Book Reviews

Abstract

Hypertext Hands-on! An Introduction to a New Way of Organizing and Accessing Information by Ben Shneiderman and Greg Kearsley. Addison-Wesley Publishing Co (1 Jacob Way, Reading MA 01867-9984). 1989, 165 pp. Includes bibliography and diskette copies of both the text of the book and a limited feature version of Hyperties, a software program for browsing and authoring in hypertext. Price: $26.75.     

Age differences in the performance of hypertext perusal as a function of text topology

The present study examined the extent to which age had impacts on the performance of hypertext browsing and navigation as a function of text topology. Twenty senior adults and 20 younger adults (mean ages = 68.95 and 23.60 respectively) participated in an experiment where three levels of text linearity were manipulated. Results showed the older adult accessed fewer numbers of text nodes than the younger counterpart, which suggests that the aged appear at a disadvantage in browsing breadth. The older adult's less oriented browsing was evidenced by the larger number of nodes repeatedly visited, particularly when the network topology was perused. As for navigation, older people experienced greater disorientation given that they searched more links to locate the target node. This age difference was mainly derived from the disorientation occurring at the hybrid and network levels, with the hybrid condition resulting in the severest navigation confusion due to its mixed text structure. Implications for the design of hypertext that accommodates the age differences are discussed.     

Effects of the presentation characteristics of dual dynamic information text on comprehension using an LCD monitor

Abstract— This study investigated the effects of the presentation method, presentation rate, type of flickering character presented in a dynamic headline, and spacing between the headline and the display window on reading moving Chinese text in a single‐line display. Eighty‐three subjects aged 14–18 years of age completed 27 experimental treatments consisting of three presentation methods (i.e., leading format, rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), with full display window, and RSVP with clause), three presentation rates (80, 155, and 230 cpm), and three types of flickering characters (twinkling, rotating, and shrinking) presented in a headline. The spacing between the headline and the display window (0.4 vs. 0.7 vs. 1.0 cm) served as the between‐subjects factor. Results showed that comprehension accuracy was lower for dynamic text presented in the leading format than for that presented in the RSVP format with a full display window or with clause. Comprehension accuracy was also lower in response to a presentation rate of 230 cpm than to a presentation rate of 80 cpm. Analyses indicated that the spacing between the headline and the display window significantly affected comprehension accuracy; the rate of accurate responses was greater with a spacing of 1.0 cm than with a spacing of 0.4 cm. However, the type of flickering characters did not significantly affect comprehension accuracy. Implications of these results for designing dynamically presented Chinese text on a Web site are discussed.     

A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF AN INTELLIGENT NARRATOR FOR INTERACTIVE NARRATIVES

One goal of interactive narrative and drama is to create an experience while utilizing the computer where the user is one main character in the story. This goal raises a set of practical and theoretical challenges to artificial intelligence. In particular, an intelligent narrator has to dynamically maintain a satisfactory storyline and adapt to the user intervention.

After reviewing the existing approaches to interactive drama, an original model is described, based on several theories on narrative. This model is based on a rule-based component for the generation of meaningful narrative actions and on a model of the user for the ranking of these actions and the action selection. A simple but authorable text generation system is also described, for the display of the actions on the computer.

The system is implemented on a real-size scenario and experimental results are discussed. We conclude by discussing the possibility of a wider application of our approach within the field of AI.     

Web-log cleaning for constructing sequential classifiers

With millions of Web users visiting Web servers each day, the Web log contains valuable information about users' browsing behavior. In this work, we construct sequential classifiers for predicting the users' next visits based on the current actions using association rule mining. The domain feature of Web-log mining entails that we adopt a special kind of association rules we call latest-substring rules, which take into account the temporal information as well as the correlation information. Furthermore, when constructing the classification model, we adopt a pessimistic selection method for choosing among alternative predictions. To make such prediction models useful, especially for small devices with limited memory and bandwidth, we also introduce a model compression method, which removes redundant association rules from the model. We empirically show that the resulting prediction model performs very well.     

Integrating textual and pictorial information via pop-up windows: An experimental study

Following previous research in cognitive psychology, this paper deals with the effect of the spatial display of textpicture information on the user's cognitive processes. Two experiments were carried out to compare three displays on a computer screen: 'split' display (text and picture information displayed in separate areas on the screen), 'integrated' display (text information close to the part of the picture to which it refers), and 'pop-up' display (text information integrated in pop-up fields which appeared only via the user's action). In both experiments, the results showed that the integrated display and to a greater extent the pop-up display led to higher performances for an equal or lower learning time. Thus, these experiments reinforce the hypothesis that material where text and picture are integrated improves learning, especially if text information appears in pop-up fields. Results are discussed from a theoretical and a practical point of view.     

