Human-Computer Interface

Au cours de ces dernières décennies, de nombreuses
méthodes et outils d’évaluation des Interfaces Hommes-
Machines (IHM) ont été proposés. Ces derniers
permettent d’effectuer des évaluations qualitatives ou
quantitatives. En général, les résultats de ces évaluations
sont présentés de manière indépendante ce qui rend
difficile la prise de décision finale d’évaluation. Dans cet
objectif, nous avons besoin d'analyser les données
quantitatives et qualitatives de façon complémentaire. A
partir de cette constatation, nous proposons l’intégration
des évaluations qualitative et quantitative en utilisant des
indicateurs de qualité fondés sur la norme ISO/IEC
15939. Ces indicateurs présentent des outils qui
fournissent une base pour l’aide à la prise de décision sur
la qualité des IHM par rapport aux critères de qualité.
Cet article présente un exemple de construction et
d’utilisation d’un indicateur avec un résultat des
premières expérimentations pour illustrer son utilité.

An increasing number of today's consumer devices such as mobile phones or tablet computers are equipped with various sensors. The extraction of useful information such as gestures from sensor-generated data based on mainstream imperative languages is a notoriously difficult task. Over the last few years, a number of domain-specific programming languages have been proposed to ease the development of gesture detection. Most of these languages have adopted a declarative approach allowing programmers to describe their gestures rather than having to manually maintain a history of event data and intermediate gesture results. While these declarative languages represent a clear advancement in gesture detection, a number of issues are still unresolved. In this paper we present relevant criteria for gesture detection and provide an initial classification of existing solutions based on these criteria in order to foster a discussion and identify opportunities for future gesture programming languages.

Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of researchers dealing with the integration of paper and digital information or services. While recent technological developments enable new forms of paper-digital integration and interaction, some of the original research on interactive paper dates back almost twenty years. We give a brief overview of the most relevant past and current interactive paper developments. Then, based on our experience in developing a wide variety of interactive paper solutions over the last decade, as well as the results of other research groups, we outline future directions and challenges for the realisation of innovative interactive paper solutions. Further, we propose the definition of common data formats and interactive paper design patterns to ensure future cross-application and framework interoperability.

Recently, museums and historic sites have begun reaching out beyond their traditional audience groups, using more innovative digital display technology to find and attract a new audience. Virtual, mixed, and augmented reality technologies are becoming more ubiquitous in our society and "virtual history" exhibits are starting to be available to the public. The authors have undertaken multiple experiments at a historic fort in upstate New York, evaluating digital display technology used by site visitors. The paper also contains a discussion of the potential benefits and problems of designing interactive virtual museum/heritage displays, based on standard usability guidelines.

PowerPoint is one of the most frequently used tools to present multimedia for educational purposes. Nevertheless, little is known about the users' needs when using PowerPoint during lecturing. Our study focused on the presenter's needs in this context of use. We interviewed nine university lecturers from the computer science department by means of a questionnaire. The results show that users require features that are not yet realised with PowerPoint. For example, the control and use of other media should be adequately integrated. Or the navigation within the slide collection should be improved to better meet the users' needs. Based on our findings, we outline required system features and suggest solutions in form of a prototype.

Saggio su interazione uomo macchina, usabilità, valore euristico dell'arte, le più diffuse tecnologie d'interfaccia, mems, gesture recognition.
Contiene i seguenti case studies: smart laser scanner, physical motion interface, sensorizzazione di una protesi, Apple multitouch screen, Nintendo WiiMote.

In particolare, al momento della pubblicazione nell'Aprile 2006, il saggio conteneva alcuni indizi di retro-ingegneria sul controller Wii, procurato tramite l'Università quando ancora non era disponibile al pubblico (nei negozi a Dicembre 2006).

There has been recent and trending needs for Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology due to
its cost effectiveness , high security, high memory capacity and high speed of reading as compared to other Auto-ID
Systems such as CCTV, Smart Cards, Biometric systems, and burglary/intruder alarm systems. The project highlighted
a car tracking system using RFID technologies incorporated with Arduino Uno based on ATmega328. The system
integrated SIM 808 GSM Module and GPS in the design for high efficiency, low power consumption and effective data
transfer utilizing TCP/IP Protocols for user’s easy access to the internet.

