Where to Look? Automating Attending Behaviors of Virtual Human Characters

This research proposes a computational framework for generating visual attending behavior in an embodied simulated human agent. Such behaviors directly control eye and head motions, and guide other actions such as locomotion and reach. The implementation of these concepts, referred to as the AVA, draws on empirical and qualitative observations known from psychology, human factors and computer vision. Deliberate behaviors, the analogs of scanpaths in visual psychology, compete with involuntary attention capture and lapses into idling or free viewing. Insights provided by implementing this framework are: a defined set of parameters that impact the observable effects of attention, a defined vocabulary of looking behaviors for certain motor and cognitive activity, a defined hierarchy of three levels of eye behavior (endogenous, exogenous and idling) and a proposed method of how these types interact.     

Is It Easy to Recognize Baby's Age and Gender?

Face analysis tasks,e.g.,estimating gender or age from a face image,have been attracting increasing interest in recent years.However,most existing studies focus...     

How do Virtual Badges Incentivize Voluntary Contributions to Online Communities?

Online communities rely heavily on badges to incentivize users to participate in voluntary activities. We examine the relationship between earned badges/pursued badges and contributions in the Stack Overflow question and answer community. Our main results reveal that different levels of earned and pursued badges increase the amount of subsequent answering activity. In addition, earned gold badges are the most influential in the motivation of users while earned bronze badges are the least impactful. Furthermore, the effect of badges involves positive spillovers from higher levels of earned badges to lower ones. Our findings offer important theoretical and managerial implications for online communities.     

Are we addicted to our cell phones?

Cellular telephone use has become extremely widespread over the past several years. There has been concern that current high levels of cell phone use may be compared to a behavioral addiction. However, this has yet to be thoroughly tested. This area of research also lacks in determining what the causes and consequences of consistent cell phone use may be. The present study examined the prevalence of characteristics of a cell phone addiction among a university student population along with possible predictors of high frequency use. Participants were a total of 152 undergraduate students (n = 35 males and n = 117 females). It was hypothesized that anxiety, as measured using self-report questionnaires, would increase upon having access to one's cell phone limited for high frequency users. However, anxiety only increased when participants had their cell phone sitting in front of them and were instructed not to use them. Predictors and variables hypothesized to be related included social anxiety, social connectedness, and addiction-proneness. Results indicated that social anxiety and addiction-proneness are significant predictors of frequent cell phone use, but social connectedness has no significant connection. This study provided insights into why cell phones are sometimes used so compulsively, and if frequency of cell phone use is becoming so high that it is becoming a new behavioral addiction.     

Are Domain-Specific Models Easier to Maintain Than UML Models?

Domain-specific modeling (DSM) languages have been adopted in many industries, but these languages haven't yet gained wide acceptance in practice. This is because the claims of increased productivity and ease of understanding haven't been verified by independent studies. To address this concern, this article compares the maintenance performance of the Enterprise Mobile Application DSM (EMADSM) language and UML. Maintenance in software-intensive systems is critical because software often continuously evolves not only during development but also after delivery, to meet users' ever-changing needs. So, maintenance performance significantly impacts software development productivity. Study results show that maintenance is significantly easier and faster with EMADSM than with UML. This finding has considerable implications for companies that maintain evolving systems.     

Basic-needs to globalization: Are ICTs the missing link?

The discourse on globalization intersects with assumptions about how new information and communication technologies can generate economic growth in less developed countries. This paper is a critical review of some of these assumptions. It argues that the current processes of globalization cannot on their own foster economic development because globalization is inherently dialectical. It can create wealth for some countries while at the same time, it can impoverish others thus further accentuating the marginalization of many countries. The paper concludes by suggesting ways in which less developed countries can stay “connected” with the global economy while at the same time pursuing development strategies that will meet the basic needs of the majority of their populations.     

R U There? How to Reach a Virtual Audience Through Affordable Marketing Strategies

ABSTRACT

Virtual reference is a vital service component of many libraries. Whether serving college students or the general public, a real-time reference service demands highly trained staff and quality resources. What can administrators do to make sure their users make the most of this cutting-edge service? The University at Buffalo (UB) was one of the first universities to establish a virtual reference service. Known as Instant Librarian, the chat room thrives as a major public service without placing a drain on staff or budget. This article discusses the marketing strategies UB applies to chat reference, including advertising, use of icons, and user surveys for assessment.     

