Is talking to an automated teller machine natural and fun?

Usability and affective issues of using automatic speech recognition technology to interact with an automated teller machine (ATM) are investigated in two experiments. The first uncovered dialogue patterns of ATM users for the purpose of designing the user interface for a simulated speech ATM system. Applying the Wizard-of-Oz methodology, multiple mapping and word spotting techniques, the speech driven ATM accommodates bilingual users of Bahasa Melayu and English. The second experiment evaluates the usability of a hybrid speech ATM, comparing it with a simulated manual ATM. The aim is to investigate how natural and fun can talking to a speech ATM be for these first-time users. Subjects performed the withdrawal and balance enquiry tasks. The ANOVA was performed on the usability and affective data. The results showed significant differences between systems in the ability to complete the tasks as well as in transaction errors. Performance was measured on the time taken by subjects to complete the task and the number of speech recognition errors that occurred. On the basis of user emotions, it can be said that the hybrid speech system enabled pleasurable interaction. Despite the limitations of speech recognition technology, users are set to talk to the ATM when it becomes available for public use.     

Is compulsive internet use related to sensitivity to reward and punishment,and impulsivity?

Aim of the present study was to examine whether the personality correlates sensitivity to reward and to punishment, and impulsivity predict compulsive internet use (CIU). Furthermore, the predictive value of these personality correlates was compared to the predictive value of factors relating to psychosocial wellbeing. The results showed that particularly rash spontaneous impulsivity predicts CIU and that this personality factor is more important than psychosocial wellbeing factors. Sensitivity to reward, which is supposed to play a role in craving processes associated with substance abuse and eating disorders, could not be related to CIU. The data suggest that internet users who are characterized by an impulsive personality feature, are less able to control their use of the internet, which makes them more vulnerable to develop CIU.     

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...     

What Is Good Help? Responses to Solicited and Unsolicited Assistance

Users rarely ask for help, and they tend to respond negatively to unsolicited help, even when they can benefit from it. It is not clear whether this is due to the way systems provide help or whether people in general dislike unsolicited help. To address this issue the authors studied responses to solicited and unsolicited help from a human adviser regarding the use of an unfamiliar e-mail system. Novice users (the advisees) received spoken advice from distant experienced users (the advisers) upon the advisee’s request (the “pull” condition”) or the adviser’s initiative (the “push” condition”). Unsolicited advice helped performance more than advice requested by the advisee, but only for unfamiliar tasks and especially for difficult tasks. Although advisees perceived unsolicited advice as helpful, they were not interested in receiving such advice in the future. This study demonstrates that although advice can help to improve performance, it may still not be welcome, even when provided by a person.     

A dialogue‐based (natural language) platform for human interaction with an intelligent mining machine

A mining environment is one of the most complex and unstructured in the manufacturing industry. In order to minimize the problems associated with these characteristics, recent strategies in mining operation are to automate the task performance and to design mining machines that are “intelligent.” These strategies, among other things, will require that the human operators and the machine interact and collaborate to perform tasks in a symbiotic manner. To achieve this, a prototype dialogue‐based interaction platform has been developed. The platform known as OASIP is a knowledge‐based system driven by the operator‐planned actions and behaviors known as intentions. OASIP is an adaptive system which exploits several sources of environmental knowledge from built‐in blackboard cells.     

Where do machine learning and human-computer interaction meet?

Implementation of machine learning (ML) in human-computer interaction (HCI) work is not trivial. This article reports on a survey of 112 professionals and academicians specializing in HCI, who were asked to state level of ML use in HCI work. Responses were captured via a structured questionnaire. Analysis showed that about one-third of those who participated in the survey had used ML in conjunction with a variety of different HCI tasks. However, statistically significant differences could not be identified between those who have and those who have not used ML. Using statistics, contingency analysis, and clustering, we modeled interaction between representative HCI tasks and ML paradigms. We discovered that neural networks, rule induction, and statistical learning emerged as the most popular ML paradigms across HCI workers, although intensive learning, such as inductive logic programming, are gaining popularity among application developers. We also discovered that the leading causes for declining use of ML in HCI work are (1) misperceptions about ML, (2) lack of awareness of ML's potential, and (3) scarcity of concrete case studies demonstrating the application of ML in HCI.     

Is overparenting harmful to creativity?

