RealTimeChess: Lessons from a Participatory Design Process for a Collaborative Multi-Touch, Multi-User Game

We report on a long-term participatory design process during which we designed and improved RealTimeChess, a collaborative but competitive game that is played using touch input by multiple people on a tabletop display. During the design process we integrated concurrent input from all players and pace control, allowing us to steer the interaction along a continuum between high-paced simultaneous and low-paced turn-based gameplay. In addition, we integrated tutorials for teaching interaction techniques, mechanisms to control territoriality, remote interaction, and alert feedback. Integrating these mechanism during the participatory design process allowed us to examine their effects in detail, revealing for instance effects of the competitive setting on the perception of awareness as well as territoriality. More generally, the resulting application provided us with a testbed to study interaction on shared tabletop surfaces and yielded insights important for other time-critical or attention-demanding applications.

How do interactive tabletop systems influence collaboration?

This paper examines some aspects of the usefulness of interactive tabletop systems, if and how these impact collaboration. We chose creative problem solving such as brainstorming as an application framework to test several collaborative media: the use of pen-and-paper tools, the ‘‘around-the-table’’ form factor, the digital tabletop interface, the attractiveness of interaction styles. Eighty subjects in total (20 groups of four members) participated in the experiments. The evaluation criteria were task performance, collaboration patterns (especially equity of contributions), and users’ subjective experience. The ‘‘aroundthe-table’’ form factor, which is hypothesized to promote social comparison, increased performance and improved collaboration through an increase of equity. Moreover, the attractiveness of the tabletop device improved subjective experience and increased motivation to engage in the task. However, designing attractiveness seems a highly challenging issue, since overly attractive interfaces may distract users from the task

R2S2: a Hybrid Technique to Visualize Sport Ranking Evolution

Extended abstract and DemoInternational audienceThis article presents R2S2, a hybrid visualization technique as an intermediate step between Rank Chart and Slope Graph to better understand and analyze team evolutions during soccer championships. Currently used rank tables for soccer are relative (ranked-based) and do not convey the absolute difference between teams. R2S2 provides a way to visualize these differences using the Slope Graph technique (value-based). By interactively setting the parameters of R2S2, we make the distance between teams appear, minimizing the overlaps caused by the Slope Graph technique

Enregistrements et transcriptions pour un atlas sonore des langues régionales de France

L’objectif est de montrer et de valoriser la diversité linguistique de la France, à travers des enregistrements recueillis sur le terrain, une réalisation informatique (qui permet de visualiser les aires dialectales) et un travail de transcription orthographique (qui représente un objet de recherche en soi). Il y a ainsi une dimension à la fois scientifique et patrimoniale à ce travail, dans la mesure où un certain nombre de langues régionales ou minoritaires sont en situation critique.The aim of this paper is to show and promote the linguistic diversity of France, through field recordings, a computer achievement (which allows us to visualise dialectal areas) and an orthographic transcription work (which represents an object of research in itself). There is thus both a scientific dimension and a heritage dimension in this work, insofar as a number of regional or minority languages are in a critical situation

CollaStar : Interaction collaborative avec des données multidimensionnelles et temporelles

International audienceAlors que la littérature regorge de représentations pour la visualisation de données multidimensionnelles, peu de travaux traitent du contrôle des valeurs de ces données dans le temps. Nous proposons Collastar, une interface permettant à plusieurs utilisateurs de manipuler collaborativement un ensemble de paramètres dynamiques grâce à des techniques d'interaction et de visualisation pertinentes. L'interface est composée d'une représentation en étoile au centre, dédiée à la manipulation collaborative des paramètres dynamiques, et d'autant de fenêtres de visualisation des données (Linear Wall de l'évolution temporelle des paramètres) que d'utilisateurs. Nous utilisons CollaStar pour contrôler un moteur de création de scènes cinématographiques (manipulation des paramètres de caméra) et évaluons notre système qualitativement avec des experts en création cinématographique

NLP4NLP+5: The Deep (R)evolution in Speech and Language Processing

This paper aims at analyzing the changes in the fields of speech and natural language processing over the recent past 5 years (2016–2020). It is in continuation of a series of two papers that we published in 2019 on the analysis of the NLP4NLP corpus, which contained articles published in 34 major conferences and journals in the field of speech and natural language processing, over a period of 50 years (1965–2015), and analyzed with the methods developed in the field of NLP, hence its name. The extended NLP4NLP+5 corpus now covers 55 years, comprising close to 90,000 documents [+30% compared with NLP4NLP: as many articles have been published in the single year 2020 than over the first 25 years (1965–1989)], 67,000 authors (+40%), 590,000 references (+80%), and approximately 380 million words (+40%). These analyses are conducted globally or comparatively among sources and also with the general scientific literature, with a focus on the past 5 years. It concludes in identifying profound changes in research topics as well as in the emergence of a new generation of authors and the appearance of new publications around artificial intelligence, neural networks, machine learning, and word embedding

Pattern of DAP12 Expression in Leukocytes from Both Healthy and Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Patients

DAP12 is an ITAM-bearing transmembrane adaptor originally identified on the surface of Natural Killer cells. A broad expression among other immune cells was later found in myeloid and lymphoid cells. However, data on DAP12 expression pattern rely only on immunoblot and microarray analysis. Here, we describe the generation and the characterization of an anti-DAP12 monoclonal antibody. Using this novel reagent, we show that DAP12 expression is restricted to innate immune cells in basal condition. Since a decreased expression of DAP12 has been suggested in NK cells of systemic lupus erythematosus patients, we have further investigated the NK cell receptor repertoire and leukocyte expression of DAP12 in these patients and no major changes were detectable when compared to controls