End-user Empowerment in the Digital Age

End-user empowerment (or human empowerment) may be seen as an important aspect of a human-centric approach towards the digital economy. Despite the role of end-users has been recognized as a key element in information systems and end-user computing, empowering end-users may be seen as a next evolutionary step. This minitrack aims at advancing the understanding of what end-user empowerment really is, what the main challenges to develop end-user empowering systems are, and how end-user empowerment may be achieved in specific domains

[How] Can Pluralist Approaches to Computational Cognitive Modeling of Human Needs and Values Save our Democracies?

In our increasingly digital societies, many companies have business models that perceive users’ (or customers’) personal data as a siloed resource, owned and controlled by the data controller rather than the data subjects. Collecting and processing such a massive amount of personal data could have many negative technical, social and economic consequences, including invading people’s privacy and autonomy. As a result, regulations such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have tried to take steps towards a better implementation of the right to digital privacy. This paper proposes that such legal acts should be accompanied by the development of complementary technical solutions such as Cognitive Personal Assistant Systems to support people to effectively manage their personal data processing on the Internet. Considering the importance and sensitivity of personal data processing, such assistant systems should not only consider their owner’s needs and values, but also be transparent, accountable and controllable. Pluralist approaches in computational cognitive modelling of human needs and values which are not bound to traditional paradigmatic borders such as cognitivism, connectionism, or enactivism, we argue, can create a balance between practicality and usefulness, on the one hand, and transparency, accountability, and controllability, on the other, while supporting and empowering humans in the digital world. Considering the threat to digital privacy as significant to contemporary democracies, the future implementation of such pluralist models could contribute to power-balance, fairness and inclusion in our societies

Serious Games for Software Refactoring

Software design issues can severely impede software development and maintenance. Thus, it is important for the success of software projects that developers are aware of bad smells in code artifacts and improve their skills to reduce these issues via refactoring. However, software refactoring is a complex activity and involves multiple tasks and aspects. Therefore, imparting competences for identifying bad smells and refactoring code efficiently is challenging for software engineering education and training. The approaches proposed for teaching software refactoring in recent years mostly concentrate on small and artificial tasks and fall short in terms of higher level competences, such as analysis and evaluation. In this paper, we investigate the possibilities and challenges of designing serious games for software refactoring on real-world code artifacts. In particular, we propose a game design, where students can compete either against a predefined benchmark (technical debt) or against each other. In addition, we describe a lightweight architecture as the technical foundation for the game design that integrates pre-existing analysis tools such as test frameworks and software-quality analyzers. Finally, we provide an exemplary game scenario to illustrate the application of serious games in a learning setting

Serious Refactoring Games

Software design issues can severely impede software development and maintenance. Thus, it is important for the success of software projects that developers are aware of bad smells in code artifacts and improve their skills to reduce these issues via refactoring. However, software refactoring is a complex activity and involves multiple tasks and aspects. Therefore, imparting competences for identifying bad smells and refactoring code efficiently is challenging for software engineering education and training. The approaches proposed for teaching software refactoring in recent years mostly concentrate on small and artificial tasks and fall short in terms of higher level competences, such as analysis and evaluation. In this paper, we investigate the possibilities and challenges of designing serious games for software refactoring on real-world code artifacts. In particular, we propose a game design, where students can compete either against a predefined benchmark (technical debt) or against each other. In addition, we describe a lightweight architecture as the technical foundation for the game design that integrates pre-existing analysis tools such as test frameworks and software-quality analyzers. Finally, we provide an exemplary game scenario to illustrate the application of serious games in a learning setting

Towards Better Support for Machine-Assisted Human Grading of Short-Text Answers

This paper aims at tools to help teachers to grade short text answers submitted by students. While many published approaches for short-text answer grading target on a fully automated process suggesting a grading result, we focus on supporting a teacher. The goal is rather to help a human grader and to improve transparency rather than replacing the human by an Oracle. This paper provides a literature overview of the numerous approaches of short text answer grading which were proposed throughout the years. This paper presents two novel approaches (answer completeness and natural variability) and evaluates these based on published exam data and several assessments collected at our university

Evolutionary Business Information Systems - Perspectives and Challenges of an Emerging Class of Information Systems

This article reflects on existing and emerging future challenges arising in the area of “evolutionary business in- formation systems”, a class of systems that demand an evolutionary software development process and which sup- port secondary design of various con- ceptual layers. We place both existing contributions and future research op- portunities in context by referring to an idealized, preliminary system archi- tecture. Finally, we emphasize our plu- ralistic perspective on the research ob- ject and the resulting need for method- ological flexibility in the sense of inter- disciplinary configurations of research methods

End-user Empowerment: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

In virtue of fast spreading emerging technologies, considering end-user empowerment (or human empowerment) while developing or adapting technologies gains importance. Even though many different approaches to end-user empowerment have been proposed, it is hardly clear what end-user (human) empowerment is and how it is possible to develop end-user empowering systems . This paper offers an interdisciplinary perspective on how it can be possible to arrive at a synthesized concept of end-user empowerment, in particular regarding the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The provided interdisciplinary perspective includes concepts from Computer Science, Information Systems, Cognitive Science, Psychology, Sociology, Science-Technology-Society, Design, System Science and Philosophy. Based on an interdisciplinary literature review, and from an enactivist, pluralist, and constructivist perspective, we argue that the individual end-users and their needs and values, as well as the environment (including socioeconomical contexts, other actors, etc.) and technologies they interact with, continuously co-create the conception of end-user empowerment. Moreover, we propose that perceiving technological development as co-creation, and considering technologies as value-bearers could provide the first steps in the development of conceptual frameworks required for the development of end-user empowering systems

Human-centric Personal Data Protection and Consenting AssistantSystems: Towards a Sustainable Digital Economy

With the growing digital transformation, increasingly more personal data is produced, collected, shared, and used. Online privacy has become one of the most significant challenges for co-creating digital artefacts in a sustainable digital world. This paper presents the results of a representative study on online privacy conducted in Austria, which shows a growing need for personalized and human-centric sociotechnical solutions which empower humans to exercise their rights to online privacy, consenting and agency. We call such systems Personal Data Protection and Consenting Assistant Systems (PDPCAS). Using a human-centric perspective on privacy and consenting, which is inspired by recent advancements in cognitive sciences and sociology of science and technology, as well as the results of our representative study, combined with the results of a set of interdisciplinary expert interviews, we provide a reflection on PDPCASs, which mainly includes the functional and non-functional requirements of such systems. Based on the results of our studies, we reflect on the main challenges for the development and adaptation of PDPCASs. We argue that besides the absence of supporting automation standards, the lack of enforceability, and the technical complexities of developing human-centric PDPCASs, the user-acceptance and user experience design pose significant challenges to realizing these systems in practice. Finally, the paper provides a short reflection on the importance of human-centric PDPCASs for the co-creation of a sustainable digital economy

Parameters driving effectiveness of automated essay scoring with LSA

Automated essay scoring with latent semantic analysis (LSA) has recently been subject to increasing interest. Although previous authors have achieved grade ranges similar to those awarded by humans, it is still not clear which and how parameters improve or decrease the effectiveness of LSA. This pa-per presents an analysis of the effects of these parameters, such as text pre-processing, weighting, singular value dimensionality and type of similarity measure, and benchmarks this effectiveness by comparing machine-assigned with human-assigned scores in a real-world case. We show that each of the identified factors significantly influences the quality of automated essay scoring and that the factors are not independent of each other