Data exploration and visualization systems are of great importance in the Big Data era. Exploring and visualizing very large datasets has become a major research challenge, of which scalability is a vital requirement. In this survey, we describe the major prerequisites and challenges that should be addressed by the modern exploration and visualization systems. Considering these challenges, we present how state-of-the-art approaches from the Database and Information Visualization communities attempt to handle them. Finally , we survey the systems developed by Semantic Web community in the context of the Web of Linked Data, and discuss to which extent these satisfy the contemporary requirements.

In software development, the waterfall model is commonly used, especially for large-scale software systems. For smaller-scale software development, agile software development approaches such as extreme programming or scrum are used. Traditional software development methodologies are mainly targeted toward customer-centric development, and therefore, new software methodologies are often not well received in the industry. In this study, we propose a new software development methodology that is aimed at developing innovative software using artificial intelligence (AI), idea creation, value engineering, and systems design. The name of our method is named as EPISODE (Extreme Programming method for Innovative SOftware based on systems DEsign). EPISODE supports the efficient and creative development of open source software (OSS) by small groups. Moreover we describe an evaluation of EPISODE in a class.

The technology of Smart Homes (SH), as an instance of ambient assisted living technologies, is designed to assist the homes’ residents accomplishing their daily-living activities and thus having a better quality of life while preserving their privacy. A SH system is usually equipped with a collection of inter-related software and hardware components to monitor the living space by capturing the behaviour of the resident and understanding his activities. By doing so the system can inform about risky situations and take actions on behalf of the resident to his satisfaction. The present survey will address technologies and analysis methods and bring examples of the state of the art research studies in order to provide background for the research community. In particular, the survey will expose infrastructure technologies such as sensors and communication platforms along with artificial intelligence techniques used for modeling and recognizing activities. A brief overview of approaches used to develop Human–Computer interfaces for SH systems is given. The survey also highlights the challenges and research trends in this area.

Document Image processing and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) have been a frontline research area in the field of human-machine interface for the last few decades. Recognition of Indian language characters has been a topic of interest for quite some time. The earlier contributions were reported in [1] and [2]. A more recent work is reported in [3] and [9]. The need for efficient and robust algorithms and systems for recognition is being felt in India, especially in the post and telegraph department where OCR can assist the staff in sorting mail. Character recognition can also form a part in applications like intelligent scanning machines, text to speech converters, and automatic language-to-language translators.

Over the last decade, there has been an increasing interest in paper-digital systems that allow regular paper documents to be augmented or integrated with digital information and services. Although a wide variety of technical solutions and applications have been proposed, they all rely on some means of specifying links from areas within paper pages to digital services where these areas correspond to elements of the document's artwork. Although various frameworks and tools are available to support the development of paper-digital applications, these tend to either require some programming skills or focus on specific application domains. We present an advanced publishing solution that is based on an authoring rather than programming approach to the production of interactive paper documents. Our solution is fully general and we describe how it uses concepts of templates and variable content elements to reduce redundancies and increase the flexibility in developing paper-digital applications.

Deaf people have difficulty communicating with the hearing people around them, but little research has addressed how new technology may help address this issue. The current research objectives were to (1) survey research on communication barriers encountered by deaf people; (2) survey the available communication applications (apps) and features designed for deaf people; (3) recommend the best existing communication apps for Deaf people; and, (4) identify the best designs and features of these apps for developers. A total of 55 communication apps were examined, but only six were found to be designed specifically as communication apps for deaf people. The survey outlines useful features of available communication apps for this population, examines the needs and preferences of the users, and compares these with existing features. We see that there is a serious need to develop more communication apps that meet the needs of deaf people.

In this paper we outline a genealogy of Mixed Reality Lab (MXR) projects, their influencing factors both from the Asian region and also within the lab, the employment of Blue-Sky Innovation by the lab for ideation, collaboration and project generation, as well as discuss some major points of inspiration for MXR from various sources.