Establishing tradeoffs that leverage attention for utility: empirically evaluating information display in notification systems

Designing and evaluating notification systems represents an emerging challenge in the study of human–computer interaction. Users rely on notification systems to present potentially interruptive information in an efficient and effective manner to enable appropriate reaction and comprehension. Little is known about the effects of these systems on ongoing computer tasks. As the research community strives to understand information design suitable for opposing usage goals, few existing efforts lend themselves to extensibility.However, three often conflicting design objectives are interruption to primary tasks, reaction to specific notifications, and comprehension of information over time. Based on these competing parameters, we propose a unifying research theme for the field that defines success in notification systems design as achieving the desirable balance between attention and utility. This paradigm distinguishes notification systems research from traditional HCI by centering on the limitations of the human attention system.In a series of experiments that demonstrate this research approach and investigate use of animated text in secondary displays, we describe two empirical investigations focused on the three critical parameters during a browsing task. The first experiment compares tickering, blasting, and fading text, finding that tickering text is best for supporting deeper comprehension, fading best facilitates reaction, and, compared to the control condition, none of the animated displays are interruptive to the browsing task. The second experiment investigates fading and tickering animation in greater detail with similar tasks—at two different speeds and sizes. Here, we found smaller displays allowed better reaction but were more interruptive, while slower displays provides increased comprehension. Overall, the slow fade appears to be the best secondary display animation type tested. Focusing research and user studies within this field on critical parameters such as interruption, reaction, and comprehension will increase cohesion among design and evaluation efforts for notification systems.     

Web access monitoring mechanism via Android WebView for threat analysis

Many Android apps employ WebView, a component that enables the display of web content in the apps without redirecting users to web browser apps. However, WebView might also be used for cyberattacks. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, although some countermeasures based on access control have been reported for attacks exploiting WebView, no mechanism for monitoring web access via WebView has been proposed and no analysis results focusing on web access via WebView are available. In consideration of this limitation, we propose a web access monitoring mechanism for Android WebView to analyze web access via WebView and clarify attacks exploiting WebView. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of this mechanism by modifying Chromium WebView without any modifications to the Android framework or Linux kernel. The evaluation results of the performance achieved on introducing the proposed mechanism are also presented here. Moreover, the result of threat analysis of displaying a fake virus alert while browsing websites on Android is discussed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.

     

A multimodal corpus of simulated consultations between a patient and multiple healthcare professionals

Language resources for studying doctor–patient interaction are rare, primarily due to the ethical issues related to recording real medical consultations. Rarer still are resources that involve more than one healthcare professional in consultation with a patient, despite many chronic conditions requiring multiple areas of expertise for effective treatment. In this paper, we present the design, construction and output of the Patient Consultation Corpus, a multimodal corpus of simulated consultations between a patient portrayed by an actor, and at least two healthcare professionals with different areas of expertise. As well as the transcribed text from each consultation, the corpus also contains audio and video where for each consultation: the audio consists of individual tracks for each participant, allowing for clear identification of speakers; the video consists of two framings for each participant—upper-body and face—allowing for close analysis of behaviours and gestures. Having presented the design and construction of the corpus, we then go on to briefly describe how the multi-modal nature of the corpus allows it to be analysed from several different perspectives.

     

The role of cue utilisation in reducing the workload in a train control task

Abstract

Skilled performance has been characterised, in part, by the capacity to accurately identify and respond to patterns as cues in the environment. The outcome is a reduction in cognitive load and a greater residual capacity to undertake concurrent tasks. The present study was designed to examine the relationship between cue utilisation and temporal pattern recognition in the context of a simulated, rail control task. Sixty-one university students undertook an assessment of cue utilisation and engaged in a rail control simulation. The appearance and movement of trains followed a consistent but implicit (undisclosed) pattern. Throughout the second half of the rail task, a secondary task was included. The results indicated that participants with relatively higher cue utilisation were more likely to identify the implicit pattern of rail movements, were more accurate and responded more rapidly under increased workload conditions. The results suggest that a propensity to identify patterns as cues may provide an opportunity to reduce cognitive demands, thereby facilitating performance in a novel task. Implications for selection and system design are discussed.

Practitioner Summary: This study was designed to explain differences in the way in which people learn, particularly when tasks involve recurring patterns. Using simulated rail control, the results indicated that participants who display behaviour that is indicative of the utilisation of cues also recognise patterns in the movement of simulated trains. This enables them to manage trains more effectively, even while undertaking other tasks.     

