work towards a vision where many small micro-applications can be threaded together using automated assistance to enable a unified and rich interaction. These technologies include data detector technology to enable any text to become a start point of semantic interaction; annotations for web-based services so that they can link data to potential actions; spreading activation over personal ontologies, to allow modelling of context; algorithms for automatically inferring 'typing' of web-form input data based on previous user inputs; and early work on inferring task structures from action traces. Some of these have already been integrated within an experimental web-based (extended) bookmarking tool, Snip!t, and a prototype desktop application On Time, and the paper discusses how the components could be more fully, yet more openly, linked in terms of both architecture and interaction. As well as contributing to the goal of an action and activity-focused web, the work also exposes a number of broader issues, theoretical, practical, social and economic, for the Semantic Web.Parts of this work were supported by the Information Society Technologies (IST) Program of the European Commission as part of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries (Contract G038- 507618). Thanks also to Emanuele Tracanna, Marco Piva, and Raffaele Giuliano for their work on On Time

Comparison of Object Detection in Head-Mounted and Desktop Displays for Congruent and Incongruent Environments

Virtual reality technologies, including head-mounted displays (HMD), can provide benefits to psychological research by combining high degrees of experimental control with improved ecological validity. This is due to the strong feeling of being in the displayed environment (presence) experienced by VR users. As of yet, it is not fully explored how using HMDs impacts basic perceptual tasks, such as object perception. In traditional display setups, the congruency between background environment and object category has been shown to impact response times in object perception tasks. In this study, we investigated whether this well-established effect is comparable when using desktop and HMD devices. In the study, 21 participants used both desktop and HMD setups to perform an object identification task and, subsequently, their subjective presence while experiencing two-distinct virtual environments (a beach and a home environment) was evaluated. Participants were quicker to identify objects in the HMD condition, independent of object-environment congruency, while congruency effects were not impacted. Furthermore, participants reported significantly higher presence in the HMD condition