Evaluating the effects of frame of reference on spatial collaboration using desktop collaborative virtual environments

Spatial collaboration is an everyday activity in which people work together to solve a spatial problem. For example, a group of people will often arrange furniture together or exchange directions with one another. Collaborative virtual environments using desktop PCs are particularly useful for spatial activities when the participants are distributed. This work investigates ways to enhance distributed, collaborative spatial activities. This paper explores how different frames of reference affect spatial collaboration. Specifically, it reports on an experiment that examines different combinations of exocentric and egocentric frames of reference with two users. Tasks involve manipulating an object, where one participant knows the objective (director) and the other performs the interactions (actor). It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the different combinations for a spatial collaboration task. Findings from this study demonstrate that frames of reference affect collaboration in a variety of ways and simple exocentric-egocentric combinations do not always provide the most usable solution.     

Context aware guidance for multimedia authoring: harmonizing domain and discourse knowledge

This paper presents an approach to assist authors during the authoring of multimedia presentations. We extend the existing authoring support by integrating processes of topic identification, content collection and discourse structure building in a single environment. This integration allows identification of the context of the authoring process. Our approach combines this process context awareness with explicit domain and discourse knowledge to steer system suggestions. We evaluate our approach with an experimental system prototype.     

Putting Web Services in Context

When considering the full range of Web service-related activities, it becomes clear that dealing with context is a major challenge, requiring greater expressiveness, reasoning capabilities, and architectural components than are provided by the current widely accepted building blocks of the Web services stack. This paper presents an informal overview of concepts, requirements and challenges for handling contextual knowledge in connection with Web services, and briefly discusses several interesting projects in this area of research.     

Investigating the validity of subjective workload rating (NASA TLX) and subjective situation awareness rating (SART) for cognitively complex human–machine work

Subjective workload and situation awareness measures, such as the NASA task load index (TLX) and the situational awareness rating technique (SART), are frequently used in human–system evaluation. However, the interpretation of these ratings is debated. In this study, empirical evidence for the measures' theoretical assumptions was investigated by comparing operators' ratings collected immediately after performing a scenario and ratings collected after operators' acquisition through a video review of the scenario, knowledge of actual system states. Eighteen licensed control room operators participated in the simulator study, running 12 relatively challenging scenarios. It was found that the interpretation of TLX items involving introspection remained stable after operators acquired factual scenario knowledge, while the interpretation of items involving the perception of external events, such as situation awareness and performance, depended on the operators' scenario knowledge. The result shows that operators’ ratings could discriminate between mental effort, performance, frustration, and situation awareness. No clear evidence for the SART index as a measure of situation awareness was found. Instead, a subjective situation awareness measure developed for this study was distinct from workload and related to operator performance, showing that this type of measure warrants future investigation of its validity. The study findings help in developing measurement procedures and interpreting subjective measures. Finally, the study reveals that informing operators about the scenario can provide useful subjective ratings of situation awareness and performance. Future research should include procedures for how to inform participants adequately and efficiently in subjective assessments.     

Determinants of users’ continuance of social networking sites: A self-regulation perspective

Social networking sites (SNS) have transformed how individuals interact, build and maintain social relationships. We proposed a research model on the determinants of user continuance using Bagozzi's framework of self-regulation as the theoretical foundation. Following the process of appraisal → emotional reactions → coping responses, we developed the model by leveraging findings from social presence and IS continuance research. Based on survey data from Facebook users, we found that appraisal factors (pleasure, awareness, connectedness, and system quality) were strong determinants of emotional reaction (user satisfaction and sense of belonging). User satisfaction and sense of belonging together positively influenced continuance intention.     

Efficient data selection for speech recognition based on prior confidence estimation using speech and monophone models

This paper proposes an efficient speech data selection technique that can identify those data that will be well recognized. Conventional confidence measure techniques can also identify well-recognized speech data. However, those techniques require a lot of computation time for speech recognition processing to estimate confidence scores. Speech data with low confidence should not go through the time-consuming recognition process since they will yield erroneous spoken documents that will eventually be rejected. The proposed technique can select the speech data that will be acceptable for speech recognition applications. It rapidly selects speech data with high prior confidence based on acoustic likelihood values and using only speech and monophone models. Experiments show that the proposed confidence estimation technique is over 50 times faster than the conventional posterior confidence measure while providing equivalent data selection performance for speech recognition and spoken document retrieval.     

A formal representation for context-aware business processes

A business process is a set of activities performed in a coordinated manner within an organizational and technical environment that is aimed toward a business goal. The flexibility of a process is related to an understanding of the unexpected events that occur when people, systems and resources interact and require adjustments. Thus, business processes must be designed to respond to information about different events and their specificity. This information defines what the literature calls “context”. To broaden the perception of context in the case of a business process, this work proposes an approach to characterize the context of a business process activity in a given domain through conceptual models structured in layers. A case study was conducted to evaluate the proposal, which provided evidence of the applicability of the model.     

阿根廷工艺设计师马塞洛·卢西尼的本土意识

阿根廷首都布宜诺斯艾利斯被称为拉丁美洲的＂巴黎＂,工艺设计师马塞洛·卢西尼的自创品牌airedelsur工作室就在这个美丽的城市。他的设计充分体现了在潘帕平原这片广袤的土地上,众多的民族文化和丰富的艺术气息。运用自己国家的民族特色来进行工艺设计,使设计师马塞洛·卢西尼的创作看起来既生动又独特。他的设计是现代与民族的完美结合,看似简洁大方,其实材料和制作的过程中包含的都是阿根廷本土的民族文化。这种本土文化运用在设计领域的成功案例给处在探索中的当代中国设计师以启发。