A Bayesian network and analytic hierarchy process based personalized recommendations for tourist attractions over the Internet

Selecting tourist attractions to visit at a destination is a main stage in planning a trip. Although various online travel recommendation systems have been developed to support users in the task of travel planning during the last decade, few systems focus on recommending specific tourist attractions. In this paper, an intelligent system to provide personalized recommendations of tourist attractions in an unfamiliar city is presented. Through a tourism ontology, the system allows integration of heterogeneous online travel information. Based on Bayesian network technique and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method, the system recommends tourist attractions to a user by taking into account the travel behavior both of the user and of other users. Spatial web services technology is embedded in the system to provide GIS functions. In addition, the system provides an interactive geographic interface for displaying the recommendation results as well as obtaining users’ feedback. The experiments show that the system can provide personalized recommendations on tourist attractions that satisfy the user.     

Interactive parallel programming using the ParaScope Editor

The ParaScope Editor, an intelligent interactive editor for parallel Fortran programs, which is the centerpiece of the ParaScope project, an integrated collection of tools to help scientific programmers implement correct and efficient parallel programs, is discussed. ParaScope Editor reveals to users potential hazards of a proposed parallelization in a program. It provides a variety of powerful interactive program transformations that have been shown useful in converting programs to parallel form. ParaScope Editor supports general user editing through a hybrid text and structure editing facility that incrementally analyzes the modified program for potential hazards. It is shown that ParaScope Editor supports an exploratory programming style in which users get immediate feedback on their various strategies for parallelization     

基于TRIZ理论的行李箱创新设计

结合网络和实地用户调研、用户行为模拟、功能系统分析等方法,分析用户在行李箱使用过程 中存在的问题;运用 TRIZ 创新发明理论分析出现的问题并转换为 TRIZ 标准问题,采用对应的发明措施原理 并结合行李箱的实际使用情况,对行李箱进行设计研究,并通过 Jack 仿真验证了设计的合理性。解决了行李 箱的现有使用问题,获得了行李箱创新设计解决方案。通过对用户行为习惯进行模拟分析、功能分析、结合 TRIZ 发明原理优化了行李箱设计流程,优化了用户的使用方式,改善了用户体验。     

The process of introducing information technology

Abstract

This paper outlines the strategies adopted by the psychologists and ergonomists of the HUSAT Research Group to help organizations learn about information technology and systematically review and plan its organizational ramifications. An essential point is that it is not enough to understand the technology; effective implementation demands the ability to establish organizational needs and to choose a form of technology which will meet them.

The paper examines three ways of designing systems. Firstly, a technology-led approach which leads to 'fire fighting' when the negative organizational effects become apparent. A second method has tried to compensate for this by involving users in the design process. Unfortunately by the time the users have come to terms with their new task and are able to make a contribution, the system has usually been designed.

The third method of design expressly seeks to give users the time and opportunity to learn how to contribute to design, by making the design process evolutionary; i.e. by building slowly from small systems to large ones and retaining the flexibility to change. Within this concept user learning and adaptation is promoted by pilot systems, user design exercises, user support and evaluation procedures. It is only by these methods that users can be given the confidence and knowledge to exploit the potential of the new technology.     

Towards a communication model applied to the interface design process

The design of computational artifacts involves many communication acts occurring through different channels; usability tests, for example, have been used as a main communication channel between designers and users. Other channels used during the design process include requirement analysis, scenario construction, prototyping, etc. This work takes the Westley and MacLehan communication model and projects it into the context of interactive artifact design, resulting in a model of fractal nature. Some channels already present during the design process fit in well with the model we are proposing. It also reveals that other channels have not been explored in the global process of communication. Thus, we show how a semiotic-based analysis can unify techniques, methods and tools that support design, as well as make explicit the necessary interactions among designers, users and computers through different channels.     

Recommendation of optimized information seeking process based on the similarity of user access behavior patterns

Differing from many studies of recommendation that provided the final results directly, our study focuses on providing an optimized process of information seeking to users. Based on process mining, we propose an integrated adaptive framework to support and facilitate individualized recommendation based on the gradual adaptation model that gradually adapts to a target user’s transition of needs and behaviors of information access, including various search-related activities, over different time spans. In detail, successful information seeking processes are extracted from the information seeking histories of users. Furthermore, these successful information seeking processes are optimized as a series of action units to support the target users whose information access behavior patterns are similar to the reference users. Based on these, the optimized information seeking processes are navigated to the target users according to their transitions of interest focus. In addition to describing some definitions and measures introduced, we go further to present an optimized process recommendation model and show the system architecture. Finally, we discuss the simulation and scenario for the proposed system.     