— Tongue controlled mouse is an ingenious human computer interface specially designed for disabled person and people with tetraplegia. Here we present a paper that evaluate the permanent magnet and metal detector to control an input device. Based on the tongue position we can define the result is shown in this paper. In this paper we demonstrate the following experiment with simple hardware technique but actually the result system is very compact like dental retainer. This paper becomes very useful for future research studies to operate a computer input device.

Despite recent work on information systems (ISs), many first responders in the UK Fire and Rescue Services (FRSs) are unable to develop sufficient understanding of the situation to enable them to make good decisions. As a partial requirement of the development of IS for the UK FRSs, a software prototype consisting of a number of human–computer interfaces are developed and subsequently evaluated to explore how to present useful information for firefighters during their response operations. This article exclusively discusses the findings arising from end-user demonstration sessions conducted via participative type of prototype evaluation that is aimed to understand the appropriateness and usefulness of the proposed software prototype supporting fire emergency response (ER). This article contributes to improve the designing of the human– computer interfaces and human–computer interaction for supporting firefighters during fire ER by introducing advice based on the end user evaluation feedback of the proposed software prototype.

When operating a machine, the operator needs to know some spatial relations, like the relative location of the target or the nearest obstacle. Often, sensors are used to derive this spatial information, and visual displays are deployed as interfaces to communicate this information to the operator. In this paper, we present psychoacoustic sonification as an alternative interface for human-machine interaction. Instead of visualizations, an interactive sound guides the operator to the desired target location, or helps her avoid obstacles in space. By considering psychoacoustics-i.e., the relationship between the physical and the perceptual attributes of sound-in the audio signal processing, we can communicate precisely and unambiguously interpretable direction and distance cues along three orthogonal axes to a user. We present exemplary use cases from various application areas where users can benefit from psychoacoustic sonification.

This paper introduces an approach for evaluating user interfaces built on visual rhetoric and the rhetorical notion of function. A personal informatics mobile application has been selected to exemplify the application of this approach. Through the results of this example evaluation, this paper discusses the consequence of applying a rhetorical evaluation to a user interface. In this discussion, it is observed that inspecting the function performed by interface components takes into account experiences, communication, and meaning. In addition, it fosters reflection and criticism.

Speed has become a way of life. We are asymptotically piling data. Speed can be achieved with new design processes, techniques, and Technology. Innovations AR and VR are just some of the many forms of technologies that will play a key role in shaping the Architecture and Planning of tomorrow, making it future-ready and ushering in a new age of innovation. AR and VR in Architecture & Planning were introduced as assisting tools and has helped generate multiple design options, expanded possibilities of visualization, and provided us with more enhanced, detailed, and specific experience in real-time; enabling us to see the resultsof work on hand well before the commencement of the project. These tools are further developed for city development decisions, helping citizens interact with local authorities, access public services, and plan their commute. After reviewing multiple research papers, it had been observed that each one is moving forward with the changes brought by it, without entirely understanding its role. This paper provides a summary of theappliance of AR & VR in architecture and planning.

All areas of language and speech technology, directly or indirectly, require handling of real (unrestricted) text. For example, text-to-speech systems directly need to work on real text, whereas automatic speech recognition systems depend on language models that are trained on text. This paper reports our ongoing effort on Hindi text normalization. In that, a novel approach to text normalization, wherein tokenization and initial token classification are combined into one stage followed by a second level of token sense disambiguation, is described. Tokenization and initial token classification are performed using a lexical analyser that is derived from various token definitions in the form of regular expressions. For second level of token sense disambiguation, application of decision lists and decision trees are explored. Token-to-word rules are then applied, which are specific for each token type and also for each format within a token type.

This paper introduces a scheme for classification of online
handwritten characters based on polynomial regression of the sampled points of the sub-strokes in a character. The segmentation is done based on the velocity profile of the written character and this requires a smoothening of the velocity profile. We propose a novel scheme for smoothening the velocity profile curve and identification of the critical points to segment the character. We also propose another method for segmentation based on the human eye perception. We then extract two sets of features for recognition of handwritten characters. Each sub-stroke is a simple curve, a part of the character, and is represented by the distance measure of each point from the first point. This forms the first set of feature vector for each character. The second feature vector are the coefficients obtained from the B-splines fitted to the control knots obtained from the segmentation algorithm. The feature vector is fed to the SVM classifier and it indicates an efficiency of 68% using the polynomial regression technique and 74% using the spline fitting method.

