三维施工中SN388炮点表的设置

本文提供了SN388在三维施工中炮点表的几种设置方法，并进行了相应的对比说明，最后给出了改进炮点表设置的有关设想。     

From ethnographic record to system design

This paper explores the issues involved in moving from ethnographic explorations of work in context to a practical contribution to system design. It does so using the example of an interdisciplinary research project involving sociologists and computer scientists in the domain of air traffic control systems. It forms a pair with another paper (Sommerville et al., 1992) exploring these questions from the perspective of our computer science partners. We characterise ethnography as a research method, and consider the differences between undertaking it for strictly sociological or anthropological purposes by contrast with interdisciplinary and design purposes. We summarise some of our results in ethnographic explications of the work of air traffic controllers, and the sociality which it manifests. We describe the dialogues involved in rendering these observations informative for systems design, and the mutual translations implied in attempting to reconcile sociological with software engineering questions about supporting the work. We conclude by specifying some features of cooperative work which an engineering approach is in danger of overlooking; the ways, and limits, in which ethnographers can form a bridge between users and designers; and some of the conflicts of interest entrained in generating technical change.The research is funded by the UK MRC/SERC/ESRC Cognitive Science/HCI Initiative with the title Social Analysis of Control Systems for HCI Design, grant number SPG 8931598. The computer science partners are Professor Ian Sommerville, Dr Tom Rodden, Dr Pete Sawyer and Mr Richard Bentley. Thanks are due to Val King, Kjeldt Schmidt, Ian Sommerville and Tom Rodden for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.     

A usability evaluation of medical software at an expert conference setting

Introduction

A usability test was employed to evaluate two medical software applications at an expert conference setting. One software application is a medical diagnostic tool (electrocardiogram [ECG] viewer) and the other is a medical research tool (electrode misplacement simulator [EMS]). These novel applications have yet to be adopted by the healthcare domain, thus, (1) we wanted to determine the potential user acceptance of these applications and (2) we wanted to determine the feasibility of evaluating medical diagnostic and medical research software at a conference setting as opposed to the conventional laboratory setting.

Methods

The medical diagnostic tool (ECG viewer) was evaluated using seven delegates and the medical research tool (EMS) was evaluated using 17 delegates that were recruited at the 2010 International Conference on Computing in Cardiology. Each delegate/participant was required to use the software and undertake a set of predefined tasks during the session breaks at the conference. User interactions with the software were recorded using screen-recording software. The ‘think-aloud’ protocol was also used to elicit verbal feedback from the participants whilst they attempted the pre-defined tasks. Before and after each session, participants completed a pre-test and a post-test questionnaire respectively.

Results

The average duration of a usability session at the conference was 34.69 min (SD = 10.28). However, taking into account that 10 min was dedicated to the pre-test and post-test questionnaires, the average time dedication to user interaction of the medical software was 24.69 min (SD = 10.28). Given we have shown that usability data can be collected at conferences, this paper details the advantages of conference-based usability studies over the laboratory-based approach. For example, given delegates gather at one geographical location, a conference-based usability evaluation facilitates recruitment of a convenient sample of international subject experts. This would otherwise be very expensive to arrange. A conference-based approach also allows for data to be collected over a few days as opposed to months by avoiding administration duties normally involved in laboratory based approach, e.g. mailing invitation letters as part of a recruitment campaign.Following analysis of the user video recordings, 41 (previously unknown) use errors were identified in the advanced ECG viewer and 29 were identified in the EMS application. All use errors were given a consensus severity rating from two independent usability experts. Out of a rating scale of 4 (where 1 = cosmetic and 4 = critical), the average severity rating for the ECG viewer was 2.24 (SD = 1.09) and the average severity rating for the EMS application was 2.34 (SD = 0.97). We were also able to extract task completion rates and times from the video recordings to determine the effectiveness of the software applications. For example, six out of seven tasks were completed by all participants when using both applications. This statistic alone suggests both applications already have a high degree of usability. As well as extracting data from the video recordings, we were also able to extract data from the questionnaires. Using a semantic differential scale (where 1 = poor and 5 = excellent), delegates highly rated the ‘responsiveness’, ‘usefulness’, ‘learnability’ and the ‘look and feel’ of both applications.

Conclusion

This study has shown the potential user acceptance and user-friendliness of the novel EMS and the ECG viewer applications within the healthcare domain. It has also shown that both medical diagnostic software and medical research software can be evaluated for their usability at an expert conference setting. The primary advantage of a conference-based usability evaluation over a laboratory-based evaluation is the high concentration of experts at one location, which is convenient, less time consuming and less expensive.     

Evaluating the Impact of User Characteristics and Different Layouts on an Interactive Visualization for Decision Making

There is increasing evidence that user characteristics can have a significant impact on visualization effectiveness, suggesting that visualizations could be designed to better fit each user's specific needs. Most studies to date, however, have looked at static visualizations. Studies considering interactive visualizations have only looked at a limited number of user characteristics, and consider either low‐level tasks (e.g., value retrieval), or high‐level tasks (in particular: discovery), but not both. This paper contributes to this line of work by looking at the impact of a large set of user characteristics on user performance with interactive visualizations, for both low and high‐level tasks. We focus on interactive visualizations that support decision making, exemplified by a visualization known as Value Charts. We include in the study two versions of ValueCharts that differ in terms of layout, to ascertain whether layout mediates the impact of individual differences and could be considered as a form of personalization. Our key findings are that (i) performance with low and high‐level tasks is affected by different user characteristics, and (ii) users with low visual working memory perform better with a horizontal layout. We discuss how these findings can inform the provision of personalized support to visualization processing.     

