Human Computer Interaction

Patterns of Synchronization of Non-verbal Cues and Speech in ECAs: Towards a More "Natural" Conversational Agent

by Nicla Rossini

In Esposito, A., Esposito, A. M., Martone, R. Mueller, V. C., Scarpetta, G. (Eds) Toward Autonomous, Adaptive, and Context-Aware Multimodal Interfaces: Theoretical and Practical Issues. Pp. 97-104. Springer-Verlag: Berlin.

N.B.: THIS IS A PRE-PUBLICATION EARLY DRAFT. IT MAY CONTAIN ERROS AND DIFFER SIGNIFICANTLY FROM THE PUBLISHED VERSION. FOR QUOTATION PURPOSES, PLEASE ASK ME A COPY OF THE PUBLISHED VERSION.

Please find it on Springer online: http://www.springerlink.com/content/l410238375431524/

This paper presents an analysis of the verbal and non-verbal cues of Conversational Agents, with a special focus on... more This paper presents an analysis of the verbal and non-verbal cues of Conversational Agents, with a special focus on REA and GRETA, in order to allow further research aimed at correcting some traits of their performance still considered unnatural by their final users. Despite the striking performance of new generation ECA, some important features make these conversational agents unreliable to the users, who usually prefer interacting with a classical computer for information retrieval. The users’ preference can be due to several factors, such as the quality of speech synthesis, or the inevitable unnaturalness of the graphics animating the avatar. Apart from the unavoidable traits that can render ECAs unnatural to the ultimate users, instances of poor synchronization between verbal and non-verbal behaviour may contribute to unfavourable results. An instance of synchronization patterns between non-verbal cues and speech is here analysed and re-applied to the basic architecture of an ECA in order to improve the ECA’s verbal and non-verbal synchronization. A proposal for future inquiry aimed at creating alternative model for the ultimate Mp4 output is also proposed, for further development in this field.

Enhancing the epistemic utility of physical spaces through digital information interfaces

by Paul Parsons

Sedig, K. & Parsons, P. (2012). Enhancing the epistemic utility of physical spaces through digital information interfaces. In Proceedings of IASTED International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Baltimore, MD.

People perform many activities in physical spaces such as scientific museums, medical laboratories, and educational... more People perform many activities in physical spaces such as scientific museums, medical laboratories, and educational exhibits. Some activities performed in such spaces are for the purpose of making sense of the features of the space, learning about how elements within the space work, solving problems regarding relationships among items within the space, and so on. As all of these activities are fundamentally cognitive in nature, they may be labeled as cognitive activities (CAs). These activities involve and are related to knowledge of and/or knowing about physical spaces. Therefore, the degree to which physical spaces support such activities may be referred to as their epistemic utility. The epistemic utility of physical spaces has historically been limited due to the limited affordances that such spaces offer. Recent technological advances, however, provide opportunities for enhancing the epistemic utility of physical information spaces. Cognitive activity support tools (CASTs) are one such type of technology that can potentially enhance the epistemic utility of physical information spaces. The enhancement is in potential form as it depends upon the effective and proper design of CASTs. This paper draws upon research from the cognitive, information, and computer sciences to inform and motivate the conceptualization of CAST-augmented physical information spaces that have enhanced epistemic utility for performing CAs.

An ergonomic user interface supporting information search and organization on a mobile device

by Korinna Bade

Effective Data Mining Support for Personal Information Management

by Korinna Bade

Influence of Individual Psychological Traits On Attribution Toward Computing Technology

by Natasha Veltri

Falaleeva, N.G., and Johnson, R.D. (2002) "Influence of Individual Psychological Traits On Attribution Toward Computing Technology," proceedings of the Americas Conference on Information Systems, Dallas, TX.

Attributions of responsibility toward computing technology: the role of interface social cues and user gender

by Natasha Veltri

Johnson, R.D., Veltri, N.F., and Hornik, S. (2008) " Attributions of Responsibility toward Computing Technology: The Role of Interface Social Cues & User Gender," International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 24 (6), 595-612.

Using Kinect to emulate an Interactive Whiteboard

by Mattia Avancini

Misyurov D.A. Dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas // Credo New. 2012. №2

by Dmitry Misyurov

The article suggests dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas: formula with... more The article suggests dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas: formula with dominant and the non-dominant elements; universal formula; formula with symbolic weight of elements; tautological formula. For example, it suggests an opportunity to use the dialectical formulas for modeling and artificial intelligence creation, etc.

Design Guidelines for Interactive Television

by Maurice McGinley

These guidelines are collected from three main sources:
• Guidelines for Designing Easy-to-Use Interactive... more These guidelines are collected from three main sources:
• Guidelines for Designing Easy-to-Use Interactive Television Services: Experiences from the ArviD Programme (Ahonen, Turkki et al. 2007)
• Sociability Heuristics for Evaluating Social Interactive Television Systems (Geerts 2009)
• A Theory of the Viewer Experience of iTV (McGinley 2009)

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

by Marco Lazzari

Bill Tomlinson, Paul, Eric P. S. Baumer, Donald J. Patterson, Joseph Corneli, Martin Mahaux, Syavash Nobarany, Marco Lazzari, Birgit Penzenstadler, Andrew W. Torrance, David J. Callele, Gary M. Olson, Six Silberman, Marcus Ständer, Fabio Romancini Palamedi, Albert Ali Salah, Eric Morrill, Xavier Franch, Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, Rebecca W. Black, Marisa L. Cohn, Patrick C. Shih, Johanna Brewer, Nitesh Goyal, Pirjo Näkki, Jeff Huang, Nilufar Baghaei, Craig Saper
"Massively distributed authorship of academic papers"
Proceedings of Alt.Chi at the 30th ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI 2012), Austin, TX, USA, 2012

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques... more Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.