A virtual environment simulator for mechanical system dynamics with online interactive control

Virtual prototyping is an effective tool in the development of mechanical product. Physically accurate simulation of multi-body mechanical system enables designers to investigate, explore, and experience the performance and behavior of an evolving product and thus reduce the number of physical prototypes needed. For the sake of better support for designers to manipulate the simulation, we have developed a dynamic simulation package of mechanical system, which provides an interactive control during the simulation process. The package incorporates physical behaviors and dynamic interactions by dynamics based modeling approach in multi-body mechanical system. In the package, user’s actions (e.g., loading a model, picking and dragging objects, steering objects during simulation process, etc.) are based on an ATN task management, and a multi-modal interface is provided which supports 2D desktop devices and 3D VR devices. The main contribution of the simulator is providing supports that allow users’ interactive manipulation in the simulation loop. During the simulation process, users can modify the constraints between components, apply force/torque to interested components and change the parameters of forces/torques. The simulator automatically updates the dynamic model of the mechanical system in real time, and then continuously simulates the behavior of the model under the current condition in the loop. An example of dynamic simulation of a vehicle is implemented and the simulation result is compared to that of ADAMS to verify the correctness and accuracy of the simulator. With the real-time interaction, solution and visualization of simulation model, the package affords better support for designers to participate in the simulation interactively and effectively.     

‘Representing the User’ in software development—a cultural analysis of usability work in the product development context

It is widely accepted that users should be involved in the development of interactive systems. However, involving users in interactive systems development is challenging, especially in product development. The organizational culture is a key factor affecting the successes and failures of organizational change and development efforts. This paper shows how user involvement is intertwined with the organizational cultures in a case study of five software development organizations. User involvement is indirect in the case organizations, and labeled as usability work. Using cross case analysis, four ‘cultures of usability work’ are identified. The cultures have distinct cultural characteristics, employ different approaches to usability work, and have different preferences and strategies for the prospective facilitation of usability work. Sensitivity to the cultural context is identified as an important consideration in the facilitation of usability work, and culturally compatible strategies for usability work in different cultural settings are identified. The paper concludes that there might not be one ‘best, universally valid, context free way’ of introducing and carrying out usability work in software product development organizations.     

Toward the design of transitional interfaces: an exploratory study on a semi-immersive hybrid user interface

A task that can be decomposed into subtasks with different technological demands may be a challenge, since it requires multiple interactive environments as well as transitions between them. Some of these transitions may involve changes in hardware devices and interface paradigms at the same time. Some previous works have proposed various setups for hybrid user interfaces, but none of them focused on the design of transition interactions. Our work emphasizes the importance of interaction continuity as a guideline in the design and evaluation of transitional interfaces within a hybrid user interface (HUI). Finally, an exploratory study demonstrates how this design aspect is perceived by users during transitions in an HUI composed by three interactive environments.     

基于Adams用户子程序的交互式仿真过程控制

研究使用Adams用户子程序进行二次开发的方法实现对交互式仿真过程的控制.在每一步的仿真结束后与主系统进行数据的交互,将Adams仿真的控制权交给主系统,实现Adams与主系统的交互式仿真.最后,通过与传统仿真方法得到的数据结果的对比分析,验证应用Adams用户子程序实现对交互式仿真的控制方法的正确性、可行性.     

Large high resolution displays for co-located collaborative sensemaking: Display usage and territoriality

From an exploratory user study using a fictional textual intelligence analysis task on a large, high-resolution vertical display, we investigated how pairs of users interact with the display to construct spatial schemas and externalize information, as well as how they establish shared and private territories. We investigated users' space management strategies depending on the design philosophy of the user interface (visualization- or document-centric). We classified the types of territorial behavior exhibited in terms of how the users interacted with information on the display (integrated or independent workspaces). Next, we examined how territorial behavior impacted the common ground between the pairs of users. Finally, we offer design suggestions for building future co-located collaborative visual analytics tools for use on large, high-resolution vertical displays.     

