Determination of Maturity Parameters of Indian Mango Cultivars Based on Eating Quality during Natural Ripening

Variation in physico-chemical characteristics as total soluble solids (TSS), titratable acidity (TA), dry matter (DM) and eating quality viz. appearance (APR) and taste (TST) scores of nine major Indian mango cultivars were studied as a function of harvesting stage. TSS, TA and DM varied between 7.6 to 22.1°Brix, 6.31 to 0.24% and 14.84 t

Technique for evaluating photo sharing interfaces with the early prototypes - group simulation

User evaluations using paper prototypes commonly lack social context. The Group simulation technique described in this paper offers a solution to this problem. The study introduces an early-phase participatory design technique targeted for small groups. The proposed technique is used for evaluating an interface, which enables group work in photo collection creation. Three groups of four users, 12 in total, took part in a simulation session where they tested a low-fidelity design concept that included their own personal photo content from an event that their group attended together. The users’ own content was used to evoke natural experiences. Our results indicate that the technique helped users to naturally engage with the prototype in the session. The technique is suggested to be suitable for evaluating other early-phase concepts and to guide design solutions, especially with the concepts that include users’ personal content and enable content sharing

Characterization of online groups along space, time, and social dimensions

Social groups play a crucial role in online social media because they form the basis for user participation and engagement. Although widely studied in their static and evolutionary aspects, no much attention has been devoted to the exploration of the nature of groups. In fact, groups can originate from different aggregation processes that may be determined by several orthogonal factors. A key question in this scenario is whether it is possible to identify the different types of groups that emerge spontaneously in online social media and how they differ. We propose a general framework for the characterization of groups along the geographical, temporal, and socio-topical dimensions and we apply it on a very large dataset from Flickr. In particular, we define a new metric to account for geographic dispersion, we use a clustering approach on activity traces to extract classes of different temporal footprints, and we transpose the “common identity and common bond” theory into metrics to identify the skew of a group towards sociality or topicality. We directly validate the predictions of the sociological theory showing that the metrics are able to forecast with high accuracy the group type when compared to a human-generated ground truth. Last, we frame our contribution into a wider context by putting in relation different types of groups with communities detected algorithmically on the social graph and by showing the effect that the group type might have on processes of information diffusion. Results support the intuition that a more nuanced description of groups could improve not only the understanding of the activity of the user base but also the interpretation of other phenomena occurring on social graphs.This work is supported by the SocialSensor FP7 project, partially funded by the EC under contract number 28797