Identifying user experience dimensions for mobile incident reporting in urban contexts

International audienceDespite the increasing interests raised by incident reporting systems, it is still unclear what dimensions of user experience (UX) and other contextual factors should be taken into account for the various stages of declaring an incident using mobile-phone applications. Research questions: How do citizens perceive and describe urban incidents? What UX dimensions are important for reporting an incident with a mobile-phone application? What other (contextual) factors are important from the users' point of view when declaring incidents? Which of the UX dimensions and contextual factors are important when in the various phases during an incident declaration? Literature review: Overall, there is a lack of empirical research in the domain of incident reporting. In general, the UX dimensions—visual and aesthetic experience, emotion, stimulation, identification, meaning and value, and social relatedness/coexperience—are important when designing interactive systems. It also shows that incidents are related to the citizen's perception of the environment. Methodology: A triangulated method approach combining interviews, a survey of existing systems, and a model-based task analysis were applied. This allows us to present a generic task model for incident reporting with a detailed description of UX dimensions affected in the various subtasks. Results and conclusions: Our findings point out the effect of UX dimensions in the task engaged by users when reporting urban citizens. The overall UX is directly influenced by the perceived level of severity, inconvenience and involvement, the personal context, and the technological mobile context. We have found that while several UX dimensions are highly relevant, they are not equally distributed along the several subtasks that citizens engage when reporting incidents. This study shows that semistructured requirement interviews can provide information about UX dimensions and it highlights the importance of the identification of UX dimensions in early phases of the development process

Characterizing Incidents Reporting Systems across Applications Domains

International audienceIncident reporting is a very well-known technique in application domains such as air traffic management and health, where specialized users are trained to provide detailed information about problems. Incident reporting systems are indeed complex systems that include many actors including the users reporting incidents, user’s colleagues and neighbors, stakeholders, policymakers, systems integrations. Incident report systems might change (positively or negatively) the users’ environment in many ways. In recent years, this kind of technique has been also been used in crisis management such as the hurricane Katrina. However, despite the fact that incident reporting systems using mobile technology are becoming more common, little is known about its actual use by the general population and which factors affect the user experience when using such system. In this paper we discuss the use of incident reporting system in critical context of use. In this paper we discuss the use of incident reporting system in several application domains. In particular we report findings in terms of dimensions that are aimed to identify social and technical aspects that can affect the design, development and use of incident reporting systems

Critères Ergonomiques pour les Interactions Homme-Environnements Virtuels : définitions, justifications et exemples

Ce rapport présente les définitions, justifications et exemples de recommandations associées aux Critères Ergonomiques adaptés aux Interactions Homme-Environnements Virtuels (IHEV). Les Critères Ergonomiques présentés sont fondés sur les Critères Ergonomiques décrits dans Bastien & Scapin (1993). On a procédé selon les mêmes étapes, lesquelles sont succinctement rappelées. Le recueil des résultats, leur décryptage et leur classification, sont présentées dans un premier temps. Une étape de validation de l'utilisabilité des critères sous la forme d'une tâche d'affectation est décrite et les principaux résultats sont fournis. Une seconde étape de validation concernant cette fois l'utilité des critères est également exposée à travers une comparaison des performances des critères, en situation d'inspection ergonomique d'Environnements Virtuels (EV), avec celles de deux autres méthodes : les Tests Utilisateurs et l'Inspection Libre. Enfin des perspectives d'autres expériences sont proposées, les limites du document et une mise en garde sur son utilisation précèdent la description complète des Critères Ergonomiques dédiés aux IHEV

Itakura-Saito nonnegative matrix factorization with group sparsity

International audienceWe propose an unsupervised inference procedure for audio source separation. Components in nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) are grouped automatically in audio sources via a penalized maximum likelihood approach. The penalty term we introduce favors sparsity at the group level, and is motivated by the assumption that the local amplitude of the sources are independent. Our algorithm extends multiplicative updates for NMF; moreover we propose a test statistic to tune hyperparameters in our model, and illustrate its adequacy on synthetic data. Results on real audio tracks show that our sparsity prior allows to identify audio sources without knowledge on their spectral properties

Semi-supervised {NMF} with time-frequency annotations for single-channel source separation