Group‐in‐a‐Box Meta‐Layouts for Topological Clusters and Attribute‐Based Groups: Space‐Efficient Visualizations of Network Communities and Their Ties

An important part of network analysis is understanding community structures like topological clusters and attribute‐based groups. Standard approaches for showing communities using colour, shape, rectangular bounding boxes, convex hulls or force‐directed layout algorithms remain valuable, however our Group‐in‐a‐Box meta‐layouts add a fresh strategy for presenting community membership, internal structure and inter‐cluster relationships. This paper extends the basic Group‐in‐a‐Box meta‐layout, which uses a Treemap substrate of rectangular regions whose size is proportional to community size. When there are numerous inter‐community relationships, the proposed extensions help users view them more clearly: (1) the Croissant–Doughnut meta‐layout applies empirically determined rules for box arrangement to improve space utilization while still showing inter‐community relationships, and (2) the Force‐Directed layout arranges community boxes based on their aggregate ties at the cost of additional space. Our free and open source reference implementation in NodeXL includes heuristics to choose what we have found to be the preferable Group‐in‐a‐Box meta‐layout to show networks with varying numbers or sizes of communities. Case study examples, a pilot comparative user preference study (nine participants), and a readability measure‐based evaluation of 309 Twitter networks demonstrate the utility of the proposed meta‐layouts.     

Playing vibrotactile music: A comparison between the Vibrochord and a piano keyboard

A novel vibrotactile musical input device called the Vibrochord, which is designed to deliver patterns of vibration to the skin, not to the ear, through the use of a vibrotactile display called the Emoti-Chair, is evaluated using proposed evaluation frameworks. Findings show that the mixture of frameworks used in this study provided valuable insight into the design of this novel musical device. Results obtained through the implementation of a mixture of these frameworks show that the Vibrochord facilitated an increased accuracy rate over the traditional piano keyboard, when inexperienced vibrotactile musicians tried to repeat vibrotactile patterns or “melodies”.     

Understanding user intent on the web through interaction mining

Predicting the goals of internet users can be extremely useful in e-commerce, online entertainment, and many other internet-based applications. One of the crucial steps to achieve this is to classify internet queries based on available features, such as contextual information, keywords and their semantic relationships. Beyond these methods, in this paper we propose to mine user interaction activities to predict the intent of the user during a navigation session. However, since in practice it is necessary to use a suitable mix of all such methods, it is important to exploit all the mentioned features in order to properly classify users based on their common intents. To this end, we have performed several experiments aiming to empirically derive a suitable classifier based on the mentioned features.     

文字可视化技术在虚拟环境中的应用(英文)

文字和图像是人类日常交流常用的两种方式,同时它们之间有着很深的联系。我们常常将图像转化为文字(如通过文字来描述一副绘画作品),反之亦然(如通过一幅画来再现一段故事),但这个过程的转换对计算机系统而言则是一个挑战。随着自然语言处理技术和计算机图形技术的发展,人们逐渐意识到结合这两种技术,并通过整合人与人之间的交流方式来进一步提高人机界面的可能性,使之成为信息可视化领域一个新的研究方向之一。本文通过回顾基于文字到可视化技术的应用发展进程,并在对当前的相关研究进行了探讨的基础上提出了我们对故事可视化系统开发的解决方案。     

oDect: an RFID‐based object detection API to support applications development on mobile devices

The RFID technology is becoming ever more popular in the development of ubiquitous computing applications. A full exploitation of the RFID potential requires the study and implementation of human–computer interaction (HCI) modalities to be able to support wide usability by the target audience. This implies the need for programming methodologies specifically dedicated to support the easy and efficient prototyping of applications to have feedback from early tests with users. On the basis of our field‐working experience, we have designed oDect, a high‐level language and platform‐independent application programming interface (API), ad hoc designed to meet the needs of typical applications for mobile devices (smart phones and PDAs). oDect aims at allowing application developers to create their prototypes focusing on the needs of the final users, without having to care about the low‐level software that interacts with the RFID hardware. Further, in an end‐user developing (EUD) approach, oDect provides specific support for the application end‐user herself to cope with typical problems of RFID applications in detecting objects. We describe in detail the features of the API and discuss the findings of a test with four programmers, where we analyse and evaluate the use of the API in four sample applications. We also present results of an end‐user test, which investigated strengths and weaknesses of the territorial agenda (TA) concept. The TA is an RFID‐based citizen guide that aids—through time‐ and location‐based reminders—users in their daily activities in a city. The TA directly exploits EUD features of oDect, in particular concerning the possibility of linking detected objects with custom actions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

海量层次信息的Focus+Context交互式可视化技术

综述了海量层次信息可视化与Focus Context技术的相关工作,针对海量层次信息可视化的交互问题,在嵌套圆可视化技术的基础上提出了基于上下文感知的Focus Context交互式可视化技术.首先,基于外切圆排列方法提出对圆心进行三角网格剖分的方法,为变形计算建立上下文;然后,针对变形计算前后上下文一致性问题,在三角网格邻居跟踪方法的基础上,提出了用于同层兄弟节点上下文感知的外切圆变形排列方法,以及用于父子节点上下文感知的嵌套圆迭代排列方法.实验结果表明。上述方法在实现焦点突出的鱼眼视图的同时,能够有效地解决Focus Context交互式可视化的上下文感知问题.上述方法应用于文件系统海量层次信息的交互式可视化问题,提供了交互式可视化工具.