Are urban public libraries websites accessible to Americans with Disabilities?

Universal Access in the Information Society - This paper examines to what extent the 129 members of the Urban Public Libraries Council meet the Section 508 standards for accessibility...     

Are We There Yet? A Technique to Determine Theoretical Saturation

Although the concept of theoretical saturation (ThS) was first introduced by Glaser and Strauss's grounded theory methodology, it is now more widely used as a fundamental concept in interview-based qualitative research. Despite its widespread use, the concept is nebulous and lacks systematization. An extensive literature review in 2007, and again in 2013, shows that this inexactitude characterizes most claims for using ThS. Yet qualitative methodologists seem strangely reluctant to accept criticism or possible improvement. By assuming ThS to be an analogue of the principle of diminishing returns, we propose a quantitative technique for determining ThS using lognormal distribution principles. Applying the technique to three large data sets provided strong evidence that the method is efficacious. Usefully, this study also shows both that the technique is not affected by the order of interviews and that corpus size is not necessarily a true indication of theoretical saturation.     

How Many Queries Are Needed to Learn One Bit of Information?

In this paper we study the question how many queries are needed to halve a given version space. In other words: how many queries are needed to extract from the learning environment the one bit of information that rules out fifty percent of the concepts which are still candidates for the unknown target concept. We relate this problem to the classical exact learning problem. For instance, we show that lower bounds on the number of queries needed to halve a version space also apply to randomized learners (whereas the classical adversary arguments do not readily apply). Furthermore, we introduce two new combinatorial parameters, the halving dimension and the strong halving dimension, which determine the halving complexity (modulo a small constant factor) for two popular models of query learning: learning by a minimum adequate teacher (equivalence queries combined with membership queries) and learning by counterexamples (equivalence queries alone). These parameters are finally used to characterize the additional power provided by membership queries (compared to the power of equivalence queries alone). All investigations are purely information-theoretic and ignore computational issues.     

Are the postures adopted according to requested linguistic categories similar to those classified by the recording protocols?

Knowledge on how workers perceive and associate their postures for trunk flexion with respect to linguistic categories, could allow for the development of simple and valid instruments for self-assessment and for more effective postural training. Considerable time and expense could be saved if reliable self-assessments were available. This study describes the anterior flexion angles of the trunk adopted by individuals according to linguistic categories (mild, moderate and severe) and registered by photograph. The postures were compared with postural recording protocols. Twenty sedentary individuals (10 male and 10 female) and 12 industrial female workers (6 healthy and 6 low back sufferers) participated. Subjects were capable of discriminating linguistic postural categories, since they adopted different trunk postures when distinct categories were requested (p< 0.0001). However, the individual variability was high for each category estimated. This could explain, at least in part, the low level of agreement between self-assessment and observational studies.     

Can eye movements be effectively measured to assess product design?: Gender differences should be considered

This study investigates the relationship between eye movements and user emotional response to product features using eighteen product images as stimuli. The stimuli are composed of unpleasant, neutral and pleasant images. Regarding the emotional design, gender difference could be a major factor that should be taken into consideration. A task-free eye-tracking experiment was conducted in which forty participants (20 males and 20 females, mean age = 35.6, SD = 6.38, range 21–48 years) looked at randomly displayed product images. The eye movements of participants were measured while viewing product images. After viewing stimuli, participants rated immediately their emotional response to the product images on a seven-point scale. The results revealed that stimuli category and gender difference, caused different variations in fixation count, fixation duration, pupil diameter, and hit ratio. For stimuli category, participants have larger fixation count, fixation duration, pupil diameter, and hit ratio in response to pleasant and neutral product images than unpleasant product images. For gender difference, the results indicated that females provided larger scores in fixation count and fixation duration, but a smaller score in hit ratio in all stimuli than that provided by males. However, the measurement of pupil diameter yielded different results. The results showed that females provided larger pupil diameter in pleasant and neutral product images but a smaller pupil diameter in unpleasant product images than that provided by males, which is consistent with the result of subjective ratings.Relevance to industryThese findings could enable industrial counselors, product designers, and academics to categorize emotional response that can be subsequently incorporated into final product design. An understanding of gender-based processing differences of product features is important to designers since it enables them to communicate with these different market segments and to produce effective products for each segment.     