Heavy parental involvement is widely believed to inhibit creativity. On the basis of this rationale and the self‐creativity literature, this study collected paired data to examine the effects of overparenting (which includes the parental arrangement of daily life affairs and parental involvement in schooling), team learning, and coaching by immediate supervisors on employee creativity (i.e., the creativity of Chinese only‐child millennial employees). The findings are described as follows. First, parental involvement in schooling had a significant and positive effect on employee creativity, and the parental arrangement of daily life affairs was inversely related to employee creativity, as in a U‐shaped relationship. Second, supervisors' coaching behaviours improved employee creativity and partially moderated the relationship between overparenting and employee creativity. Third, team learning moderated the interrelationships between overparenting, coaching behaviours, and employee creativity. This paper discusses the complex factors that shape creativity and provides recommendations regarding the parenting and recruitment of Chinese millennials.     

Will I start an automated driving system? Report on the emotions,cognition, and intention of drivers who experienced real-world conditional automated driving

Cognition, Technology & Work - The automotive market today has seen the entry of Level-3 conditional automated driving vehicles equipped with an automated driving system that waits for the...     

e-Sports: Playing just for fun or playing to satisfy life goals?

Purposee-Sports is an area of the game scene, in which computer game players specialize in a specific game, form game teams (clans), compete together in tournaments and meet at so-called LAN (Local Area Network) parties. The objective of this study was to compare the different types of e-Sports players from the perspective of their personality traits and explicit motives and to compare e-Sports players with casual players in selected life goals.MethodsA questionnaire assessing life goals (Pöhlmann & Brunstein, 1997) and basic personality traits (Personality inventory KUD, 1986) were administered to 108 e-Sports players and 54 casual computer game players.ResultsIn the group of e-Sports players, only clan leaders significantly differed in life goal power from those who were not members of any clan. Significant differences were also found between e-Sports players and casual players in terms of life goals affiliation and diversion.Conclusionse-Sports seem not only to be about playing computer games, but can also serve as a means of satisfying the need to belong. They do this by creating friendly relationships through membership in game teams and participation in LAN parties, or satisfying the need for power by upholding a position of a game team leader and determining its course of action.     

Construction of a brain–machine hybrid system to evaluate adaptability of an insect

Insects perform adaptive behavior according to changing environmental conditions using comparatively small brains. Because adaptability is generated through the relationship among brain, body and environment, it is necessary to examine how a brain works under these conditions. In this study, to understand neural processing involved in adaptive behavior, we constructed a brain–machine hybrid system using motor signals related to the steering behavior of the male silkworm moth for controlling a two-wheeled mobile robot. We developed this hybrid system according to the following steps. (1) We selected steering signals corresponding to walking direction that were activated during neck swinging induced by optic flow and pheromone stimuli. (2) To control a robot by neural activity, we implemented a spike-behavior conversion rule such that frequency of the left and right neck motor neurons’ spikes was linearly converted into rotation of the wheels. (3) For electrophysiological multi-unit recordings on a robot, we developed small amplifiers. Using this hybrid system, we could observe the programmed behavioral pattern and orientation toward a pheromone source. Moreover, we compared the orientation behavior of moths and that of the hybrid system at different pheromone stimulus frequencies. From these experiments, we concluded that we could reconstruct silkworm moth behavior on the hybrid system.     

Is eyeball temperature related to fatigue?

A study was made to determine whether eye temperature changed as a consequence of blood flow changes. The measurements on railway workers indicate a relationship between temperature and fatigue.     

Is emotion relevant to requirements engineering?

This viewpoint argues that the introduction of most computer-based system to an organization transforms the organization and changes the work patterns of the system’s users in the organization. These changes interact with the users’ values and beliefs and trigger emotional responses which are sometimes directed against the software system and its proponents. A requirements engineer must be aware of these emotions.

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Do automated program repair techniques repair hard and important bugs?

Existing evaluations of automated repair techniques focus on the fraction of the defects for which the technique can produce a patch, the time needed to produce patches, and how well patches generalize to the intended specification. However, these evaluations have not focused on the applicability of repair techniques and the characteristics of the defects that these techniques can repair. Questions such as “Can automated repair techniques repair defects that are hard for developers to repair?” and “Are automated repair techniques less likely to repair defects that involve loops?” have not, as of yet, been answered. To address such questions, we annotate two large benchmarks totaling 409 C and Java defects in real-world software, ranging from 22K to 2.8M lines of code, with measures of the defect’s importance, the developer-written patch’s complexity, and the quality of the test suite. We then analyze relationships between these measures and the ability to produce patches for the defects of seven automated repair techniques —AE, GenProg, Kali, Nopol, Prophet, SPR, and TrpAutoRepair. We find that automated repair techniques are less likely to produce patches for defects that required developers to write a lot of code or edit many files, or that have many tests relevant to the defect. Java techniques are more likely to produce patches for high-priority defects. Neither the time it took developers to fix a defect nor the test suite’s coverage correlate with the automated repair techniques’ ability to produce patches. Finally, automated repair techniques are less capable of fixing defects that require developers to add loops and new function calls, or to change method signatures. These findings identify strengths and shortcomings of the state-of-the-art of automated program repair along new dimensions. The presented methodology can drive research toward improving the applicability of automated repair techniques to hard and important bugs.     

