Passenger comfort--an overview

In transport it is axiomatic that passenger comfort is extremely important. This paper considers the concept of comfort and its relationship to the passenger's other travel experiences. The papers which follow in this special issue are then introduced and briefly discussed. The paper concludes with a section which considers factors in the transport environment likely to influence comfort but which have not been covered elsewhere in this issue. These factors include: temperature, ventilation, illumination, photic stimulation, pressure changes on the ear, journey length and task impairment.     

Predicting passenger seat comfort and discomfort on the basis of human,context and seat characteristics: a literature review

Abstract

This literature review focused on passenger seat comfort and discomfort in a human–product–context interaction. The relationships between anthropometric variables (human level), activities (context level), seat characteristics (product level) and the perception of comfort and discomfort were studied through mediating variables, such as body posture, movement and interface pressure. It is concluded that there are correlations between anthropometric variables and interface pressure variables, and that this relationship is affected by body posture. The results of studies on the correlation between pressure variables and passenger comfort and discomfort are not in line with each other. Only associations were found between the other variables (e.g. activities and seat characteristics). A conceptual model illustrates the results of the review, but relationships could not be quantified due to a lack of statistical evidence and large differences in research set-ups between the reviewed papers.

Practitioner Summary: This literature review set out to quantify the relationships between human, context and seat characteristics, and comfort and discomfort experience of passenger seats, in order to build a predictive model that can support seat designers and purchasers to make informed decisions. However, statistical evidence is lacking from existing literature.     

Design for product experience: a study on the analepsis construction of product use

In the field of product design and development, product experience has started attracting a great deal of attention. However, assisting product designers to understand the concept of product experience, what sort of experiences they want for their products and how to include these into their design are topics that still need to be addressed. The aim of this study is to propose a design approach that begins with the use of narration and collects narration cases of product use for a specific product experience. This design approach guides designers through a four-step process, to develop a design model that fits in with the product experience. In order to better understand how this design approach works, this study takes the concept of analepsis as an example of product experience to demonstrate the process. The definition of analepsis, a term used in narratology, is “an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment.” When the term is used in the product design field, it refers to use past experiences to solve current problems. This study explores the conceptual framework of the topic and proposes a product experience-orientated design model for product design, an issue that has rarely been discussed before. Directions for future research are also discussed.     

Identifying predictors of comfort and discomfort in using hand tools

The aim of the study was to identify predictors of comfort and discomfort in using hand tools. For this purpose, the comfort questionnaire for hand tools (CQH) was developed based on the results of a previous study. In the current study, four screwdrivers were evaluated on comfort (expected comfort at first sight and comfort after short time use) using the CQH and discomfort (local perceived discomfort). The results showed that expected comfort at first sight was predicted by aesthetics. Additionally, functionality and physical interaction, and adverse body effects were the major predictors of overall comfort after short time use. Discomfort was predicted by adverse body effects only. It is concluded that comfort and discomfort in using hand tools have partly the same underlying factors: discomfort feelings also affect the comfort experience.     

Identifying predictors of comfort and discomfort in using hand tools

The aim of the study was to identify predictors of comfort and discomfort in using hand tools. For this purpose, the comfort questionnaire for hand tools (CQH) was developed based on the results of a previous study. In the current study, four screwdrivers were evaluated on comfort (expected comfort at first sight and comfort after short time use) using the CQH and discomfort (local perceived discomfort). The results showed that expected comfort at first sight was predicted by aesthetics. Additionally, functionality and physical interaction, and adverse body effects were the major predictors of overall comfort after short time use. Discomfort was predicted by adverse body effects only. It is concluded that comfort and discomfort in using hand tools have partly the same underlying factors: discomfort feelings also affect the comfort experience.     

Guest Editorial

The nine papers in this special issue are devoted to extensions of Type-1 fuzzy sets. The purpose of the special issue is to highlight some of the more recent theoretical and practical advances in the use of nonstandard fuzzy systems. Each of the included papers is briefly summarized.     

Expected versus experienced neck comfort

There is certainly room for economy‐class travelers to make their trips more pleasant. A travel pillow might improve comfort. In this study, the comfort expectations and experience of travel pillows were examined. Comparing these 2 aspects indicated that it is not always possible to predict the comfort experience associated with a product based on a picture, and that there is a discrepancy between expected and experienced comfort. Experienced comfort is highest for travel pillows that restrict head movements in all directions in order to maintain a neutral posture. The results of this study also support earlier studies that suggested that discomfort experience can be predicted by observing the number of participants’ in‐seat movements; more movements result in higher experienced discomfort.     

Touchable objects: attributes applied to the design of computer input devices

Among many important attributes, designers often seek to create products that are comfortable both in the sense of avoiding discomfort and providing a positive sense of comfort. Another way of looking at the design of hand-held products is to consider what attributes make a product enjoyable to touch, rather than just comfortable or uncomfortable. A series of focus discussions investigated the qualities of objects that are enjoyable to touch. Persons were asked to bring in one or two objects that said to them, "Touch me" and "Keep touching me". Discussion with the participants discerned their motivations for selecting the touchable objects. Observations noted the objects' sizes, weights, shapes, surfaces, and colours. This research about qualities of touchable objects influenced the designs of new designs of trackballs for computer navigation. Further hypothesis supposes that the attributes of touchable objects are based on human experience over time with nature.     

Editorial of the Special Issue on Manifold Learning

In many information analysis tasks, one is often confronted with thousands to millions dimensional data, such as images, documents, videos, web data, bioinformatics data, etc. Conventional statistical and computational tools are severely inadequate for processing and analysing high-dimensional data due to the curse of dimensionality, where we often need to conduct inference with a limited number of samples. On the other hand, naturally occurring data may be generated by structured systems with possibly much fewer degrees of freedom than the ambient dimension would suggest. Recently, various works have considered the case when the data is sampled from a submanifold embedded in the much higher dimensional Euclidean space. Learning with full consideration of the low dimensional manifold structure, or specifically the intrinsic topological and geometrical properties of the data manifold is referred to as manifold learning, which has been receiving growing attention in our community in recent years. This special issue is to attract articles that (a) address the frontier problems in the scientific principles of manifold learning, and (b) report empirical studies and applications of manifold learning algorithms, including but not limited to pattern recognition, computer vision, web mining, image processing and so on. A total of 13 submissions were received. The papers included in this special issue are selected based on the reviews by experts in the subject area according to the journal''s procedure and quality standard. Each paper is reviewed by at least two reviewers and some of the papers were revised for two rounds according to the reviewers'' comments. The special issue includes 6 papers in total: 3 papers on the foundational theories of manifold learning, 2 papers on graph-based methods, and 1 paper on the application of manifold learning to video compression. The papers on the foundational theories of manifold learning cover the topics about the generalization ability of manifold learning, manifold ranking, and multi-manifold factorization. In the paper entitled ``Manifold Learning: Generalizing Ability and Tangential Proximity'', Bernstein and Kuleshov propose a tangential proximity based technique to address the generalized manifold learning problem. The proposed method ensures not only proximity between the points and their reconstructed values but also proximity between the corresponding tangent spaces. The traditional manifold ranking methods are based on the Laplacian regularization, which suffers from the issue that the solution is biased towards constant functions. To overcome this issue, in the paper entitled ``Manifold Ranking using Hessian Energy'', Guan et al. propose to use the second-order Hessian energy as regularization for manifold ranking. In the paper entitled ``Multi-Manifold Concept Factorization for Data Clustering'', Li et al. incorporate the multi-manifold ensemble learning into concept factorization to better preserve the local structure of the data, thus yielding more satisfactory clustering results. The papers on graph-based methods cover the topics about label propagation and graph-based dimensionality reduction. In the paper entitled ``Bidirectional Label Propagation over Graphs'', Liu et al. propose a novel label propagation algorithm to propagate labels along positive and negative edges in the graph. The construction of the graph is novel against the conventional approach by incorporating the dissimilarity among data points into the affinity matrix. In the paper entitled ``Locally Regressive Projections'', Lijun Zhang proposes a novel graph-based dimensionality reduction method that captures the local discriminative structure of the data space. The key idea is to fit a linear model locally around each data point, and then use the fitting error to measure the performance of dimensionality reduction. In the last paper entitled ``Combining Active and Semi-Supervised Learning for Video Compression'', motivated from manifold regularization, Zhang and Ji propose a machine learning approach for video compression. Active learning is used to select the most representative pixels in the encoding process, and semi-supervised learning is used to recover the color video in the decoding process. One remarking property of this approach is that the active learning algorithm shares the same loss function as the semi-supervised learning algorithm, providing a unified framework for video compression. Many people have been involved in making this special issue possible. The guest editor would like to express his gratitude to all the contributing authors for their insightful work on manifold learning. The guest editor would like to thank the reviewers for their comments and useful suggestions in order to improve the quality of the papers. The guest editor would also like to thank Prof. Ruqian Lu, the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Software and Informatics, for providing the precious opportunity to publish this special issue. Finally, we hope the reader will enjoy this special issue and find it useful.     