A theory of personalisation of appearance: quantitative evaluation of qualitatively derived data

Abstract

This paper suggests three motivations for the strong interest in human factors' aspects of user interfaces and reviews five design issues: command language versus menu selection, response time and display rates, wording of system messages, on-line tutorials, explanations and help messages and hardware devices. Five methods and tools for system development are considered: participatory design, specification methods, software implementation tools, pilot studies and acceptance tests and evolutionary refinement based on user feedback.

The final portion of the paper presents direct manipulation, an approach which promises to become widely used in interactive systems. Direct manipulation involves representation of the object of interest, rapid incremental reversible actions and physical action instead of complex syntax.     

BashDungeon

We present here the first of a series of video-games designed for teaching fundamentals of computer science to university students. We built the game as an adventure inside a dungeon, which aims at reproducing the topology of a Unix file system. Inside the different rooms, the players can learn how to use several Unix commands, from simple file system actions to complex text manipulations, to complete the quests and win the game. We performed a user test on a class of B.Sc. students at the University of Cagliari. The results show a good acceptance of the game metaphor and its effectiveness in supporting the learning process. We plan to expand this game and to design similar games for teaching object-oriented programming and algorithms and data structures.

     

Auditory display design—An investigation of a design pattern approach

We present the evaluation of a methodological design framework that supports expert and novice designers in creating auditory artefacts in human–technology interaction. We first motivate the development of our framework by analysing available guidance and the current practice in the field. Subsequently, we recapitulate on the design of the framework—paco, pattern design in the context space—and present its key concepts and methods. The evaluation of paco aimed to investigate how useful this framework is in a real-world environment. It was conducted in two phases: experts in auditory display design first captured successful designs through paco and created a body of design patterns. These patterns were subsequently used in a controlled experiment with novice designers who were given a design task that forced them to use audio. The results demonstrate that paco has facilitated the transfer of design knowledge and good practice from experts to novices through design patterns. The context space, a key concept in paco, improves the contextual awareness of designers and provides an organising principle for problems, patterns and artefacts. We close by reflecting on the results and discussing future lines of research.     

Discovering novel memory cell designs for sentiment analysis on tweets

Designing a Recurrent Neural Network to extract sentiment from tweets is a very hard task. When using memory cells in their design, the task becomes even harder due to the large number of design alternatives and the costly process of finding a performant design. In this paper we propose an original evolutionary algorithm to address the hard challenge of discovering novel Recurrent Neural Network memory cell designs for sentiment analysis on tweets. We used three different tasks to discover and evaluate the designs. We conducted experiments and the results show that the best obtained designs surpass the baselines—which are the most popular cells, LSTM and GRU. During the discovery process we evaluated roughly 17,000 cell designs. The selected winning candidate outperformed the others for the overall sentiment analysis problem, hence showing generality. We made the winner selection by using the cumulated accuracies on all three considered tasks.

     

A framework for reuse of user experience in Web browsing

This paper examines aspects affecting user behaviours in Web browsing with a discussion of existing models for both the computer and human aspects of Web browsing. Problems in Web information retrieval are analysed and studies related to the reuse of user experience in Web browsing are reviewed. An object-oriented model for user behaviours in Web browsing is proposed in which both the information from the Web and the information retained by users are modelled as objects. Thus, user actions on the Web are described as a graph of objects or transformations from one object to another. A framework for reuse of user experience is provided. The possible methods of reusing Web browsing experience are described for the scenario of reusing by oneself (history mechanism, prediction) or reusing by others (collaborative filtering, instructions).     

Individual differences in hypertext browsing strategies

The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in web browsing strategies between older and younger participants and also between individuals displaying verbaliser and imager cognitive styles. Typically, verbalisers process information in word form, whereas imagers process information in terms of images. Ten minutes each were allowed to 58 participants to read information in either a hierarchical or relational hypertext with the expectation of answering questions on this information. Browsing strategies were assessed firstly by using three indices of browsing patterns (number of pages visited, proportion of pages visited and pages revisited) and secondly by analysing assessments of browsing strategies given by independent judges. Differences were found between imagers and verbalisers for the indices of browsing patterns, with verbalisers visiting more pages in the hierarchical architecture and imagers visiting more pages in the relational architecture. Similarly, differences were noted between younger and older participants, with the younger groups visiting more pages in the hierarchical condition and the older groups visiting more pages in the relational condition. No differences were observed for the judge's ratings of browsing strategy. The findings have possible implications for the design of web-based instructional systems.