International audienceWe formulate a novel extension of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) to take into account partial information on source-specific activity in the spectrogram. This information comes in the form of masking coefficients, such as those found in an ideal binary mask. We show that state-of-the-art results in source separation may be achieved with only a limited amount of correct annotation, and furthermore our algorithm is robust to incorrect annotations. Since in practice ideal annotations are not observed, we propose several supervision scenarios to estimate the ideal mask- ing coefficients. First, manual annotations by a trained user on a dedicated graphical user interface are shown to provide satisfactory performance although they are prone to errors. Second, we investigate simple learning strate- gies to predict the Wiener coefficients based on local information around a given time-frequency bin of the spec- trogram. Results on single-channel source separation show that time-frequency annotations allow to disambiguate the source separation problem, and learned annotations open the way for a completely unsupervised learning procedure for source separation with no human intervention

Scenario-based VR Framework for Product Design

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Understanding Users’ Capability to Transfer Information between Mixed and Virtual Reality: Position Estimation across Modalities and Perspectives

International audienceMixed Reality systems combine physical and digital worlds, with great potential for the future of HCI. It is possible to design systems that support flexible degrees of virtuality by combining complementary technologies. In order for such systems to succeed, users must be able to create unified mental models out of heterogeneous representations. In this paper, we present two studies focusing on the users' accuracy on heterogeneous systems using Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) and immersive Virtual Reality (VR) displays, and combining viewpoints (egocentric and exocentric). The results show robust estimation capabilities across conditions and viewpoints

SUSTAIN drilling at Surtsey volcano, Iceland, tracks hydrothermal and microbiological interactions in basalt 50 years after eruption

The 2017 Surtsey Underwater volcanic System for Thermophiles, Alteration processes and INnovative concretes (SUSTAIN) drilling project at Surtsey volcano, sponsored in part by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP), provides precise observations of the hydrothermal, geochemical, geomagnetic, and microbiological changes that have occurred in basaltic tephra and minor intrusions since explosive and effusive eruptions produced the oceanic island in 1963–1967. Two vertically cored boreholes, to 152 and 192 m below the surface, were drilled using filtered, UV-sterilized seawater circulating fluid to minimize microbial contamination. These cores parallel a 181 m core drilled in 1979. Introductory investigations indicate changes in material properties and whole-rock compositions over the past 38 years. A Surtsey subsurface observatory installed to 181 m in one vertical borehole holds incubation experiments that monitor in situ mineralogical and microbial alteration processes at 25–124 ∘C. A third cored borehole, inclined 55∘ in a 264∘ azimuthal direction to 354 m measured depth, provides further insights into eruption processes, including the presence of a diatreme that extends at least 100 m into the seafloor beneath the Surtur crater. The SUSTAIN project provides the first time-lapse drilling record into a very young oceanic basaltic volcano over a range of temperatures, 25–141 ∘C from 1979 to 2017, and subaerial and submarine hydrothermal fluid compositions. Rigorous procedures undertaken during the drilling operation protected the sensitive environment of the Surtsey Natural Preserve

A Novel Neurotrophic Drug for Cognitive Enhancement and Alzheimer's Disease

Currently, the major drug discovery paradigm for neurodegenerative diseases is based upon high affinity ligands for single disease-specific targets. For Alzheimer's disease (AD), the focus is the amyloid beta peptide (Aß) that mediates familial Alzheimer's disease pathology. However, given that age is the greatest risk factor for AD, we explored an alternative drug discovery scheme that is based upon efficacy in multiple cell culture models of age-associated pathologies rather than exclusively amyloid metabolism. Using this approach, we identified an exceptionally potent, orally active, neurotrophic molecule that facilitates memory in normal rodents, and prevents the loss of synaptic proteins and cognitive decline in a transgenic AD mouse model

On Landau damping

Going beyond the linearized study has been a longstanding problem in the theory of Landau damping. In this paper we establish exponential Landau damping in analytic regularity. The damping phenomenon is reinterpreted in terms of transfer of regularity between kinetic and spatial variables, rather than exchanges of energy; phase mixing is the driving mechanism. The analysis involves new families of analytic norms, measuring regularity by comparison with solutions of the free transport equation; new functional inequalities; a control of nonlinear echoes; sharp scattering estimates; and a Newton approximation scheme. Our results hold for any potential no more singular than Coulomb or Newton interaction; the limit cases are included with specific technical effort. As a side result, the stability of homogeneous equilibria of the nonlinear Vlasov equation is established under sharp assumptions. We point out the strong analogy with the KAM theory, and discuss physical implications.Comment: News: (1) the main result now covers Coulomb and Newton potentials, and (2) some classes of Gevrey data; (3) as a corollary this implies new results of stability of homogeneous nonmonotone equilibria for the gravitational Vlasov-Poisson equatio