Touchable objects: attributes applied to the design of computer input devices

Among many important attributes, designers often seek to create products that are comfortable both in the sense of avoiding discomfort and providing a positive sense of comfort. Another way of looking at the design of hand-held products is to consider what attributes make a product enjoyable to touch, rather than just comfortable or uncomfortable. A series of focus discussions investigated the qualities of objects that are enjoyable to touch. Persons were asked to bring in one or two objects that said to them, ‘Touch me’ and ‘Keep touching me’. Discussion with the participants discerned their motivations for selecting the touchable objects. Observations noted the objects' sizes, weights, shapes, surfaces, and colours. This research about qualities of touchable objects influenced the designs of new designs of trackballs for computer navigation. Further hypothesis supposes that the attributes of touchable objects are based on human experience over time with nature.     

Sitting comfort and discomfort and the relationships with objective measures

The concepts of comfort and discomfort in sitting are under debate. There is no widely accepted definition, although it is beyond dispute that comfort and discomfort are feelings or emotions that are subjective in nature. Yet, beside several subjective methodologies, several objective methods (e.g. posture analysis, pressure measurements, electromyography (EMG) are in use to assess sitting comfort or discomfort. In the current paper a theoretical framework is presented, in which comfort and discomfort were defined and the hypothetical associations with underlying factors were indicated. Next, the literature was reviewed to determine the relationships between objective measures and subjective ratings of comfort and discomfort. Twenty-one studies were found in which simultaneous measures of an objective parameter and a subjective rating of comfort or discomfort were obtained. Pressure distribution appears to be the objective measure with the most clear association with the subjective ratings. For other variables, regarding spinal profile or muscle activity for instance, the reported associations are less clear and usually not statistically significant.     

Sitting comfort and discomfort and the relationships with objective measures

The concepts of comfort and discomfort in sitting are under debate. There is no widely accepted definition, although it is beyond dispute that comfort and discomfort are feelings or emotions that are subjective in nature. Yet, beside several subjective methodologies, several objective methods (e.g. posture analysis, pressure measurements, electromyography (EMG) are in use to assess sitting comfort or discomfort. In the current paper a theoretical framework is presented, in which comfort and discomfort were defined and the hypothetical associations with underlying factors were indicated. Next, the literature was reviewed to determine the relationships between objective measures and subjective ratings of comfort and discomfort. Twenty-one studies were found in which simultaneous measures of an objective parameter and a subjective rating of comfort or discomfort were obtained. Pressure distribution appears to be the objective measure with the most clear association with the subjective ratings. For other variables, regarding spinal profile or muscle activity for instance, the reported associations are less clear and usually not statistically significant.     

