The impact of online real-time interactivity on patronage intention: The use of avatars

The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of online real-time interactivity on the desire of users to visit and to purchase products/services from the company in the future. Online real-time interactivity has been increased by the use of avatars. We also investigated the antecedents of online real-time interactivity by focusing on trust, emotional appeal, and social presence. As far as the methodology is concerned, we designated companies using avatars on their websites. We asked respondents to visit these websites and then fill in our questionnaire. We received 945 questionnaires back. As we had several latent variables, we used partial least squares (PLS), a variance-based structural equation modeling method. The results show that online real-time interactivity significantly increases the patronage intention. The results also illustrate the impact of the degree of trust and the emotional appeal on user's perception about the online real-time interactivity. Nevertheless, the impact of the emotional appeal is less relevant compared to the degree of trust. Moreover, the degree of trust in the information found on the website explains user's emotional appeal during the conversation. Finally, avatar's social presence has a significant impact on trust and emotional appeal. Our results have immediate and direct implications for avatars' developers and companies who want to invest in improving the real-time interactivity of their website.     

How Motion-Control Influences a VR-Supported Technology for Mental Rotation Learning: From the Perspectives of Playfulness,Gender Difference and Technology Acceptance Model

ABSTRACT

Spatial training has been shown to help student’s university retention rates and performance. The goal of this study is: (1) to explore users’ acceptance of a virtual-reality-supported technology for mental-rotation learning and (2) to examine the effects of interactivity and gender on acceptance. Little is known about whether college students nowadays perceive motion-control and virtual-reality technology as novel and interesting and how gender affects their acceptance of technology. Two learning programs were developed using motion-control and virtual-reality technologies. Learners could actively manipulate the learning object or they could only passively learn. User’s acceptance of the training program (rather than mental-rotation performance) was compared. Results showed higher levels of perceived playfulness, ease of use, usefulness, and use-intention scores were found in motion-control training, suggesting interactivity is still attractive. However, gender difference was also found. While perceived ease of use was a major contributor to training use-intention for both genders, influence of perceived playfulness on use-intention was found only in women.     

Mitigating the harmful effects of technostress: inducing chaos theory in an experimental setting

ABSTRACT

This research investigates the role of users’ proactive personality when they mitigate the adverse impacts of ICT's (information and communication technologies’) technostress in an experimental setting. Further, this study examines genuinely two types of individuals’ proactive personality, i.e. confront and transform. Both types can handle ICT's technostress creators by different attitudes and behaviours. This article contributes to a novelty by inducing chaos theory. This inducement laid in the experimental setting that the users had been in a chaotic situation. Results of this research show that users’ proactive personality mitigates the negative impact of ICT's technostress on their performance and satisfaction. This study found that the user's proactive personality, rested in a chaotic situation, does mitigate greatly. This research finds that users’ performance and satisfaction are higher to the proactive personality verging to the transform than that of confront. It implies that information system managers should consider the ICT user's characteristics. Besides, it means that ICT's developer should make users do their innovativeness.     

基于SOM神经网络的服务质量预测

服务质量预测在服务计算领域中是一个热点研究问题.在历史QoS数据稀疏的情况下,设计一个满足用户个性化需求的服务质量预测方法成为一项挑战.为解决这一挑战问题,本文提出一种基于SOM神经网络的服务质量预测方法SOMQP.首先,基于历史QoS数据,应用SOM神经网络算法分别对用户和服务进行聚类,得到用户关系矩阵和服务关系矩阵;进而,综合考虑用户信誉和服务关联性,采用一种新的Top-k选择机制获得相似用户和相似服务;最后,采用基于用户的和基于项目的混合策略对缺失QoS值进行预测.在真实的数据集WS-Dream上进行大量实验,结果表明,与经典的CF算法和K-means算法相比,本文方法较大程度上提高了QoS预测精度.     

