A company-office system “Valentine” providing informal communication and personal space based on 3D virtual space and avatars

In this paper we propose a virtual office environment that integrates natural communication and secure private space. The features of this system are the following. (1) This system has a virtual shared room based on the idea of “shared room metaphor” and 3D graphics on an SGI workstation is used for this system. It uses Ethernet media (i.e. real-time audio/video streams). (2) This system implements the field of view of a human by using our “around view” technique. This provides more natural communication between members. (3) “Sound effects” are used to help users feel the presence of other members. For instance, members hear the sound of a door opening when someone logs into our system and the sound of footsteps when someone is walking around our virtual room. (4) At times our system limits the flow of awareness information. A person concentrating on his/her work may not want to perceive excessive awareness of others. To support such situation, we define “awareness space” which restricts the field where other members' awareness is transmitted. Awareness space changes in size with the degree of concentration which is measured through two factors: the movement of a chair and the frequency of keyboard typing. (5) “Headphone metaphor”. A picture of a headphone is attached above a person's image and changes color depending on the degree of concentration. This enables other members to recognize his/her state and can be a criterion as to whether he/she is available to communicate or not. (6) In the virtual space, users are represented as avatars built of 3D polygons and still pictures. The avatars change shape automatically according to the users' action.     

“Damned if you do,damned if you don’t”: Media frames of responsibility and accountability in handling a wildfire

Previous research on media framing of wildfire has chiefly been concerned with the nature of wildfire in the context of climate change and with framing effects on policy and public opinion. Empirical studies on media content, hence what is mediated to crisis managers and the public concerning authorities’ and the public's response, seem to be largely missing. This is remarkable, given that the media represent main sources of information that may influence crisis management and shape public opinion. Thus, the aim of this study was to identify key media frames relating to portrayals of public and authority responses during and after a wildfire crisis. The study is based on media articles from two time periods: immediately after the fire and 1 year later. We used a thematic method of analysis (TA), thus an inductive, “bottom‐up” approach. A core frame, Responsibility/accountability is identified, underpinned by two sub‐themes. One sub‐theme relates to the causes of the fire and its escalation, revealing a number of different interrelated blame frames. The second sub‐theme refers to management of the crisis, reflecting both authorities’ and citizens’ responses. The deficiencies of the former are implicitly suggested to have forced citizens to act to compensate for their inadequacy. The main theoretical contribution is the identification of an interrelationship between frames in relation to different groups of individuals responding to a crisis, pointing to a more complex view of framing effects. In addition, results show how media tend to assess crisis management based on idealistic criteria, inevitably making the evaluation negative. This contributes to an understanding of how media blame frames, thus “blame games,” may unfold. Practical implications of these results are discussed.     

Modeling and Algorithms for Multiagent Communication through Interactive Dynamic Influence Diagrams

Communication is an important resource for multiagent coordination. Interactive Dynamic Influence Diagrams (I-DIDs) have been used extensively in multiagent planning when there is uncertainty, and they are recognized graphical representations of Interactive Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (I-POMDPs). We establish a communication model among multiple agents based on the I-DID framework. We use the AND-communication method by assuming a separate communication and action phase in each step, rather than replacing domain actions, in order that communication facilitates better domain-action selection. We use a synchronized communication type: when an agent initiates communication, all of the agent’s teammates synchronize to share their recent observations. We give a general algorithm to calculate communicative decision from a single-agent perspective by comparing expected rewards with and without communication. Finally, we use multiagent “tiger” and “concert” problems to validate the model’s effectiveness.     

A computational approach to measuring the correlation between expertise and social media influence for celebrities on microblogs

Social media influence analysis, sometimes also called authority detection, aims to rank users based on their influence scores in social media. Existing approaches of social influence analysis usually focus on how to develop effective algorithms to quantize users’ influence scores. They rarely consider a person’s expertise levels which are arguably important to influence measures. In this paper, we propose a computational approach to measuring the correlation between expertise and social media influence, and we take a new perspective to understand social media influence by incorporating expertise into influence analysis. We carefully constructed a large dataset of 13,684 Chinese celebrities from Sina Weibo (literally ”Sina microblogging”). We found that there is a strong correlation between expertise levels and social media influence scores. Our analysis gave a good explanation of the phenomenon of “top across-domain influencers”. In addition, different expertise levels showed influence variation patterns: e.g., (1) high-expertise celebrities have stronger influence on the “audience” in their expertise domains; (2) expertise seems to be more important than relevance and participation for social media influence; (3) the audiences of top expertise celebrities are more likely to forward tweets on topics outside the expertise domains from high-expertise celebrities.     

面向沉浸式流场可视化的多视图数据管理方法

由于沉浸式环境下的三维交互方式对二维界面操作不够友好,使得依赖于二维列表界面的流场数据管理任务变得复杂且低效。为了实现沉浸式虚拟环境下对流场数据高效的组织和管理,增强用户对流场空间信息的理解,提出一种基于多视图结合交互的沉浸式流场可视化数据块管理方法。该方法构建了一个三维小视图用于提供场景概览,并通过“主视图交互+小视图辅助“”小视图交互+主视图反馈”等多种多视图组合交互方式完成对多块流场数据的管理交互操作。最后构建了一个基于手势的沉浸式流场可视化系统,定义多项交互任务,从学习时长、完成时间和用户反馈几个方面对比了多视图方法和传统交互方法差异。实验结果表明,相比于传统交互方法,多视图方法可以显著提高数据管理任务的效率。     

Making Decisions on Innovation: Meetings or Networks?

Within some streams of thinking in the management of innovation and product development, the crux is the manager's active engagement in the evaluation, selection and control of the various activities through gate and portfolio meetings in which information is presented and decisions are made that manage innovation projects at a distance. This traditional managerial perspective regards the meetings as (important) ‘obligatory passage points’ but cannot explain a number of observations that reveal few decisions being made at those meetings. A network process perspective on the management of innovation is derived as an alternative to the normative linear view. This alternative perspective makes it possible to explain how innovation projects actually consist of myriad actions, negotiations, and micro‐decisions in the effort to create strong networks, leaving few decisions for the official gate and portfolio meetings. Through the analysis of two cases, this paper demonstrates how project managers work to stabilize the network in order to involve numerous human and non‐human actors and to encourage more and more of them into joining the network. Successfully establishing stable networks and successfully filling the templates for their projects leaves little room – and requires little intervention – for decision makers at portfolio meetings, where approvals are sought rather than decisions made. This study explains how gate and portfolio management meetings are, in some instances, better viewed as checkpoints rather than as decision meetings, how decision making is displaced from the meetings, and how the use of gate and portfolio management systems have created a number of mandatory templates which must be dealt with by the project managers. These mandatory documents function as boundary objects between and among the different worlds of the actors involved and establish new obligatory passage points in the management process; thus boundary objects become transformed into obligatory passage points. Implications for managers and research are outlined, including methods of dealing with the management of product innovation projects when the focus shifts from planning, preparations and decision making toward the co‐creation of technology and markets and involves interessement of human and non‐human actors.     

Your place or mine? Learning from long-term use of Audio-Video communication

Workstations and personal computers are increasingly being delivered with the ability to handle multimedia data; more and more of us are linked by high-speed digital networks. With multimedia communication environments becoming more commonplace, what have we learned from earlier experiences with prototype media environments? This paper reports on some of our experiences as developers, researchers and users of flexible, networked, multimedia computer environments, or “media spaces”. It focusses on the lessons we can learn from extended, long-term use of media spaces, with connections that last not hours or days, but months or years. We take as our starting point a set of assumptions which differ from traditional analytical perspectives. In particular, we begin from the position that that real-world baseline is not always an appropriate point of comparison for new media technologies; that a set of complex and intricate communicative behaviours arise over time; and that media spaces connect not only individuals, but the wider social groups of which they form part. We outline a framework based on four perspectives — individual, interactional, communal and societal — from which to view the behaviour of individuals and groups linked by multimedia environments. On the basis of our long-term findings, we argue for a view of media spaces which, first, focuses on a wider interpretation of media space interaction than the traditional view of person-to-person connections, and, second, emphasises emergent communicative practices, rather than looking for the transfer of face-to-face behaviours.     

Quantitative Measurements of the Influence of Participant Roles during Peer Review Meetings

Peer review meetings (PRMs) are formal meetings during which peers systematically analyze artifacts to improve their quality and report on non-conformities. This paper presents an approach based on protocol analysis for quantifying the influence of participant roles during PRMs. Three views are used to characterize the seven defined participant roles. The project view defines three roles: supervisor, procedure expert and developer. The meeting view defines two roles: author and reviewer, and the task view defines the roles reflecting direct and indirect interest in the artifact under review. The analysis, based on log-linear modeling, shows that review activities have different patterns, depending on their focus: form or content. The influence of each role is analyzed with respect to this focus. Interpretation of the quantitative data leads to the suggestion that PRMs could be improved by creating three different types of reviews, each of which collects together specific roles: form review, cognitive synchronization review and content review.     

A naturalistic decision-making perspective on anaesthetists’ rule-related behaviour

As a widely recognised feature of work activity, procedural violations have been of considerable interest to human factors specialists, and several models have been proposed to aid in understanding their occurrence. A common feature of these models is that they depict violations as being, to a greater or lesser extent, intentional; therefore, rule-related behaviour could be reconceptualised as an exercise in decision-making. In this paper, we examine anaesthetists’ use of rules from the perspective of naturalistic decision-making. Doing so suggests that their rule-related behaviour is a product of the extent to which following a rule is consistent with other principles that guide their decision-making. Observational and interview data from 23 consultant anaesthetists indicated the presence of three such principles: “doing the right thing”; “doing what works in the circumstances”; and “using one’s skills and expertise”. Hence, rule-related behaviour in this setting is better understood as a form of situated action than as the following or breaking of rules per se. We discuss the implications of this view for understanding why violations occur, and how to address them.     

Speed, International Security, and "New War" Coverage in Cyberspace

Mass media representations foster a view that the “War on Terror” is taking place both everywhere and nowhere, presenting Western governments with an opportunity to mobilize public support in new and ubiquitous ways. Starting with Virilio’s critique of technology, speed, and de‐territorialization, this article discusses the ways in which mass support is mobilized by the state in conventional pursuit of geopolitical objectives. Drawing on contemporary international relations theory, the authors introduce the concept of “securitization” and discuss how war coverage in cyberspace has been used to securitize international threats, such as “global terrorism,” to justify state intervention, including war. It is concluded that one of the paradoxes of war coverage in cyberspace is that whereas cyber‐technologies should democratize the politics of war by liberating access to information about war, the state has coopted information and communication technologies to facilitate new forms of mass mobilization for war itself.     

A comprehensive study of parameters in physical environment that impact students’ focus during lecture using Internet of Things

We describe and analyze the impact of several parameters of the physical environment in a classroom on students’ focus, where the term “focus” refers to the students’ subjective feeling of their ability to concentrate on a lecture at a given moment. The primary goal is to identify those parameters that significantly affect students’ focus during the lectures. We had measured several parameters in a real classroom environment using different low-cost smart devices. The research is based on the dataset collected from 14 recorded lectures attended by 197 students. We had measured five parameters of the physical environment and extracted 22 features from the lecturer’s voice. After analyzing collected measurements, we had identified eight parameters that have shown to have statistically different values for “focused” and “not focused” segments. We used obtained dataset to test different classifiers and their ability to correctly classify “focused” against “not focused” segments of the lectures. We found out that AdaBoost M1 classifier had the best overall recognition accuracy (86.78%). After performing additional series of trials we identified three parameters that could be removed from the original dataset without changing classifier’s accuracy, which left us five uncorrelated parameters that have shown to have significant impact on students’ focus.     

What Interactivity Means to the User Essential Insights into and a Scale for Perceived Interactivity

The selection and use of media depend largely on how users perceive such media. A central aspect of the “new media” is their interactivity, but how users perceive this phenomenon has rarely been researched. This study provides an in‐depth investigation into the perception component of interactivity and develops a compact scale for its measurement. According to psychological approaches, practical uses (affordances) – not physical or technical characteristics – guide perception. While existing scales mostly measure whether the “interactive” technical features of devices or websites are noticed, our instrument is based on the affordances that interactivity provides. Consequently, a new research design, the use‐identified meaning, was implemented. This is the first study on interactivity that empirically examines a wide range of Internet‐based services, thus meeting the broad ambit of interactivity. Our results generally validate the existing constructs, which are largely based on technical characteristics, yet provide additional insights into the relevant contexts and the subjective significance of different aspects of interactivity.     

Ten years of visualization of business process models: A systematic literature review

Business process modeling is an essential task in business process management. Process models that are comprehensively understood by business stakeholders allow organizations to profit from this field. In this work, we report what is being investigated in the topic “visualization of business process models”, since visualization is known as improving perception and comprehension of structures and patterns in datasets. We performed a systematic literature review through which we selected and analyzed 46 papers from two points of view. Firstly, we observed the similarities between the papers regarding their main scope. From this observation we classified the papers into six categories: “Augmentation of existing elements”, “Creation of new elements”, “Exploration of the 3D space”, “Information visualization”, “Visual feedback concerning problems detected in process models” and “Perspectives”. The less explored categories and which could represent research challenges for further exploration are “Visual feedback” and “Information visualization”. Secondly, we analyzed the papers based on a well-known visualization analysis framework, which allowed us to obtain a high-level point of view of the proposals presented in the literature and could identify that few authors explore user interaction features in their works. Besides that, we also found that exactly half of the papers base their proposals on BPMN and present results from evaluation or validation. Since BPMN is an ISO standard and there are many tools based on BPMN, there should be more research intending to improve the knowledge around this topic. We expect that our results inspire researchers for further work aiming at bringing forward the field of business process model visualization, to have the advantages of information visualization helping the tasks of business process modeling and management.     

