The Rigidity Conjecture

A central question in dynamics is whether the topology of a system determines its geometry. This is known as rigidity. Under mild topological conditions rigidity holds for many classical cases, including: Kleinian groups, circle diffeomorphisms, unimodal interval maps, critical circle maps, and circle maps with a break point. More recent developments show that under similar topological conditions, rigidity does not hold for slightly more general systems. In this paper we state a conjecture which describes how topological classes are organized into rigidity classes.Comment: 6 page

Tasks Model Composition : beyond data, representing user activities

International audienceThe aim of this paper is to illustrate, by way of a few case studies, the value of model-based task analysis in interaction and design specification of Web mashups. Task analysis is recognized as one fundamental way to focus on the specific user needs and to improve the general understanding of how users may interact with a user interface to accomplish a given goal when using an interactive system. It is argued that some of current challenges to the design and development of Web mashups are commonplace when building task models. So that, in some extension, model-based task analysis can help designers of Web mashups to better understand and describe users’ tasks for combining data sources. The cases studies presented hereafter focused on tasks carried out by both developers and end-users of Web mahsups. More than simple illustrations, all cases studies are issued from real life applications

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

Making Distributed User Interfaces Interruption-Resistant : A Model-Based Approach

International audienceDistributed User Interfaces (DUIs) have gone beyond the fact that traditional user interfaces run on the same computing platform in the same environment. This new interaction paradigm affects the way these novel systems are designed and developed. New features need to be taken into account from the very beginning of the development process and new models and tools need to be considered for the correct development of interactive systems based on DUIs. The starting point of this paper is that DUI-based systems are susceptible of being interrupted in several ways as they are dependent on connectivity. In this proposal this issue is assessed from a conceptual point of view, asking the question of what new features should be considered and how should they be included within the development process? The model-based approach presented provides developers with means to make DUIs resilient or resistant to interruptions

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

A Domain Specific Language for Orchestrating User Tasks Whilst Navigation Web Sites

International audienceIn this paper we claim that there are a lot of processes over Web applications that require a high level of coordination between individuals and tasks featuring procedures. We propose hereafter a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for describing the asynchronous orchestration users’ tasks including manual users’ tasks (i.e. simple instructions that tell users what to do during the navigation) and automated tasks (i.e. tasks that can be partially or completely automated by client-side scripts). The approach is illustrated by examples and a case study showing the tools, for which an empiric evaluation is presented

Public policies and multilingualism in HCI

International audiencePublic policy plays an influential role in the work we do as HCI researchers, interaction designers, and practitioners. "Public policy," a broad term, includes both government policy and policy within non-governmental organizations. This forum focuses on topics at the intersection of human-computer interaction and public policy

A Tool Support for Web Applications Adaptation Using Navigation History

Currently the Web is a platform for performing complex tasks which involve dealing with different Web applications. However users still have to face these tasks in a handcrafted way. In this paper we present a novel approach that combines concern-sensitive adaptation and navigation history to improve the user experience while performing a task. We have developed some simple though powerful tools for applying this approach to some typical tasks such as trip planning and house rental. We illustrate the paper with a simple though realistic case study and compare our work with others in the same field.Publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (vol. 6949).Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad