Mobile map interactions during a rendezvous: exploring the implications of automation

Location awareness can help facilitate a rendezvous of two or more persons. To further enhance the rendezvous experience, we conducted two complementary field studies to identify what information in a location-aware map application is important to rendezvous individuals (study 1) and to explore the use of autofocus, our automation technique to reduce user interactions with the rendezvous application while still providing relevant information to assist users with their navigation task (study 2). Overall, our results highlight the importance of maintaining the visibility of the user’s location in relation to that of their partner(s) and rendezvous location. Additionally, we show that automation is useful in the context of a rendezvous application, but that the considerations are significantly more nuanced than originally conceived. We discuss unique instances when and why the automation process broke-down or did not perform as required by users. The results of this work demonstrate the potential for automation in a location-aware rendezvous application and identify important design considerations for future work in this area.     

Designing for ubiquity: the perception of privacy

Ubicomp researchers have long argued that privacy is a design issue, and it goes without saying that successful design requires that we understand the desires, concerns, and awareness of the technology's users. Yet, because ubicomp systems are relatively unusual, too little empirical research exists to inform designers about potential users. Complicating design further is the fact that ubicomp systems are typically embedded or invisible, making it difficult for users to know when invisible devices are present and functioning. As early as 1993, ubicomp researchers recognized that embedded technology's unobtrusiveness both belies and contributes to its potential for supporting potentially invasive applications. Not surprisingly, users' inability to see a technology makes it difficult for them to understand how it might affect their privacy. Unobtrusiveness, nevertheless, is a reasonable goal because such systems must minimize the demands on users. To investigate these issues further, I conducted an ethnographic study of what I believe is the first US eldercare facility to use a sensor-rich environment. Our subjects were normal civilians (rather than ubicomp researchers) who lived or worked in a ubiquitous computing environment. We interviewed residents, their family members, and the facility's caregivers and managers. Our questions focused on how people understood both the ubiquitous technology and its effect on their privacy. Although the embedded technology played a central role in how people viewed the environment, they had a limited understanding of the technology, thus raising several privacy, design, and safety issues.     

The ubiquity of discovery

As scientists interested in studying the phenomenon of “intelligence”, we first choose a view of Man, develop a theory of how intelligent behavior is managed, and construct some models which can test and refine that theory. The view we choose is that Man is a processor of symbolic information. The theory is that sophisticated cognitive tasks can be cast as searches or explorations, and that each human possesses (and efficiently accesses) a large body of informal rules of thumb (or heuristics) which constrain his search. The source of what we colloquially call “intelligence” is seen to be very efficient searching of an a priori immense space. Some computational models which incorporate this theory are described. Among them is AM, a computer program that develops new mathematical concepts and formulates conjectures involving them; AM is guided in this exploration by a collection of 250 more or less general heuristic rules. The operational nature of such models allows experiments to be performed upon them, experiments which help us test and develop hypotheses about intelligence. One interesting finding has been the ubiquity of this kind of heuristic guidance: intelligence permeates everyday problem solving and invention, as well as the kind of problem solving and invention that scientists and artists perform. The ultimate goals of this kind of research are (i) to de-mystify the process by which new science and art are created, and (ii) to build tools (computer programs) which enhance man's mental capabilities.     

The Internet: from here to ubiquity

Gives an analysis of and recommendations for the future of the Internet. We need a fully developed Internet to give us competition, deregulation, economic growth, social change, high productivity and new, record sales of hardware and software. The author wants to see the Internet grow everywhere in the USA, with access for poor and rich, seniors and children, English and non-English speakers alike. He also wants to see the Internet provide a key answer to the problem of competition in the local telephone markets     

User sensitive research in e-learning: exploring the role of individual user characteristics

The increasing need for active and accessible learning in the inclusive knowledge society drives the demand for e-learning that engages users much more effectively than ever before. In this context, it is crucial to conduct research that embraces innovation in user sensitive design, or else influential individual user differences may be overlooked. The objective of this paper is to explore the creation of successful e-learning systems that are able to increase users’ learning performance and enhance their personal learning experiences. The paper reports two converging and complimentary approaches, namely case studies and experimentation. First, case studies are used to explore the extent to which effective e-learning systems comply with eight specific factors. Of the eight, accessibility, individual differences and student modeling turn out to be the weakest points in current practice. Second, an empirical study investigates the influences of user individual user differences on users’ learning outcomes in an e-learning environment. The experiment found that individual differences in motivation to learn and expectations about e-learning significantly impacted users’ learning achievements. Third, based on these studies, improvements in research methodology are identified towards greater consideration of user sensitive research issues, thus enabling us to outline improved experimental procedures. Further experiment results should provide us with better insights into the arguments needed to carefully assess benefits of developing and involving a user model in an e-learning application. Consequently, evaluation and justification could now encompass both system performance as well as user performance.     