Content-based and collaborative techniques for tag recommendation: an empirical evaluation

The rapid growth of the so-called Web 2.0 has changed the surfers’ behavior. A new democratic vision emerged, in which users can actively contribute to the evolution of the Web by producing new content or enriching the existing one with user generated metadata. In this context the use of tags, keywords freely chosen by users for describing and organizing resources, spread as a model for browsing and retrieving web contents. The success of that collaborative model is justified by two factors: firstly, information is organized in a way that closely reflects the users’ mental model; secondly, the absence of a controlled vocabulary reduces the users’ learning curve and allows the use of evolving vocabularies. Since tags are handled in a purely syntactical way, annotations provided by users generate a very sparse and noisy tag space that limits the effectiveness for complex tasks. Consequently, tag recommenders, with their ability of providing users with the most suitable tags for the resources to be annotated, recently emerged as a way of speeding up the process of tag convergence. The contribution of this work is a tag recommender system implementing both a collaborative and a content-based recommendation technique. The former exploits the user and community tagging behavior for producing recommendations, while the latter exploits some heuristics to extract tags directly from the textual content of resources. Results of experiments carried out on a dataset gathered from Bibsonomy show that hybrid recommendation strategies can outperform single ones and the way of combining them matters for obtaining more accurate results.     

Experiencing flow with instant messaging and its facilitating role on creative behaviors

The goal of this study is to explore how experiencing flow with IM, an Internet-based communication technology, can facilitate an individual’s perception on creativity. We argue that certain capabilities in IM, telepresence and perceived control, provide users a means to experience flow. We further investigate whether flow and its outcomes, positive affect and exploratory behavior have any influence on the perception of creativity of the users. Using an online survey with 207 observations we found that user’s perceived control over the technology and its ability to transport the user to a virtual environment were shown to facilitate the experience of flow. We found that flow in itself does not influence perceived expected creativity in its users but does indirectly influence perceived expected creativity through exploratory behavior and positive affect. From these initial findings we believe that our study provides implications for both users and designers on IT. Furthermore, managers can apply the findings during implementation and use of interactive information technologies for communications in the workplace.     

基于交互式流量回放的用户行为仿真技术

流量回放可为网络靶场提供逼真的流量数据并支持网络新技术验证与安全评测。面向复杂虚拟网络的交互式用户行为仿真需求,设计一种交互式流量链路的用户行为仿真架构。采用基于云平台的分布式流量仿真策略,以实现面向复杂虚拟网络用户的行为仿真多样化和可扩展加载。对交互式流量回放过程中延时修复与补偿策略进行研究,提升交互式用户行为仿真的时序逼真性。仿真实验结果表明,该仿真架构能够在保证流量时序准确性的前提下,实现交互式的大规模用户行为仿真,与传统的ITRM、Tcpreplay等方法相比,在仿真行为的多样性、规模性、逼真性上具有一定优势,可为安全评测提供有效支撑。     

基于博弈论与区块链融合的◢k◣-匿名位置隐私保护方案

基于移动用户的位置服务中,通常采用位置k-匿名技术保护用户的隐私安全性。然而,用户协作构建k-匿名组中难以保证请求用户和协作用户的诚信合作行为。针对以上问题,首先基于完全信息静态博弈理论分析请求用户和诚信用户的行为策略,计算请求用户的诚信阈值,协作用户根据请求阈值与协同阈值的比较决定是否参与匿名组构建;其次,构建信誉机制将用户的近期表现与收益结合,约束参与匿名组构建的请求用户及协作用户的不诚信行为;最后,使用区块链存储博弈过程和协作用户的位置信息,当发现请求用户和协作用户的不诚信行为时,对不诚信的用户进行信誉值和收益降低的处罚。安全分析表明,该方案能有效保护用户的位置隐私,促进请求用户与协作用户的诚信合作,同时激励更多的人参与匿名组的构建。     

Involving users early on in the design process: closing the gap between mobile information services and their users

Designing mobile information services, including mobile Internet services, mobile banking, interactive mobile television, location-based services etc. that capture a mass market has not been easy, and there have been many disappointments over the past years. There are still uncertainties with regard to the kinds of mobile services users want and need. We argue that users wants and needs depend on their context, which means that users should play an important role in the design process of mobile information services, through a structured approach in which developers and users work together. In this paper, we present a group-based approach to include the user early on in the design process in an efficient way. We have applied the group-based approach in three cases, i.e. mobile services for campus visitors, wireless applications for the process industry and services for crisis management. In all cases, involving users early on in the design process enabled the developers to gather useful information for designing mobile information services.     