Understanding users’ continuous content contribution behaviours on microblogs: an integrated perspective of uses and gratification theory and social influence theory

ABSTRACT

Microblogs are revolutionising the way users produce, consume and distribute short content. The continuous content contributions of users are crucial for the sustainable development of microblogs. Knowledge regarding this user behaviour is scarce. Based on the uses and gratifications theory (U&G) and the social influence theory (SIT), this paper proposes an integrated research model with the aim of understanding the factors that affect users’ continuous content contribution behaviours (CCCB) on microblogs. The data were collected from 379 microblog users in China. The empirical results indicate that perceived gratification had a positive but surprisingly trivial effect on continuous content contribution behaviours. Social influence had a strong and significantly positive effect on users’ CCCB, it also had a positive moderating effect on the relationship between perceived gratification and CCCB. Users’ perceived gratification was positively affected by the antecedents of self-expression, anticipated extrinsic rewards and anticipated reciprocity but negatively affected by privacy concerns. The platform attributes of microblogs (i.e. accessibility and interactivity) also influenced users’ perceived gratification. This research contributes to social media research with regards to the theory of users’ CCCB.     

Falcon: On-line monitoring for steering parallel programs

Advances in high performance computing, communications and user interfaces enable developers to construct increasingly interactive high performance applications. The Falcon system presented in this paper supports such interactivity by providing runtime libraries, tools and user interfaces that permit the on-line monitoring and steering of large-scale parallel codes. The principal aspects of Falcon described in this paper are its abstractions and tools for capture and analysis of application-specific program information, performed on-line, with controlled latencies and scalable to parallel machines of substantial size. In addition, Falcon provides support for the on-line graphical display of monitoring information, and it allows programs to be steered during their execution, by human users or algorithmically. This paper presents our basic research motivation, outlines the Falcon system's functionality, and includes a detailed evaluation of its performance characteristics in light of its principal contributions. Falcon's functionality and performance evaluation are driven by our experiences with large-scale parallel applications being developed with end users in physics and in atmospheric sciences. The sample application highlighted in this paper is a molecular dynamics simulation program (MD) used by physicists to study the statistical mechanics of liquids. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Guest editorial: Integrating organizational and cognitive approaches towards computer-based systems

The paper reports on an investigation into the users of financial dealing room systems in the City of London. These subjects have used a wide range of interactive systems for a number of years. Retrieving information from such systems is an integral and important part of the professional work of a financial dealer. Use of specific systems and specific features is often discretionary. The results obtained indicate that these users can display expert performance with a subset of each system. The same users also displayed novice performance with a large proportion of the functionality of the same systems. The pattern of known and unknown functions varied from user to user, but appeared not to be related to the user's job tasks. Accommodating such users in the design of future userinterfaces is discussed. Parallels with previous studies into discretionary and casual users are drawn.     

Bird in the wire: creativity,resistance, networked citizenships

ABSTRACT

This paper contemplates the extent to which online music-making and sharing practices can be understood as acts of creative citizenship. While the digital is often lauded as a mechanism by which citizens may engage creatively with local or national communities, this paper contends that it may equally represent a means for disengagement with those groups, by instead facilitating participation in the transnational, diasporic communities that have long prospered on the Internet. Possible motivations for this are multifarious and context-dependent, but often signify an act of resistance: against artistic and commercial institutions, against creatively oppressive states, against the cultural isolation of an immediate environment. This paper holds that this type of digitally mediated creative engagement—that which arises as a specific reaction to a perceived inadequacy in one’s civic life—might be best understood through the lens of creative citizenship. In order to assess the relationship between online creative communities and their offline counterparts, it employs Wellman and Castells' notion of ‘networked individualism’, and contextualizes its ideas by referring to recent studies in online amateur music-making in Iran, where the digital is often regarded as a way of circumnavigating the creative oppression of the state.     