基于改进模糊算法的移动机器人避障

为了提高移动机器人在连续障碍物环境下的避障性能,提出了一种具有速度反馈的模糊避障算法。移动机器人利用超声传感器感知周围环境,在模糊控制的基础上通过障碍物分布情况调整自身速度,进而引入优雅降级并把改进的模糊避障融入其中,增强了移动机器人的鲁棒性。实验结果表明,该方法能通过与环境交互调整机器人移动速度,控制机器人成功避障并优化避障路径,具有良好的有效性。     

Information systems design: through adaptivity to ubiquity

In a globalised economy the accessibility of services becomes increasingly important for businesses. This has led to a demand that information systems should be ubiquitous in the sense that they are available to all users under all circumstances, everywhere and at all times, and independent of the access devices and channels used. The authors believe the key to meeting that demand is existence of an omnipresent media of interaction and existence of information systems that within that media adapt themselves to context parameters at run-time. The World Wide Web is considered as that omnipresent media. Thus, the task is left to design adaptive information systems in a way that avoids unnecessary replication. In this article it will be shown how context parameters can be utilised to enable system adaptivity. The latter is supposed to increase usability and targets the quality of use, the content, and the functionality. We propose using an algebraic approach that aids in providing the leanest appropriate interface via user typing and story boarding. Our approach furthermore limits the content delivered to a user to the amount that can be dealt with in a usage scenario. The latter is based on defining hyphenation points within the content.

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Multi-device application middleware: leveraging the ubiquity of the Web with webinos

The broad range of connected devices has turned the Internet into a ubiquitous concept. In addition to desktop and laptop PCs, the Internet currently connects mobile devices, home entertainment systems, and even in-car units. From this ubiquitous evolution towards sensor-rich devices, the opportunity arises for various new types of innovative software application. However, alongside rises the issue of managing the increasing diversity of device characteristics and capabilities. As device fragmentation grows, application developers are facing the need to cover a wider variety of target devices and usage scenarios. In result, maintaining a viable balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be an important challenge when developing applications for a ubiquitous ecosystem. In this article, we present the webinos platform, a distributed Web runtime platform that leverages the Web for supporting self-adaptive cross-device applications. In order to enable the development of such immersive ubiquitous applications, we introduce and evaluate the concept of a context-aware federated overlay architecture.     

The force of wilderness within the ubiquity of cyberspace

Wilderness and cyberspace are opposites and yet are poorly defined and set off against each other. Wilderness, in fact, is enveloped by cyberspace and so seems to have become disposable and replaceable. The legal delimitation of wilderness requires us, however, to stop and consider how to cross over into it, and if entered thoughtfully, the wilderness can teach us to recognize how, within cyberspace, it has attained a new kind of sacred force.     

Presenting natiOnal resources to audiences locally: exploring the role of external resources in institutional portals

This article outlines the ongoing work of the Presenting natiOnal Resources To Audiences Locally (PORTAL) project. The project, funded under the Joint Information Systems Committee's (JISC) FAIR programme, is addressing a number of issues associated with the deployment of institutional portals within the UK tertiary education sector and looking specifically at the integration of external resources. This article draws together the results of several project deliverables and presents work in the context of the growing interest in institutional portals and national development activities in this area. The article concludes that the inclusion of external resources within institutional portals offers the potential to enhance the institutional information environment, but that such developments must be undertaken in the context of the evolving needs of both users and content providers.     

Towards ubiquity in ambient intelligence: User-guided component mobility in the HI architecture

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems need to be as transparent as possible, that is, their users should perceive only the effects of the features presented to them and, in some cases, some kind of interface. They should not be conscious of how these features are implemented, from a hardware or from a software point of view.     

Breaking or keeping the habits: exploring the role of legacy habits in the process of discontinuing organisational information systems

Users develop habits in relation to information systems (IS) to reduce the cognitive and behavioural efforts needed for using them. However, when these systems have to be discontinued, users face challenges regarding how to stop relying on their legacy habits. Despite their importance, we know little about how legacy habits shape the way users discontinue a legacy system. Through a comparative case-study approach, in a large mortgage firm and an international telecommunication company, we identify three roles that these habits play during the discontinuance process. We demonstrate that legacy habits not only play an ‘inhibiting’ role by keeping users attached to legacy systems; they also play a ‘bridging’ role by acting as a common ground for users to start working with a new system and a ‘deterring’ role when users resent certain habits of working with the legacy systems, despite their orientation to keep relying on these habits. We contribute to the IS habit literature by extending the roles of legacy habits beyond an inhibiting role. We also enrich the conceptualisation of legacy habits beyond the individual level by showing that the socio-technical conditions in which the habits are embedded impact the emergence and evolution of their roles during the discontinuance process. We discuss the implications of our findings for theorising and managing IS discontinuance process.     

Investigating the moderating role of uncertainty avoidance cultural values on multidimensional online trust

Building online trust and understanding its relationship to online customer purchase decision making is important to e-commerce companies. We decided to investigate the moderating role of uncertainty avoidance on the relationship between subjective norms and online trust (integrity, ability, and benevolence) as well as purchase intention on a model we had developed. We generated a questionnaire and first pilot tested it (n = 116), and then modified it before performing the main test of our model (n = 209). Specifically, trust (cognition and affect based) was adapted to better understand social and cultural factors in online customer behavior. Uncertainty avoidance was found to moderate the relationships between subjective norms and two dimensions of cognition-based trust, (integrity and ability). Benevolence, however, was not found to have any relationship to cultural values or purchase intention. Normative influence on ability belief about the website was significant only when the online consumer had a high sense of uncertainty avoidance. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Mobile pupillometry in manual assembly: A pilot study exploring the wearability and external validity of a renowned mental workload lab measure

Human operators in the upcoming Industry 4.0 workplace will face accelerating job demands such as elevated cognitive complexity. Unobtrusive objective measures of mental workload (MWL) are therefore in high demand as indicated by both theory and practice. This pilot study explored the wearability and external validity of pupillometry, a MWL measure robustly validated in laboratory settings and now deployable in work settings demanding operator mobility. In an ecologically valid work environment, 21 participants performed two manual assemblies - one of low and one of high complexity - while wearing eye-tracking glasses for pupil size measurement. Results revealed that the device was perceived as fairly wearable in terms of physical and mental comfort. In terms of validity, no significant differences in mean pupil size were found between the assemblies even though subjective mental workload differed significantly. Exploratory analyses on the pupil size when attending to the assembly instructions only, were inconclusive. The present work suggests that current lab-based procedures might not be adequate yet for in-the-field mobile pupillometry. From a broader perspective, these findings also invite a more nuanced view on the current validity of lab-validated physiological MWL-measures when applied in real-life settings. We therefore conclude with some key insights for future development of mobile pupillometry.     

Revisiting the use of secondary task reaction time measures in telepresence research: exploring the role of immersion and attention

In this experimental study, we use secondary task reaction time (STRT) to measure Attention to a media presentation and compare STRT to traditional self-report measures of Telepresence (immersion, social reality, spatial presence, and transportation) and enjoyment. Further, we compare the STRT measure with the composite items of Telepresence–Immersion. The results indicate that STRT may be useful for measuring some sub-dimensions of Telepresence. Implications are discussed.     

GameSense: game-like in-image advertising

Considering the continuously increasing availability and accessibility of multimedia contents via social networking sites, our research addresses how to monetize the social multimedia contents with an efficient advertising approach. This paper presents a novel game-like advertising system called GameSense, which is driven by the compelling contents of online images. The contextually relevant ads (i.e., product logos) are embedded at appropriate positions within the online games, which are created on the basis of online images. The ads are selected based on multimodal relevance, i.e. text relevance, user relevance and visual content similarity. The game is able to provide viewers rich experience and thus promotes the embedded ads to provide more effective advertising. GameSense represents one of the first attempts toward effective online mashup applications which connect a photo-sharing site with an advertising agency. The effectiveness of GameSense is evaluated over a large-scale real world image set.     

移动中间件：移动无线Internet的将来

移动计算正成为一个迅速发展的领域。然而由于移动环境的种种限制,为开发移动应用带来巨大的挑战。文章讨论解决此问题的一种新兴技术：移动中间件技术,并提出一个移动中间件的实际应用体系结构,为移动终端设备提供一种简单、安全的方法访问已存在的分布式对象系统。     

Material light: exploring expressive materials

The control of material appearance has become richer than before, giving designers new expressive freedom. Designers need tools and techniques to handle this freedom when designing products. We present a simple but powerful technique to explore material expression in the conceptual phase of the design process. Colours and patterns are projected on foam and paper models to enable designers to quickly visualise and judge materials in context of the products shape. This paper is part of the 3AD design colloquium creative connections.     

Why smartphone advertising attracts customers: A model of Web advertising,flow, and personalization

Thirty-five percent of US adults own a smartphone and more than seventy-three percent of the population in South Korea owns a smartphone in the first quarter of 2013. The number of people that use a smartphone has radically increased. Smartphone users always maintain connectivity, and frequent and swift communication with others. As the mobile advertising market is drastically expanded, advertisers and companies should be more attentive to effective smartphone advertising. This study suggests a comprehensive advertising model that combines a Web advertising model, personalization and flow theory in understanding the antecedents of purchase intention and influence processes in the context of smartphone advertisements. The results show that personalization has a positive association with informativeness, credibility, and entertainment of the advertising message while having a negative association with irritation. Purchase intention is increased by advertising value and flow experience. Advertising value has a positive relationship with credibility, entertainment, and incentives. Flow experience is positively associated with credibility, entertainment, incentives. Irritation negatively affects flow experience but advertising value. This study theoretically contributes to the application of the smartphone advertising model and practically contributes influential factors for effective advertising to marketers and advertisers.