Correction to: Can search result summaries enhance the web search efficiency and experiences of the visually impaired users?

There are limited studies that are addressing the challenges of visually impaired (VI) users when viewing search results on a search engine interface by using a screen reader. This study investigates the effect of providing an overview of search results to VI users. We present a novel interactive search engine interface called InteractSE to support VI users during the results exploration stage in order to improve their interactive experience and web search efficiency. An overview of the search results is generated using an unsupervised machine learning approach to present the discovered concepts via a formal concept analysis that is domain-independent. These concepts are arranged in a multi-level tree following a hierarchical order and covering all retrieved documents that share maximal features. The InteractSE interface was evaluated by 16 legally blind users and compared with the Google search engine interface for complex search tasks. The evaluation results were obtained based on both quantitative (as task completion time) and qualitative (as participants’ feedback) measures. These results are promising and indicate that InteractSE enhances the search efficiency and consequently advances user experience. Our observations and analysis of the user interactions and feedback yielded design suggestions to support VI users when exploring and interacting with search results.

     

TADEUS: seamless development of task-based and user-orientedinterfaces

Task-based and user-oriented user interfaces utilize knowledge about user tasks and user characteristics to the utmost extent. They support users throughout their work flows, and must be constructed by a development process that avoids loss of application context and involves user feedback, from requirements specification to code generation. The concepts behind the task analysis/design/end users systems (TADEUS) approach to enable seamless task-based development are a semantically rich representation scheme, a model-driven development procedure, a diagrammatic notation and unifying specification scheme. Thus, interactive applications can be developed seamlessly. Specifications comprise problem domain knowledge, work processes, user roles and personal profiles, as well as interaction modalities (required for task accomplishment). For user-interface prototyping the TADEUS environment contains a model interpreter that executes structure and behavior specifications. This way, early feedback on task-based portals can be provided by users. In this paper we detail the latest developments in the TADEUS project when implementing a work-process based usability life cycle. We review the underlying methodology and the features of the TADEUS environment, in order to demonstrate the benefits for developers and users resulting of smooth transition support for and between the different stages of development     

Interactive resource recommendation algorithm based on tag information

With the popularization of social media and the exponential growth of information generated by online users, the recommender system has been popular in helping users to find the desired resources from vast amounts of data. However, the cold-start problem is one of the major challenges for personalized recommendation. In this work, we utilized the tag information associated with different resources, and proposed a tag-based interactive framework to make the resource recommendation for different users. During the interaction, the most effective tag information will be selected for users to choose, and the approach considers the users’ feedback to dynamically adjusts the recommended candidates during the recommendation process. Furthermore, to effectively explore the user preference and resource characteristics, we analyzed the tag information of different resources to represent the user and resource features, considering the users’ personal operations and time factor, based on which we can identify the similar users and resource items. Probabilistic matrix factorization is employed in our work to overcome the rating sparsity, which is enhanced by embedding the similar user and resource information. The experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can get more accurate predictions and higher recommendation efficiency.     

The Role of Instructional Design in Persuasion: A Comics Approach for Improving Cybersecurity

Abstract

Although computer security technologies are the first line of defense to secure users, their success is dependent on individuals’ behavior. It is therefore necessary to persuade users to practice good computer security. This interview analysis of users’ conceptualization of security password guessing attacks, antivirus protection, and mobile online privacy shows that poor understanding of security threats influences users’ motivation and ability to practice safe behaviors. An online interactive comic series called Secure Comics was designed and developed based on instructional design principles to address this problem. An eye-tracking experiment suggests that the graphical and interactive components of the comics direct users’ attention and facilitate comprehension of the information. In the evaluations of Secure Comics, results from several user studies show that the comics improve understanding and motivate positive changes in security management behavior. The implication of the findings to better understand the role of instructional design and persuasion in education technology are discussed.