Daryl H. Hepting

Rough Sets, Fuzzy Sets, Data Mining, and Granulär Computing

14th International Conference, RSFDGrC 2013, Halifax, NS, Canada, October 11-14, 2013. Proceedings - Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series

Bridging the gaps between design and use: developing tools to support environmental management and policy

Abstract Integrated assessment models, decision support systems (DSS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are examples of a growing number of computer-based tools designed to provide decision and information support to people engaged in formulating and implementing environmental policy and management. It is recognised that environmental policy and management users are often not as receptive to using such tools as desired but that little research has been done to uncover and understand the reasons. There is a diverse range of environmental decision and information support tools (DISTs) with uses including organisational and participatory decision support, and scientific research. The different uses and users of DISTs each present particular needs and challenges to the tool developers. The lack of appreciation of the needs of end-users by developers has contributed to the lack of success of many DISTs. Therefore it is important to engage users and other stakeholders in the tool development process to help bridge the gap between design and use. Good practice recommendations for developers to involve users include being clear about the purpose of the tool, working collaboratively with other developers and stakeholders, and building social and scientific credibility.

Decision support for local environmental impact assessment

Abstract Sustainability has become a key concern for consumers and industry. However, coming to understand its implications in the context of daily life can be difficult. It may be hard to come to terms with the idea that traditional activities present environmental risks and may lead to real emergencies, manifested differently depending on local conditions. Everyone will be asked to do more but the move towards sustainability may require the total transformation of current attitudes and actions. This paper considers the role of informatics in responding to, and possibly averting, environmental emergencies by making information available to decision makers, whether they are individual consumers, institutional buyers, or emergency response personnel. If all choices can be presented within a spectrum of best and worst possible impacts for sustainability, decision makers can meaningfully weigh their options. Any evaluation on this basis is presently very difficult because one needs to independently assess and integrate possibly incomplete and conflicting information from a wide variety of sources. This paper describes the use of the cogito software, which embodies an approach for data access and presentation that is expected to provide significant benefits over existing web-based tools. The paper also considers the issues related to the collection and synthesis of disparate data.

Qualitative analysis of invariant tori in a dynamical system

Invariant tori are examples of invariant manifolds in dynamical systems. Usual tools in dynamical systems such as analysis and numerical simulations alone are often not sufficient to understand the complicated mechanisms that cause changes in these manifolds. Computer-graphical visualization is a natural and powerful addition to these tools used for the qualitative study of dynamical systems, especially for the study of invariant manifolds. The dynamics of two linearly coupled oscillators is the focus of this case study. With little or no coupling between the oscillators, an invariant torus is present but it breaks down for strong coupling. Visualization has been employed to gain a qualitative understanding of this breakdown process. The visualization has allowed key features of the tori to be recognized, and it has proven to be indispensable in developing and testing hypotheses about the tori.

Creating synergy between usability courses and open source software projects

In this paper, we discuss our experience in offering a usability course with projects taken from an active open source software development project. We describe what was done in the class inside the larger context of the usability of open source software. We conclude with an invitation for others to adopt this model and use it for their own purposes.

Ethics and usability testing in computer science education

Ethics and usability testing are increasingly important parts of a modern computer science education, given the changing profile of computer science employment and the increased focus on privacy. This paper introduces the concept of a participant pool, a means to recruit participants for research, which can be a valuable tool in teaching usability testing and ethics. It has a role in an overall emphasis on software quality and the importance of research. It can also help to increase the profile of this research and the desirability of a Computer Science degree to the larger population.

A Rough Sets Approach for Personalized Support of Face Recognition

The activity of facial recognition is routine for most people; yet describing the process of recognition, or describing a face to be recognized reveals a great deal of complexity inherent in the activity. Eyewitness identification remains an important element in judicial proceedings. It is very convincing, yet it is not very accurate. We studied how people sorted a collection of facial photographs and found that individuals may have different strategies for similarity recognition. In our analysis of the data, we have identified two possible strategies. We apply rough set based attribute reduction methodology to this data in order to develop a test to identify which of these strategies an individual is likely to prefer. We hypothesize that by providing a personalized search and filter environment, individuals would be more adequately equipped to handle the complexity of the task, thereby increasing the accuracy of identifications. Furthermore, the rough set based analysis may help to more clearly identify the different strategies that individuals use for this task. This paper provides a description of the preliminary study, our computational approach that includes an important pre-processing step, discusses results from our evaluation, and provides a list of opportunities for future work.

Consumer Modelling in Support of Interface Design

There is significant interest in developing new methods to design more effective user interfaces for decision support tools in online shopping environments. Many online companies have already begun to provide their consumers with enhanced user interface options, such as the ability to customize and/or personalize their user interface. However, for these enhanced options to produce meaningful, useful results, consumers are often required to input substantial amounts of information, placing a strain on the consumers¿ cognitive decision-making abilities and disrupting their focus on their immediate decision task(s). In this paper, the authors describe a personalization technique to reduce the amount of consumer information required to develop and deploy systems providing these enhanced options. Over the course of the three experiments, the authors built upon each experiment utilizing a combination of traditional statistical methods and rough set theory. This paper will describe the refined technique and the procedures, algorithms, observations, and analysis of the experiments conducted. As well, a discussion detailing future work will be provided.

Classification of facial photograph sorting performance based on verbal descriptions

Eyewitness identification remains an important element in judicial proceedings. It is very convincing, yet it is not very accurate. To better understand eyewitness identification, we began by examining how people understand similarity. This paper reports on analysis of study that examined how people made similarity judgements amongst a variety of facial photographs: participants were presented with a randomly ordered set of photos, with equal numbers of Caucasian (C) and First Nations (F), which they sorted based on their individual assessment of similarity. The number of piles made by the participants was not restricted. After sorting was complete, each participant was then asked to label each pile with a description of the piles contents. Following the results of an earlier study, we hypothesize that individuals may be using different strategies to assess similarity between photos. In this analysis, we attempt to use the descriptive pile labels (in particular, related to lips and ears) as a means to uncover differences in strategies for which a classifier can be built, using the rough set attribute reduction methodology. In particular, we aim to identify those pairs of photographs that may be the key for verifying an individuals abilities and strategies when recognizing faces. The paper describes the method for data processing that enabled the comparisons based on labels. Continued success with the same technique as previously reported to filter pairs before performing the rough sets analysis, lends credibility to its use as a general method. The rough set techniques enable the identification of the sets of photograph pairs that are key to the divisions based on various strategies. This may lead to a practical test for peoples abilities, as well as to inferring what discriminations people use in face recognition.

A user-driven interface for exploring visualizations

There is presently a variety of methods by which to create visualizations, and many of these require a great deal of manual intervention. Even with those methods by which it is easy to create a single visual representation, understanding the range of possible visual representations and exploring amongst them is difficult. We present a generalized interface, called cogito, that permits the user to control exploration of the visualization output of various manual tools, all without the requirement to modify the original tool. Programming within the cogito API is required to connect to each tool, but it is not onerous. We consider that the exploratory experience or activity is valuable, and that it is possible to easily create this experience for standard tools that do not normally permit exploration. We illustrate this approach with several examples from different kinds of manual interfaces and discuss the requirements of each.