How to find people who can help to answer a question? – Analyses of metrics and machine learning in online communities

Online communities have become important places for users to exchange information and build knowledge. In these communities, people ask and answer questions, learn with each other, but some problems may occur such as not getting an answer or getting contradictory ones. In order to increase the responsiveness of the communities, it would be important to identify people who are willing to help and who provide good answers in such communities, whom we call reliable users. We investigated various components of online communities and users’ attributes looking for a correlation between these characteristics and the users’ reputation in these communities. After that, we proposed the usage of two machine learning techniques, artificial neural network and clustering algorithm, with the users’ attributes for finding reliable sources. The results show that the usage of an artificial neural network is a good approach as around 90% of the users were correctly identified while the clustering algorithm makes to find groups of reliable users more easily.     

How close are we to solving the problem of automated visual surveillance?

The problem of automated visual surveillance has spawned a lively research area, with 2005 seeing three conferences or workshops and special issues of two major journals devoted to the topic. These alone are responsible for somewhere in the region of 240 papers and posters on automated visual surveillance before we begin to count those presented in more general fora. Many of these systems and algorithms perform one small sub-part of the surveillance task, such as motion detection. But even with low level image processing tasks it is often difficult to compare systems on the basis of published results alone. This review paper aims to answer the difficult question “How close are we to developing surveillance related systems which are really useful?” The first section of this paper considers the question of surveillance in the real world: installations, systems and practises. The main body of the paper then considers existing computer vision techniques with an emphasis on higher level processes such as behaviour modelling and event detection. We conclude with a review of the evaluative mechanisms that have grown from within the computer vision community in an attempt to provide some form of robust evaluation and cross-system comparability.     

Is computational complexity a barrier to manipulation?

When agents are acting together, they may need a simple mechanism to decide on joint actions. One possibility is to have the agents express their preferences in the form of a ballot and use a voting rule to decide the winning action(s). Unfortunately, agents may try to manipulate such an election by mis-reporting their preferences. Fortunately, it has been shown that it is NP-hard to compute how to manipulate a number of different voting rules. However, NP-hardness only bounds the worst-case complexity. In this survey article, we summarize the evidence for and against computational complexity being a barrier to manipulation. We look both at techniques identified to increase complexity (for example, hybridizing together two or more voting rules), as well as other features that may change the computational complexity of computing a manipulation (for example, if votes are restricted to be single peaked then some of the complexity barriers fall away). We discuss recent theoretical results that consider the average case, as well as simple greedy and approximate methods. We also describe how computational ??phase transitions??, which have been fruitful in identifying hard instances of propositional satisfiability and other NP-hard problems, have provided insight into the hardness of manipulating voting rules in practice. Finally, we consider manipulation of other related problems like stable marriage and tournament problems.     

Autonomous trucks: an affront to masculinity?

Autonomous (or self-driving) vehicle technology has become a commercial reality in a number of cars being driven on public roads around the globe. However, this technology is not only confined to cars. It is equally applicable to trucks and there is speculation that it will be autonomous trucks that will hit the roads first because they operate in ‘a less complicated traffic environment’ and are therefore ideal starting points for the coming automated vehicle market.¹1 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/06/nevada-self-driving-trucks-public-roads-daimler-inspiration, last accessed 15 December 2016. For example, in May 2015, authorities granted a license to Daimler to test its self-driving trucks on public roads in the US State of Nevada.²2 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/06/nevada-self-driving-trucks-public-roads-daimler-inspiration, last accessed 15 December 2016. These use a series of different technologies, including video cameras and radar, which, when applied in an incremental way, allow drivers to take breaks, although there must always be a qualified driver at the wheel.³3 M Taylor and P Maynard, “Self-driving cars” (2015) 21(5), CTLR 133, 134. It is clear to see the benefits of self-driving trucks to trucking companies, who could use them to transport goods across much longer distances and without all of the scheduled breaks than is presently possible with human truck drivers. But what about the impact on the image of the retained drivers themselves? Traditionally, truck drivers have been men and this representation is well-entrenched in a variety of media. Does the introduction of self-driving truck technology represent an attack on the masculinist truck driving culture as portrayed in TV shows such as ‘Ice Road Truckers’ or ‘Outback Truckers’. If so, is such a change to be encouraged or is the historical image (though objectionable to some) worthy of protection? Given that self-driving trucks could be available for purchase from the middle of the coming decade, the socio-legal aspects of self-driving truck technology will be reflected on and the degree to which this issue can be contemplated at law addressed.