Understanding the Practice and Supporting the Creation of Design Systems

RÉSUMÉ : L’utilisabilité spécifie à quel point un système logiciel doit être facile, efficace, anti-erreur et agréable pour être utilisé par des utilisateurs humains. Au cours des deux à trois dernières années, de nombreuses entreprises et organisations qui développent des technologies de l’information et de la communication ont commencé à adopter des systèmes de conception qui aident à améliorer la convivialité de leurs produits. Ces entreprises et organisations ont généralement plus d’un produit sur différentes plates-formes, ce qui présente divers défis de conception tels que la cohérence, la maintenabilité, des coûts élevés et une mauvaise collaboration entre les équipes de conception. Les systèmes de conception aident à standardiser la conception de l’interaction utilisateur en créant des directives et des composants réutilisables pouvant être utilisés dans tous les produits et / ou versions de produits. Pour comprendre la popularité croissante des systèmes de conception, nous avons mené une étude d’analyse de contenu des problèmes de système de conception open source de GitHub. Nous avons constaté que les problèmes du système de conception consistent principalement en des rapports de bogues ou des demandes de fonctionnalités et en améliorant le comportement de l’interface utilisateur ou la conception visuelle des composants du système de conception.----------ABSTRACT : Usability specifies how easy, efficient, error-preventing, and pleasant a software system must be to be used by human users. In the recent two to three years, many companies and organizations that develop information and communication technologies have started to adopt design systems that help address the usability of their products. These companies and organizations usually have more than one product across different platforms, which introduces various design challenges such as consistency, maintainability, large costs, and poor collaboration between design teams. Design systems help standardize user interaction design by creating guidelines and reusable components that can be used across products and/or product versions. To understand the growing popularity of design systems, we first conducted a content analysis study of open-source design system issues from GitHub. We found that design system issues consist mainly of bug reports, feature requests and improvement of the UI behavior or visual design of design system components

Capturing the Practices, Challenges, and Needs of Transportation Decision-Makers

Transportation decision-makers from government agencies play an important role in addressing the traffic network conditions, which in turn, have a major impact on the well-being of citizens. The practices, challenges, and needs of this group of practitioners are less represented in the HCI literature. We address this gap through an interview study with 19 practitioners from Transports Qu\'ebec, a government agency responsible for transportation infrastructures in Qu\'ebec, Canada. We found that this group of decision-makers can most benefit from research about data analysis tools and platforms that (1) provide information to support data quality awareness, (2) are interoperable with other tools in the complex workflow of the practitioners, and (3) support intuitive and customizable visual analytics. These implications can also be informative to the design of tools supporting other decision-making tasks and domains.Comment: 7 pages, 0 figures, ACM CHI LBW Paper (2020). For personas created in the project, see https://github.com/HCDLab/TDMPersona

Impact of caloric and dietary restriction regimens on markers of health and longevity in humans and animals: a summary of available findings

Considerable interest has been shown in the ability of caloric restriction (CR) to improve multiple parameters of health and to extend lifespan. CR is the reduction of caloric intake - typically by 20 - 40% of ad libitum consumption - while maintaining adequate nutrient intake. Several alternatives to CR exist. CR combined with exercise (CE) consists of both decreased caloric intake and increased caloric expenditure. Alternate-day fasting (ADF) consists of two interchanging days; one day, subjects may consume food ad libitum (sometimes equaling twice the normal intake); on the other day, food is reduced or withheld altogether. Dietary restriction (DR) - restriction of one or more components of intake (typically macronutrients) with minimal to no reduction in total caloric intake - is another alternative to CR. Many religions incorporate one or more forms of food restriction. The following religious fasting periods are featured in this review: 1) Islamic Ramadan; 2) the three principal fasting periods of Greek Orthodox Christianity (Nativity, Lent, and the Assumption); and 3) the Biblical-based Daniel Fast. This review provides a summary of the current state of knowledge related to CR and DR. A specific section is provided that illustrates related work pertaining to religious forms of food restriction. Where available, studies involving both humans and animals are presented. The review includes suggestions for future research pertaining to the topics of discussion

Understanding and Supporting the Design Systems Practice

Design systems represent a user interaction design and development approach that is currently of avid interest in the industry. However, little research work has been done to synthesize knowledge related to design systems in order to inform the design of tools to support their creation, maintenance, and usage practices. This paper represents an important step in which we explored the issues that design system projects usually deal with and the perceptions and values of design system project leaders. Through this exploration, we aim to investigate the needs for tools that support the design system approach. We found that the open source communities around design systems focused on discussing issues related to behaviors of user interface components of design systems. At the same time, leaders of design system projects faced considerable challenges when evolving their design systems to make them both capable of capturing stable design knowledge and flexible to the needs of the various concrete products. They valued a bottom-up approach for design system creation and maintenance, in which components are elevated and merged from the evolving products. Our findings synthesize the knowledge and lay foundations for designing techniques and tools aimed at supporting the design system practice and related modern user interaction design and development approaches.Comment: 28 pages, 2 figures, to appear in EMS

