Microbial ligand costimulation drives neutrophilic steroid-refractory asthma

Funding: The authors thank the Wellcome Trust (102705) and the Universities of Aberdeen and Cape Town for funding. This research was also supported, in part, by National Institutes of Health GM53522 and GM083016 to DLW. KF and BNL are funded by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, BNL is the recipient of an European Research Commission consolidator grant and participates in the European Union FP7 programs EUBIOPRED and MedALL. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Evaluating Metaphor Reification in Tangible Interfaces

International audienceMetaphors are a powerful conceptual device to reason about human actions. As such, they have been heavily used in designing and describing human computer interaction. Since they can address scripted text, verbal expression, imaging, sound, and gestures, they can also be considered in the design and analysis of multimodal interfaces. In this paper we discuss the description and evaluation of the relations between metaphors and their implementation in human computer interaction with a focus on tangible user interfaces (TUIs), a form of multimodal interface. The objective of this paper is to define how metaphors appear in a tangible context in order to support their evaluation. Relying on matching entities and operations between the domain of interaction and the domain of the digital application, we propose a conceptual framework based on three components: a structured representation of the mappings holding between the metaphor source, the metaphor target, the interface and the digital system; a conceptual model for describing metaphorical TUIs; three relevant properties, coherence, coverage and compliance, which define at what extent the implementation of a metaphorical tangible interface matches the metaphor. The conceptual framework is then validated and applied on a tangible prototype in an educational application