Globalization via the digital age is upon us, demanding a new ethics and an intercultural awareness while the dialectics of globalism and cyberspace mandate a committed reflection on what the synthesis between the digital realm and global citizenship entails. In many ways, the borders that previously separated us as citizens physically and culturally have begun to dissipate, replaced by a call for an intercultural accountability and a form of global citizenship that, on one hand, surpasses borders, patriotism, and nationalism alike, but while on the other, demands an understanding and respect for the cultural idiosyncrasies among us, acknowledging the unique existential paradox of universal citizenship that posits each of us as both stranger and citizen on a commonly shared globe.

What is cosmopolitan in the digital age? Is a global digital citizen the same as merely a digital citizen? While talk of digital citizenship has increased in recent years, usually centered on a capitalist drive, encouraging a full electronic participation in society and a responsibility to digital commerce, many questions remain unanswered.  Is the netizen the citizen of a democratic state, and of digital democracy? As a citizen of the world interacting online, how will one’s “rights” and “duties” be determined? And are these “rights” universal, and in such a case, what does “universal” mean? What are the legal parameters of netizenship, and what will they be as globalization further takes hold? Is democracy critical to citizenship, or is it not? What are the political landscapes of global citizenship in the digital age? And last of all, is the concept of digital citizenship even tangible? Is it real?

This paper provides an evaluation of the SingleTapBraille keyboard, designed to assist people with no or low vision in using touchscreen smartphones. This application allows blind users to input characters based on braille patterns. To assess SingleTapBraille, this study compares its performance with that of the commonly used QWERTY keyboard. We conducted an evaluation study with 7 blind participants to examine the performance of both keyboards on Android platforms. Overall, participants were able to quickly adjust to SingleTapBraille and type on touchscreen devices using their knowledge of Braille patterns within fifteen to twenty minutes of introduction to the system. The SingleTapBraille keyboard was better than the QWERTY keyboard in terms of both speed and accuracy, indicating that SingleTapBraille represents an improvement over existing alternatives in making touchscreen keyboards more accessible for blind users. Based on the evaluation results and the feedback of our participants, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of previous keyboards that have been used by participants, as well as those of SingleTapBraille. In doing so, we consider possible design improvements for the future development of accessible keyboards for blind users.

Touchscreen calculators require a user to visually locate a button on the screen. This poses a challenge for individuals with limited or no vision. To overcome this challenge, prior to use these individuals must invest additional time and energy into memorizing the calculator layout. There is currently no application that simplifies the calculator user-interface for individuals with limited or no vision. To fill this void, this paper proposes BrailleTap. BrailleTap is a button-free calculator application for touchscreen devices that utilizes tap gestures to operate. Using finger tap, the user can input a number in braille and the application will compute the braille code to its corresponding numerical value. Alternatively, using a swipe gesture, the user will be orally prompted to select the desired arithmetic operations. This paper presents our pilot study of BrailleTap that was conducted with two blind users. Results indicate that BrailleTap is faster and more accessible to blind users than the traditional touchscreen calculator. However, in order to increase the efficiency of BrailleTap further development of the underlying algorithm is required.

In this paper, we present a user-centred approach for designing and developing smart homes for people with dementia. In contrast to most of the existing literature related to dementia, the present approach aims at tailoring the system to the specific needs of dementia using a scenario-based methodology. Scenarios are based on typical dementia symptoms which are collected from research literatures and validated by dementia caregivers. They portray the common behaviour of people with dementia. Because they explain real-world situations, scenarios are meant to generalise the requirements of smart homes for people with dementia. Hence, a top-down approach is followed to summarise the content of the scenarios into the essential requirements for smart home frameworks dedicated to monitoring people with dementia.