Making Ourselves Useful: The evolution of HCI from a Formal to Practical discipline

by Maurice McGinley

draft.

Published histories of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have presented the development of the discipline from many... more Published histories of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have presented the development of the discipline from many perspectives, including that of interaction technology, academic disciplines, professional entities, and models of the user. Starting from the constructivist epistemological premise that knowledge cannot be divorced from social context, this article analyses the practical concerns that formed the discipline of HCI and the social context in which the discipline continues to find its relevance.

A historical survey of the development of HCI considers the context within which the discipline of HCI is most frequently practiced: computer (software and hardware) projects. A key theme in this history is shown to be a need for responsiveness to changing understandings of user requirements. The scope of consideration is then expanded to include the contexts of application domains, technology, and society. It is proposed that, considered within these broader contexts, the trajectory of development of HCI can be discerned as a movement from Formal to Practical methods, and the implications for HCI practitioners are discussed.

Television's Job-To-Be-Done

by Maurice McGinley

This article reviews research into why people watch television. Christensen (2003) proposes businesses are best... more This article reviews research into why people watch television. Christensen (2003) proposes businesses are best understood by looking at the way they help people address their jobs-to-be-done. If new forms of television are more likely to succeed to the extent that they do the jobs now done by traditional television; then to understand how people will use future forms of TV, we must understand how viewers use traditional TV.

A map of the television experience

by Maurice McGinley

This paper presents an analysis of the experience of television based on a definition of experience as 'understanding... more This paper presents an analysis of the experience of television based on a definition of experience as 'understanding situated in time'. Citing Heidegger's phenomenological investigations of everyday experiences, as well as tenets from Distributed Cognition, and Activity Theory, the experience of interaction with television is shown to be situated within personal and cultural contexts, which determine the meaning and therefore the quality of the experience. A diagram of television use cases representing television practices is presented, ordered according to proximity to cultural practice. The diagram and method are discussed. The method is recommended as a tool to direct user-interface design and requirements development priorities.

Mecanismos de navegación en el videojuego: aproximación desde la teoría de la enunciación al diseño de la interacción en espacios tridimensionales

by Marta Fernández

Retos y oportunidades de la comunicación multimedia en la era del 2.0 / coord. por Javier Sierra Sánchez, 2011, págs. 374-388

Tell me more? The effects of mental model soundness on personalizing an intelligent agent.

by Todd Kulesza

In the proceedings of CHI 2012. Honorable mention for Best Paper award.

What does a user need to know to productively work with an intelligent agent? Intelligent agents and recommender... more What does a user need to know to productively work with an intelligent agent? Intelligent agents and recommender systems are gaining widespread use, potentially creating a need for end users to understand how these systems operate in order to fix their agent's personalized behavior. This paper explores the effects of mental model soundness on such personalization by providing structural knowledge of a music recommender system in an empirical study. Our findings show that participants were able to quickly build sound mental models of the recommender system's reasoning, and that participants who most improved their mental models during the study were significantly more likely to make the recommender operate to their satisfaction. These results suggest that by helping end users understand a system's reasoning, intelligent agents may elicit more and better feedback, thus more closely aligning their output with each user's intentions.

Using hidden Markov models and dynamic size functions for gesture recognition

by Fabio Cuzzolin

Towards unsupervised detection of actions in clutter

by Fabio Cuzzolin

Articulated shape matching by robust alignment of embedded representations

by Fabio Cuzzolin

Towards recognizing “cool”: Can end users help computer vision recognize subjective attributes of objects in images?

by Todd Kulesza

Published in the proceedings of IUI 2012.

Recent computer vision approaches are aimed at richer image interpretations that extend the standard recognition of... more Recent computer vision approaches are aimed at richer image interpretations that extend the standard recognition of objects in images (e.g., cars) to also recognize object attributes (e.g., cylindrical, has-stripes, wet). However, the more idiosyncratic and abstract the notion of an object attribute (e.g., "cool" car), the more challenging the task of attribute recognition. This paper considers whether end users can help vision algorithms recognize highly idiosyncratic attributes, referred to here as subjective attributes. We empirically investigated how end users recognized three subjective attributes of cars—"cool", "cute", and "classic". Our results suggest the feasibility of vision algorithms recognizing subjective attributes of objects, but an interactive approach beyond standard supervised learning from labeled training examples is needed.

Why-Oriented End-User Debugging of Naive Bayes Text Classification

by Todd Kulesza

Published in ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, Vol. 1, No. 1, October 2011.

Machine learning techniques are increasingly used in intelligent assistants, that is, software targeted at and... more Machine learning techniques are increasingly used in intelligent assistants, that is, software targeted at and continuously adapting to assist end users with email, shopping, and other tasks. Examples include desktop SPAM filters, recommender systems, and handwriting recognition. Fixing such intelligent assistants when they learn incorrect behavior, however, has received only limited attention. To directly support end-user “debugging” of assistant behaviors learned via statistical machine learning, we present a Why-oriented approach which allows users to ask questions about how the assistant made its predictions, provides answers to these “why” questions, and allows users to interactively change these answers to debug the assistant’s current and future predictions. To understand the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, we then conducted an exploratory study to investigate barriers that participants could encounter when debugging an intelligent assistant using our approach, and the information those participants requested to overcome these barriers. To help ensure the inclusiveness of our approach, we also explored how gender differences played a role in understanding barriers and information needs. We then used these results to consider opportunities for Why-oriented approaches to address user barriers and information needs.