Enhancement of math content accessibility in EPUB3 educational publications

ABSTRACT

The article presents methods of increasing mathematical content accessibility in educational e-publications using multimodal user interfaces (UI). Educational mathematical publications such as exercise notebooks and worksheets, require student's interactivity in problem solving. EPUB3, an open format for e-publications, has the possibilities of creating multimedia, interactive mathematics content. Among the programs that support EPUB3, only a few support the MathML format presenting formulas, and provides limited possibilities for user interactivity, insufficient in mathematical education. Our solutions in the PlatMat system increase the interactive accessibility of EPUB3 mathematical content for students with visual impairment. The solutions are based on concurrent multimodal alternative interfaces for exploring math content in EPUB3 publications. Students can read and modify formulas choosing preferred UI and device. Similarly, in different modes (visual, acoustic and touch) students can recognise function graphs and shapes of geometrical figures saved in scalable vector graphics (SVG) format. Teachers can create universal mathematical documents for all students. The system supports inclusive maths education and is designed according to the principles of universal design for learning (UDL). The article describes the system’s usefulness in relation to research conducted among maths teachers. Positive results have become the basis for the further development of the system.     

Managing Trust in Social Networks

ABSTRACT

The huge diffusion of Web-based social networks increases the risks for users, including identity theft, personalized phishing, and malware. Effective mechanisms for trust evaluation can help to identify malicious users and contrast these risks.

In this paper, we propose an approach to evaluate trust based on the history of the activity of each user. This guarantees robustness (it is difficult to be artificially reproduced by an attacker) and is reliable (as it does not rely on user-generated tags or keyword but it makes an analysis of users' conversation).     

Providing Reference in a Joint-Use Library

SUMMARY

As a one of a kind joint-use facility between a private university and a county government, the Alvin Sherman Library, Research, and Information Technology Center at Nova Southeastern University (NSU) provides reference services to both NSU students on and off campus and public users. Reference librarians have had to adjust to the variety of users and demands for new services and at the same time find new and creative methods of offering, promoting, and providing instruction about their services to public users as well as NSU's local and distance students. Tracking statistics can assist in identifying user needs.     

Ambient interaction and situational influence: case studies in public sites

Abstract

An audience's direct physical intervention is widely believed to be instrumental in the field of interactive art. However, this long established expectation faces new challenges through the increasing accessibility of a growing diversity of interactive technologies and ubiquitous smart media. Such innovations are often fully integrated components of interactive public artworks, many of which do not directly involve audiences or individuals as key agents in the functional or aesthetic realisation of the work. Based on three case studies of interactive artworks in public places, this article identifies an important characteristic of interactivity in interactive art, through the largely unexplored concept of “Ambient Interaction” in which artworks are embodied and enacted through environmental conditions and situational influences rather than exclusively through people's intentional and direct physical engagement.     

Using Data Normalization Techniques for Effective Data Base Design

Abstract

Today's users want to access their data through fourth-generation languages, or 4GLs, and microcomputers. More flexible data bases are required to satisfy this growing need. These data bases must be based on the data as perceived by users, not as viewed by a system—the normalized approach to data base design provides for this. Data bases can be built that satisfy user needs and establish a logical design done only once regardless of the DBMS or computer system that will subsequently use the data.     

Inferring user intent to interact with a public service robot using bimodal information analysis

ABSTRACT

Achieving polite service with a public service robot requires it to proactively ascertain who will interact with it in human-populated environments. Enlightened by interactive inference of intentions among humans, we investigate a novel and practical interactive intention-predicting method for people using bimodal information analysis for a public service robot. Different from the traditional research, only the visual cues are used to analyze the user's attention, this method combines the RGB-D camera and laser information to perceive the user, which realizes the 360-degree range perception, and compensates for the lack of perspective using the RGB-D camera. In addition, seven kinds of interactive intent features were extracted, and a random forest regression model was trained to score the interaction intentions of the people in the field of view. Considering the inference order of two different sensors, a priority rule for intention inference is also designed. The algorithm is implemented into a robot operation system (ROS) and evaluated on our public service robot. Extensive experimental results illustrate that the proposed method enables public service robots to achieve a higher level of politeness than the traditional, passive interactivity approach in which robots wait for commands from users.     

