Wunderkammers: Powerful Metaphors for ‘Tangible’ Experiential Knowledge Building

The paper identifies the need to support powerful metaphors that capture innovations of new emerging human computer interaction (HCI) technologies and innovative question and answering (Q&A) systems in the context of spatial learning and inquiry-based learning in education. Aim/goals of the research: Explore the potential of ‘Wunderkammer’ (curiosity cabinet) as a powerful metaphor to design new types of learning experiences catering for an ecology of artefacts (real or virtual objects) to provide a holistic context for educators to share and extend learning in action. Conclusions: We provide insight into the emergence of smart interactive objects with different types of sensors that can potentially support everyday life and the increasing access to new visual experiences through augment reality and virtual reality, for new types of tangible knowledge building that can be personalised and shared. This reshaping of human centred design and creating new experiences through tangible creations that externalize in real time and through new materials, the creative power of the ‘imaginations of movement’ provides new user experience design thinking through the concept of powerful metaphors, to provide core design requirements where the blending of worlds is common place

Internet of Things Enhanced User Experience for Smart Water and Energy Management

Smart environments can engage a wide range of end users with different interests and priorities, from corporate managers looking to improve the performance of their business to school children who want to explore and learn more about the world around them. Creating an effective user experience within a smart environment (from smart buildings to smart cities) is an important factor to success. In this article, we reflect on our experience of developing Internet-of-Things-enabled applications within a smart home, school, office building, university, and airport, where the goal has been to engage a wide range of users (from building managers to business travelers) to increase water and energy awareness, management, and conservation

Linked Water Data For Water Information Management

The management of water consumption is hindered by low general awareness and absence of precise historical and contextual information. Effective and efficiency management of water resources requires a holistic approach considering all the stages of water usage. A decision support tool for water management services requires access to a number of different data domains and different data providers. The design of next-generation water information management systems poses significant technical challenges in terms of information management, integration of heterogeneous data, and real-time processing of dynamic data. Linked Data is a set of web technologies that enables integration of different data sources. This work investigates the usage of Linked Data technologies in the Water Management domain, describes the fundamental concepts of the approach, details an architecture, and discusses possible water management applications

Semantically enhanced interfaces for browsing the world wide web

Browsing in the World Wide Web (WWW) for disabled users poses a series of problems. This thesis presents the idea of Browsing Shortcuts (BS) as a way of dealing with those problems. In particular, it specializes in the problems that Visually Impaired (VI) people confront when browsing the WWW. After a thorough analysis of the problems of VI users, it is obvious that the main cause for them is that today web pages carry a great deal of visual meta-information for sighted users, which is not communicated to VI users. BSs is a mechanism that compensates disabled users for the information they lose while browsing. For VI users in particular, BS allow them to recognize easily content areas and other functional elements that exist in the web page such as a newspaper article, a menu, a search form etc. in addition, BSs also provide users with the necessary functionality to transfer them quickly to the each of the elements in order to use them appropriately. The technological framework that supports the implementation of the BSs idea is based on Semantic Web (SW) technologies. This way the implementation of BSs ensures its extensibility, scalability and independence from the current web content production community. The implementation of BS is supported by a community of people that are motivated to participate in their solution (eg. family, friends, teacher of VI persons), and are separated into groups with specific roles. Therefore it stands in solid foundation. From the evaluation process, through experiments, a series of results led to specific conclusions about the application of the BSs mechanism. VI users using the BSs made less effort (less keystrokes) and read quicker the web pages compared to the browsing without the BSs. The latter, also led to the increase of web page visits during an information seeking process and in the increase of information read by the users during it. Combining these findings with the fact that users read web pages more carefully when using the BSs, than without them, and the change of strategy during their browsing within web pages, we understand that apart from the quantity of information, the quality of the information retrieved, during an information seeking task, is also increased. Apart from the basic version of the BSs, two more versions of the idea were also examined in order to find whether they can improve even more the browsing with BSs. In the respective experiments the results show that, in order for Spatially Enriched BSs to be used effectively users need a bigger familiarization period with the spatial information. On the contrary, this is not the case with the use of Adaptive BSs which adapt the BSs list according to users? needs and seem to perform with quite positive results

Mainstreaming of Mobile Assistive Technology: Experts’ Thoughts and Opinions

This paper presents the outcomes from the interviews with experts and stakeholders that took part under the study on e-Accessibility2020[1] (“Study on Implications from Future ICT Trends on Assistive Technology and Accessibility”, SMART 2010/0077). This study aims to provide the European Commission with recommendations on future research policy, especially regarding Framework Programme 8 (ICT & FET) and the next Competitiveness & Innovation Programme (CIP). To achieve that, the study follows a data gathering process from various sources, such as scientific papers, past and running projects deliverables and interviews with experts. The objective of this data gathering process is to identify key trends, micro-trends and weak signals on new technologies that will possibly affect the future of eAccessibility. In this paper we present the findings from a series of interviews with experts and stakeholders which took part during the data gathering process

The perceptions of people with dementia on robot companions and their potential to reduce loneliness and isolation

[No abstract available]EU Horizons 2020 grant agreement 643808 Project MARI