Toward an intelligent system architecture for smart agriculture: application to smart beehives

International audienceSince the application of information and communications technologies (ICT) to agriculture is far from the potential, we investigate how to systematize the process of transformation. In this article, we propose a new approach to design intelligent systems for the management and supervision of smart agriculture, as well as an example of its application in the beekeeping sector. It consists of the analysis of all the decisions that can be made using a spatio-temporal matrix that couples the time horizons to the modeling approaches. The final goal is to develop a reusable architecture for smart agriculture

Nested object detection using mask R-CNN: application to bee and varroa detection

International audienceAbstract In this paper, we address an essential problem related to object detection and image processing: detecting objects potentially nested in other ones. This problem exists particularly in the beekeeping sector: detecting varroa parasites on bees. Indeed, beekeepers must ensure the level of infestation of their apiaries by the varroa parasite which settles on the backs of bees. As far as we know, there is no yet a published approach to deal with nested object detection using only one neural network trained on two different datasets. We propose an approach that fills this gap. Therefore, we improve the accuracy and the efficiency of bee and varroa detection task. Our work is based on deep learning, more precisely Mask R-CNN neural network. Instead of segmenting detected objects (bees), we segment internal objects (varroas). We add a branch to Faster R-CNN to segment internal objects. We extract relevant features for internal object segmentation and suggest efficient method for training the neural network on two different datasets. Our experiments are based on a set of images of bee frames, containing annotated bees and varroa mites. Due to differences in occurrence rates, two different sets were created. After carrying out experiments, we ended up with a single neural network capable of detecting two nested objects without decreasing accuracy compared to two separate neural networks. Our approach, compared to traditional separate neural networks, improves varroa detection accuracy by 1.9%, reduces infestation level prediction error by 0.22%, and reduces execution time by 28% and model memory by 23%. In our approach, we extract Res4 (a layer of the ResNet neural network) features for varroa segmentation, which improves detection accuracy by 11% compared to standard FPN extraction. Thus, we suggest a new approach that detects nested objects more accurately than two separate network approaches

Generating proposals from corners in RPN to detect bees in dense scenes

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Toward an intelligent system architecture for smart agriculture: application to smart beehives

International audienceSince the application of information and communications technologies (ICT) to agriculture is far from the potential, we investigate how to systematize the process of transformation. In this article, we propose a new approach to design intelligent systems for the management and supervision of smart agriculture, as well as an example of its application in the beekeeping sector. It consists of the analysis of all the decisions that can be made using a spatio-temporal matrix that couples the time horizons to the modeling approaches. The final goal is to develop a reusable architecture for smart agriculture

PNAPI Digital Support Platform for Beekeepers

International audienceBees are suffering from a big problem; the high rate of mortality. This is mainly caused by climate change, intensive farming, pesticides use and varroa parasites.Consequences:• Decrease of quantity of bees’ products like honey• Diminution of pollination considered as a primordial step in agricultureScientific work has allowed establishing concrete elements to guide the decisions of beekeepers. But this knowledge is not well transferred to them and does not consider their different needs. Our approach: a large computer system based on artificial intelligence. It would collect information, build and improve beekeeping knowledge, and help beekeepers in decisions makin

Digital Transformation of Beekeeping through the Use of a Decision Making Architecture

International audienceThe use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in agriculture is far from their potential. In this article, we consider how to facilitate and systematize the process of transforming traditional agriculture into digital agriculture; Agriculture 4.0. Among the different technologies, we focus on the IoT aspects. In the article, we propose a new approach for the design of intelligent agricultural management and supervision systems. The proposed approach is illustrated as an example of application in the beekeeping sector. Indeed, this sector is affected by a crisis due to the disappearance of bees and the different actors need support to make their decisions. As an example of decisions that can be made, we can cite: treatment planning or policy planning. An architecture based on sensors and open data is proposed to help them make decisions. An implementation of it is shown; it is based on a device with sensors, as well as an interface to collect the data on beehives and show notifications and alerts to beekeepers. The proposed architecture is flexible, and it can be used in the context of different levels of technology maturity. The final objective is to develop a reusable architecture for Agriculture 4.0