Are We Ready to Innovate? Work Climate‐Readiness to Innovate Relationship: The Case of Jordan

This paper aims at understanding the role of work climate in influencing employees’ innovation. The study consists of two core concepts: work climate and readiness to innovate. By surveying a sample of 1000 employees from 20 industrial companies in Jordan, it investigates the impact of work climate on employees’ readiness to innovate. The results reveal that employees’ perceptions of their work climate tend to play a significant role in their readiness to innovate, with implications for both practitioners and researchers. An interesting finding is that older employees showed higher climate satisfaction reports than did younger employees, and were found to be more innovative. In addition, male employees reported higher levels of readiness to innovate – as rated by themselves – than did their females counterparts.     

Are We There Yet? A Roadmap of Network Visualization from Surveys to Task Taxonomies

Networks are abstract and ubiquitous data structures, defined as a set of data points and relationships between them. Network visualization provides meaningful representations of these data, supporting researchers in understanding the connections, gathering insights, and detecting and identifying unexpected patterns. Research in this field is focusing on increasingly challenging problems, such as visualizing dynamic, complex, multivariate, and geospatial networked data. This ever-growing, and widely varied, body of research led to several surveys being published, each covering one or more disciplines of network visualization. Despite this effort, the variety and complexity of this research represents an obstacle when surveying the domain and building a comprehensive overview of the literature. Furthermore, there exists a lack of clarification and uniformity between the terminology used in each of the surveys, which requires further effort when mapping and categorizing the plethora of different visualization techniques and approaches. In this paper, we aim at providing researchers and practitioners alike with a “roadmap” detailing the current research trends in the field of network visualization. We design our contribution as a meta-survey where we discuss, summarize, and categorize recent surveys and task taxonomies published in the context of network visualization. We identify more and less saturated disciplines of research and consolidate the terminology used in the surveyed literature. We also survey the available task taxonomies, providing a comprehensive analysis of their varying support to each network visualization discipline and by establishing and discussing a classification for the individual tasks. With this combined analysis of surveys and task taxonomies, we provide an overarching structure of the field, from which we extrapolate the current state of research and promising directions for future work.     

Are you talking to me? An Audio Augmented Reality conversational guide for cultural heritage

Augmented Reality (AR) technologies are increasingly utilized as a means of stimulating immersive experiences to cultural site visitors, mainly through visual superimposition of interactive digital elements onto the physical world. Recent research has investigated the use of Audio AR (AAR) in heritage sites, wherein visitors listen to spatially registered sound which could be attributed to ‘talking’ physical artefacts. A parallel trend in the audience engagement programs of cultural institutions involves the employment of AI chatbots which are engaged in dialogues with followers or visitors to provide meaningful responses to a number of user questions. Herein, we present Exhibot, an intelligent audio guide system aiming at enhancing the user experience of cultural site visitors. Exhibot involves the combination of AAR and chatbot technologies to enable natural visitor-exhibit interaction, while also leveraging IoT devices to contextualize the delivered information. The key contribution of the proposed system lies in the interplay of AAR, chatbot and IoT technologies to create immersive learning experiences in the context of an integrated cultural guide system. Exhibot has undergone field trials to validate its usability and utility in realistic operational conditions. As a case study, we have chosen the statue of a prominent politician situated at a central square in Heraklion, Greece. The evaluation results indicated a very positive attitude of users, which is attributed both to the sense of immersion evoked by the AAR-powered storytelling and the natural human-like conversation enabled by the chatbot.     

Are governments ready to issue smart citizens’ cards? The Industry thinks so.

Two major players in the smart card business, Bull Smart Cards & Terminals (France) and ICL (UK), have decided to put their weight behind developing chip technology for use in citizens’ ID cards.