Introduction to the special issue on normative multiagent systems

This special issue contains four selected and revised papers from the second international workshop on normative multiagent systems, for short NorMAS07 (Boella et al. (eds) Normative multiagent systems. Dagstuhl seminar proceedings 07122, 2007), held at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, in March 2007. At the workshop a shift was identified in the research community from a legal to an interactionist view on normative multiagent systems. In this editorial we discuss the shift, examples, and 10 new challenges in this more dynamic setting, which we use to introduce the papers of this special issue.     

浅析软件界面设计中的色彩运用

随着计算机行业的发展,软件产品层出不穷,人们不再仅仅满足于对于软件的功能要求上,对于软件的使用方便度及舒适度上提出了更高的要求,本文就软件界面设计中的色彩运用这一问题做简要分析,以期以点带面,引起行内人士对此问题的关注。     

Comparison of comfort, discomfort, and continuum ratings of force levels and hand regions during gripping exertions

The goal of this study was to compare three different evaluation systems of comfort, discomfort, and a continuum for the force levels and hand regions when gripping hand tools. Seventy-two participants were assigned to three groups, each group testing a different evaluation system. Each participant exerted ten levels of submaximal voluntary contractions on hand tools and used their assigned evaluation system to evaluate comfortable or uncomfortable feelings for the force levels and five different regions of the hand. The participants generally rated higher discomfort as required forces increased, but the discomfort and continuum evaluation systems were better than the comfort evaluation system because gripping exertion was related to the physical aspects of the hand tools and their users. Based on the results of the continuum evaluation system, the feeling changed from comfort to discomfort at 65% maximum voluntary contraction. The palm was the region of the hand with the most discomfort. Other design factors affecting comfort need to also be considered in order to better understand hand tool use.     

浅析软件界面设计中的色彩运用

随着计算机行业的发展,软件产品层出不穷,人们不再仅仅满足于对于软件的功能要求上,对于软件的使用方便度及舒适度上提出了更高的要求,本文就软件界面设计中的色彩运用这一问题做简要分析,以期以点带面,引起行内人士对此问题的关注。     

Metalearning and Algorithm Selection: progress,state of the art and introduction to the 2018 Special Issue

This article serves as an introduction to the Special Issue on Metalearning and Algorithm Selection. The introduction is divided into two parts. In the the first section, we give an overview of how the field of metalearning has evolved in the last 1–2 decades and mention how some of the papers in this special issue fit in. In the second section, we discuss the contents of this special issue. We divide the papers into thematic subgroups, provide information about each subgroup, as well as about the individual papers. Our main aim is to highlight how the papers selected for this special issue contribute to the field of metalearning.     

Designing for Diagnosing: Introduction to the Special Issue on Diagnostic Work

When faced with anything out of the ordinary, faulty or suspicious, the work of determining and categorizing the trouble, and scoping for what to do about it (if anything) often go hand in hand—this is diagnostic work. In all its expert and non-expert forms diagnostic work is often both intellectual and embodied, collaborative and distributed, and ever more deeply entangled with technologies. Yet, it is often poorly supported by them. In this special issue we show that diagnostic work is an important and pervasive aspect of people’s activities at work, at home, and on the move. The papers published in this Special Issue come from a range of domains including, ambulance dispatch, a friendly fire incident and anomaly response for the NASA space shuttle; software, network and photocopier troubleshooting; and users attempting to use a new travel management system. These papers illustrate the variety of work that may be thought of as diagnostic. We hope that bringing a focus on diagnostic work to these diverse practices and situations opens up a rich vein of inquiry for CSCW scholars, designers, and users.     

eScience today and tomorrow

This special issue contains extended versions of many of the top papers from the 10th IEEE International eScience Conference (eScience 2014), held in October 2014 in Guarujá, Brazil. The authors of strongly reviewed papers published in that conference were invited to extend their papers, which then went through a second peer review. This special issue contains the first set (seven) of the extended papers selected as the result of this review. Part 2, with three additional extended papers, will follow in a future issue of FGCS.