Utility of stereoscopic displays for indirect-vision driving and robot teleoperation

The effectiveness of an active shutter-glasses stereoscopic display (SD) and a passive polarised SD was evaluated in a live robot-teleoperation task and a simulated indirect-vision driving task in various terrains. Overall, participants completed their tasks significantly faster with the SDs in three-dimensional (3D) mode than with the SDs in the baseline 2D mode. They also navigated more accurately with the SDs in 3D mode. When the effectiveness of the two types of SDs was examined separately, results showed that the active shutter-glasses SD resulted in faster responses and task completion times than the passive polarised SD, though most of the differences failed to reach statistical significance. Perceived workload when interacting with the two SD systems did not differ significantly between the active versus passive display types or between the 3D and 2D modes of operation; however, participants reported more severe discomfort after interacting with the passive polarised SD.     

Effective website design for experience-influenced environments: The case of high culture museums

While most research on website has focused on functional tasks, the Internet offers many opportunities for leisure as well as experiential activities. Because of the evolution of developed society toward an experience economy, analyzing the role of technologies in the presence of prior user experiences makes sense. This research identifies variables that play a role and influence online behaviors in a specific experiential environment, namely the high culture museum website. Relying on the literature on experience, we propose a research model tested with two different websites. The results of the free simulation experiment indicates that (1) esthetics is the most important design criteria for experiential interfaces and (2) that website design influences intentions to visit a physical place.     

Human-autonomy teaming in military settings

ABSTRACT

In this Thematic Issue ‘Human-Autonomy Teaming’ of Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, five U.S. military-funded research efforts are presented to discuss human factors issues in a variety of military human-autonomy teaming mission environments: dismounted infantry working with a small ground robot; intelligence analysis; human working with an intelligent agent to manage a team of heterogeneous unmanned vehicles; vehicle-mounted ground penetrating radar. The research issues addressed in this Issue are diverse – from display designs to operator performance and trust in the systems. The results and insights documented in these five articles should provide useful resources to researchers and practitioners working on intelligent and autonomous systems.     

A study on key strategies in P2P file sharing systems and ISPs�� P2P traffic management

The flourish of P2P systems draws a lot of attention of networking researchers. Some research efforts focus on P2P systems, trying to understand the mechanism of various implementations and the behavior pattern of P2P users, and then improve the systems?? performance. Others look at the issue from the angle of ISPs, trying to help ISPs solve various issues brought by P2P applications. In this article, we conduct a review study on recent research efforts in these two areas. The first part of this article focuses on several key strategies that have significant influence on the performance of P2P systems. In the second part, we review some important techniques for ISPs to manage P2P traffic, i.e., blocking, caching and localization, and compare their advantages and disadvantages.     

Shrinkage and model selection with correlated variables via weighted fusion

In this paper, we propose the weighted fusion, a new penalized regression and variable selection method for data with correlated variables. The weighted fusion can potentially incorporate information redundancy among correlated variables for estimation and variable selection. Weighted fusion is also useful when the number of predictors p is larger than the number of observations n. It allows the selection of more than n variables in a motivated way. Real data and simulation examples show that weighted fusion can improve variable selection and prediction accuracy.     

A study of traffic, user behavior and pricing policies in a large campus network

Tsinghua University campus network is a large campus network in China, providing volume-based and flat-rate Internet access service for more than 31,000 students and staff. In order to better understand its traffic, user behavior and pricing policies to facilitate network planning and management, we collect a one-year-long flow-based traffic log and a 10-year-long user-based log at the boundary of this campus network, and then conduct an analysis study on these two data sets. In this paper, we first present characteristics of inbound traffic flows from the aspects of traffic prediction and inference. Then we analyze the geographical origins of incoming flows, and the result reveals that USA, Japan and Korea are the most important source countries of international traffic. Our user-based investigation shows that the properties of users have important influence on their behavior, e.g., major has stronger influence on users’ online time, while occupation has stronger influence on users’ international traffic volume. We also find that there are more and more users choosing flat rate pricing scheme instead of volume based pricing scheme, and these users tend to over-provision when they subscribe from tiered pricing options.     

Visualising Errors in Animal Pedigree Genotype Data

Genetic analysis of a breeding animal population involves determining the inheritance pattern of genotypes for multiple genetic markers across the individuals in the population pedigree structure. However, experimental pedigree genotype data invariably contains errors in both the pedigree structure and in the associated individual genotypes, introducing inconsistencies into the dataset, rendering them useless for further analysis. The resolution of these errors requires consideration of genotype inheritance patterns in the context of the pedigree structure. Existing pedigree visualisations are typically more suited to human pedigrees and are less suitable for large complex animal pedigrees which may exhibit cross generational inbreeding. Similarly, table‐based viewers of genotype marker data can highlight where errors become apparent but lack the functionality and interactive visual feedback to allow users to locate the origin of errors within the pedigree. In this paper, we detail a design study steered by biologists who work with pedigree data, and describe successive iterations through approaches and prototypes for viewing genotyping errors in the context of a displayed pedigree. We describe how each approach performs with real pedigree genotype data and why eventually we deemed them unsuitable. Finally, a novel prototype visualisation for pedigrees, which we term the ‘sandwich view’, is detailed and we demonstrate how the approach effectively communicates errors in the pedigree context, supporting the biologist in the error identification task.     

Supervisory control of multiple robots in dynamic tasking environments

A military targeting environment was simulated to examine the effects of an intelligent route-planning agent RoboLeader, which could support dynamic robot re-tasking based on battlefield developments, on the performance of robotics operators. We manipulated the level of assistance (LOAs) provided by RoboLeader as well as the presence of a visualisation tool that provided feedback to the participants on their primary task (target encapsulation) performance. Results showed that the participants' primary task benefited from RoboLeader on all LOAs conditions compared to manual performance; however, visualisation had little effect. Frequent video gamers demonstrated significantly better situation awareness of the mission environment than did infrequent gamers. Those participants with higher spatial ability performed better on a secondary target detection task than did those with lower spatial ability. Finally, participants' workload assessments were significantly lower when they were assisted by RoboLeader than when they performed the target entrapment task manually. Practitioner Summary: This study demonstrated the utility of an intelligent agent for enhancing robotics operators' supervisory control performance as well as reducing their workload during a complex urban scenario involving moving targets. The results furthered the understanding of the interplay among level-of-autonomy, multitasking performance and individual differences in military tasking environments.     

Homophily horizons and ethnic mover flows among homeowners in Scotland

Abstract

This article analyses mover flows in Glasgow and the role of ethnic homophily, the tendency for movers to be drawn to areas with similar ethnicities to their own. We look at how homophily affects the spatial relocation patterns of homeowners in Glasgow from Scottish, Indian, Pakistani and Chinese descent, and focus on the extent to which homophily extends beyond the immediate locality to surrounding neighbourhoods. Our interest is in estimating the “homophily horizon” – how far the gaze of homophily reaches in mover location decisions. Using a simple Schelling-type theoretical model, we argue that homophily horizons are potentially important in shaping the long-term social structure of cities as they may profoundly affect how potent the overall sorting tendencies of the housing market are in driving segregation. In principle, the more distant the homophily horizon, the more quickly the housing market will tend towards segregation, other things being equal. We adopt Folch and Rey’s use of the local centralization index to capture the influence of surrounding neighbourhoods in shaping mover flows and neighbourhood dynamics. Our estimation combines ethnic mover flows derived from surname analysis of house buyers from the house transactions recorded in Registers of Scotland data. Our results show that the presence of the own ethnic group in the local surroundings is important for explaining mover flows, and that homophily is a local phenomenon.