Information Security Tradeoffs: The User Perspective

Abstract

When taking a typical approach to computer security, one could make the following relatively extreme statements: A piece of data can be rendered completely secure with 100 percent assurance. Simply write the data on a piece of paper, burn the paper, and scatter the ashes. No one will be able to read or alter that data ever again. Of course, this exercise and the underlying premise are a trick. Understanding the deception is the key to understanding information security: Data that is being “protected” has to remain available to legitimate users. There is a strong tendency for information security researchers and practitioners to focus on “securing” data by preventing attacks and loss of data. An IS practitioner's job might depend on preventing and recovering from security-related problems. However, increased monitoring and enhanced use of security controls can easily lead to interference and delays of information usage for legitimate users.     

Usability aspects,socio-relational context and learning performance in the virtual classroom: A laboratory experiment

This paper presents a virtual classroom laboratory experiment involving real users. The main aim was to test the effects of two multimedia system configurations with a different degree of interactivity on usability aspects, socio-relational context and learning performance. Results confirm the effectiveness of the multimedia system both in terms of technical and psychological features. No difference between the two configurations was detected for usability and socio-relational factors while learning performance increased in the less interactive configuration. This suggests that for a specific task and for specific learners, less interactive configurations are preferable as they require less technological and training resources. Results are also discussed in terms of the implications for the basic features of multimedia systems used in the virtual classroom and on the correct procedures for training teachers and learners in the use of the equipment.     

The Future of Wireless Communications

Abstract

Just a few years ago, wireless LANs were seen as a strategic means of meeting the demands of today's highly dynamic work environments and mobile users. Today's 100-Mbps and 1-Gbps wired LANs have blunted this notion.     

It Takes a Library to Support Distance Learners

ABSTRACT

The Rochester Institute of Technology Wallace Library's philosophy is to create and provide resources and services that will support all users. Consequently, distance learners and distance faculty have a plethora of online resources available to them, some of which are “pushed out,” saving time and effort for the library user. The evolvement of Wallace's online resources is continuous, focused on the student or professor's research need from a geographic distance.     

User-centred design does make a difference. The case of decision support systems in crop production

This paper lends weight to the argument that user-centred design is important in design and development of software systems by describing the case of decision support systems for crop production. Decision support systems (DSS) are increasingly being seen as useful mechanisms for the transfer of scientific knowledge and 'best practice'; particularly in the field of agriculture. Although many systems have been developed, few can be termed 'successful' (i.e. have a significant uptake by intended users, and used by them). This paper provides evidence to support the importance of a user-centred approach by showing that each issue considered to be relevant to the failure of DSS in crop production can be addressed by the appropriate inclusion of users in the design and development process. Positive evidence in the shape of successful systems that have employed UCD is also presented.     

Optimizing conditions for computer-assisted anatomical learning

An experiment evaluated the impact of two typical features of virtual learning environments on anatomical learning for users of differing visuo-spatial ability. The two features studied are computer-implemented stereopsis (the spatial information that is based on differences in visual patterns projected in both eyes) and interactivity (the possibility to actively and continuously change one's view of computer-mediated objects). Participants of differing visuo-spatial ability learned about human abdominal organs via anatomical three-dimensional (3D) reconstructions using either a stereoptic study phase (involving stereopsis and interactivity) or using a biocular study phase that involved neither stereopsis nor interactivity. Subsequent tests assessed the acquired knowledge in tasks involving (a) identification of anatomical structures in anatomical 2D cross-sections (i.e. typical Computed Tomography pictures) in an identification task, and (b) localization of these cross-sections in a frontal view of the anatomy in a localization task. The results show that the stereoptic group performed significantly better on both tasks and that participants of low visuo-spatial ability benefited more from the stereoptic study phase than those of high visuo-spatial ability.