Gendering the digital body: women and computers

As we live in a culture where “everything can be commodified, measured and calculated and can be put in the competitive market for sale, detached from its roots and purpose,” there is need to redefine our humanness in terms of the changing nature of science, technology, and their deeper impact on human life. More than anything else, it is Information Technology that now has tremendous influence on all spheres of our life, and in a sense, IT has become the destiny of our life. And this is where the real trauma lies. On the one hand, our being in the cyberspace opens up new and exciting horizons before us; on the other hand, we ourselves are changed and transformed in the process. The virtual world transforms human users to a problem-solver technocrat. The speed at which Information Technology is changing the way that youth around the world are socializing, playing, and researching, it is the common practice now for a 15-year old to go home and update their MySpace page, followed by playing online games, or looking up the new trendy YouTube video. These forms of technology are often the topic of adolescent conversations as YouTube, blogs, e-magazines, Face book, MySpace, iPhones, and iPods dominate the commercial and social networking market. Some researchers refer to this phenomenon as ubiquitous technology drawing attention to the fact that ubiquitous technology acknowledges the speedy adoption of day-to-day use of technology as a global phenomenon. In this background, this article aims at revisiting the question, “What is to be human in the era of Ubiquitous Technology?” From a feminist perspective, one can still redefine the boundaries between femininity and masculinity in the context of IT and its impact on our lifestyle and thought style. While examining the ways in which our definitions of “woman” and “man” are shifting in this new communication environment, Elizabeth Lane Lawley observes that we cannot fix a single center from which the experiences of women with computer and communication systems can be viewed and that such fixity would only serve to deepen inequities rather than exposing and removing them. She finally submits, “It is possible to use new theoretical perspectives on the shifting boundaries of gender definitions to rethink a previously deterministic view of the effect of new technologies on society, and particularly the effect of those technologies on women. While the gradual absence of the subject from the field of Artificial Intelligence leads to the invisibility of feminine care along with social and relational nature of man, some feminists dismiss the biological sex distinction on such issues and encourage females to ‘imitate man’ and to become more aggressive, assertive and dominating” (Lawley 1993). What are the possible impacts of this new technology on the so-called feminine traits of our human nature? How far our definitions of “woman” and “man” are shifting in this new communication environment? This is what this article seeks to explore.     

Silverlight和WCF的媒体管理系统

媒体管理系统着眼于媒体资源有效管理,包括媒体资源的收集、整理、检索、播放、解说词管理等功能。系统采用Silverlight技术实现客户端、WCF（Windows Communication Foundation）服务提供数据、LINQTOSQL操纵数据库;客户和服务器采用异步通信模式交换数据,解决客户端获取数据和客户端程序状态的控制问题。系统体现了一种基于Web2．0的技术解决方案。     

Communication support system for operators in emergency of large-scale plant

It is very important to support communications among operators in the emergency of large-scale plants. This paper deals with a communication support system for emergent situations in a hierarchical management structure for large-scale plants. Our system is based on the communication model that considers human-related factors such as “competence,” “duty,” “responsibility,” and “knowledge.” A prototype of a group communication support system is developed based on the model, and the system is evaluated for a plant example. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Medicoscapes: notes on effects of media ubiquity – The Somaliland Telemedical System for Psychiatry

The article presents theoretical comments on the theme of ‘media ubiquity’, as an introduction to the presentation of an information and communication technology ‘4’ development (ICT4D)project in the Republic of Somaliland: The Somaliland Telemedical System for Psychiatry. This project is based on use of resources of the global civil society emerging in global ‘transformations’ related to migration, media and ‘the social work of the imagination’. Whereas much new media debate departs from the assumption of media ubiquity affecting our notions of reality, the article will attempt a different perspective. It will ponder issues of collective imagination as exerted by way of such effects, i.e. in cultural forms that emerge out of media-roles in the ‘complex connectivity’ in globalisation processes.