Florian Evéquoz

Walking-pad: a step-in-place locomotion interface for virtual environments

This paper presents a new locomotion interface that provides users with the ability to engage in a life-like walking experience using stepping in place. Stepping actions are performed on top of a flat platform that has an embedded grid of switch sensors that detect footfalls pressure. Based on data received from sensors, the system can compute different variables that represent users walking behavior such as walking direction, walking speed, standstill, jump, and walking. The overall platform status is scanned at a rate of 100Hz with which we can deliver real-time visual feedback reaction to user actions. The proposed system is portable and easy to integrate into major virtual environment with large projection feature such as CAVE and DOME systems. The overall weight of the Walking-Pad is less than 5 Kg and can be connected to any computer via USB port, which make it even controllable via a portable computer.

Gérer son information personnelle au moyen de la navigation par facettes

This article introduces Weena, a personal information management (PIM) system enabling faceted navigation in a personal collection. Re-finding information items can be achieved in particular through the related people (social facet) and temporal period (temporal facets) in addition to traditional hierarchical browsing and text search. Participants in the evaluation effectively used those facets and expressed an interest for the approach. Faceted navigation is therefore a viable and promising alternative to hierarchical browsing and text search, the two more traditional re-finding means in PIM.

Mining and Visualizing Social Data to Inform Marketing Decisions

Most of todays commercial companies heavily rely on social media and community management tools to interact with their clients and analyze their online behaviour. Nonetheless, these tools still lack evolved data mining and visualization features to tailor the analysis in order to support useful marketing decisions. We present an original methodology that aims at formalizing the marketing need of the company and develop a tool that can support it. The methodology is derived from the Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) and includes additional steps dedicated to the design and development of visualizations of mined data. We followed the methodology in two use cases with Swiss companies. First, we developed a prototype that aims at understanding the needs of tourists based on Flickr and Instagram data. In that use case, we extend the existing literature by enriching hashtags analysis methods with a semantic network based on Linked Data. Second, we analyzed internal customer data of an online discount retailer to help them define guerilla marketing measures. We report on the challenges of integrating Facebook data in the process. Informal feedback from domain experts confirms the strong potential of such advanced analytic features based on social data to inform marketing decisions.

Putting the Customer Back in the Center of SOA with Service Design and User-Centered Design

This article introduces a methodology used for designing the online presence of a Swiss SME providing Cloud Services. The Web application used for the purchasing and administration, backed by a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), has been designed to be customer-centric using a combination of different techniques borrowed from the fields of ethnomethodology, service design and user-centered design. The tools employed include service blueprint design and affinity diagram analysis followed by prototyping and subsequent usability evaluation. This collaborative methodology explained with the help of the applied research project use case is seen to yield excellent results in terms of customer-orientation.

MEMODULES as Tangible Shortcuts to Multimedia Information

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) are emerging as a new paradigm for facilitating user interaction with the digital world by providing intuitive means to link the physical and digital worlds. The MEMODULES project has the objective of developing, experimenting and evaluating the concept of tangible shortcuts (reminders), facilitating (a) the control of devices in the everyday life and also (b) the categorization of information in order to ease or improve information access and retrieval. The project aims at facilitating the user interaction with multimedia information by supporting both the creation and management of tangible links to digital content. Moreover, our research investigates the opportunity of a more complex, multi-sensorial combination of objects and multimedia information by combining multiple interaction modalities - such as voice and gesture - with interactive information visualizations. In order to address these issues we propose a user-oriented framework, called Memodules Framework, enabling end users to turn everyday objects into Memodules. The framework provides a single platform that combines end-user programming, tangible interaction, multimodality and personal information management issues. Memodules framework is built upon MemoML (Memodules Markup Language) and SMUIML (Synchronized Multimodal User Interaction Markup Language) models, which guarantee framework flexibility, extensibility and evolution over time.

Browsing multimedia archives through intra- and multimodal cross-documents links

This article proposes to consider all the links existing between documents, as a new artifact for browsing through multimedia archives. In particular, links between static documents and other media are presented in this article through Inquisitor, FriDoc and FaericWorld, i.e. three distinct document-centric systems, which allow (a) browsing (b) validation of annotations, and (c) edition of annotations or documents. Inquisitor illustrates the intra-document links between a raw document and its abstract representations. It is the base level, i.e. the closest to the raw media. FriDoc illustrates the cross-documents links, in particular temporal ones, between documents at the event level, which strictly connect documents captured at the same occasion (e.g. a meeting, a conference, etc.). Finally, FaericWorid proposes cross-documents linking as a novel artifact for browsing and searching through a cross-event multimedia library. This article describes those three systemvs and the various types of links that can be built between documents. Finally, the paper presents the result of a user evaluation of FriDoc and briefly discusses the usefulness of cross-documents linking, and in particular document alignments, for browsing through multimedia archives.

Designing a Classification for User-authored Annotations in Data Visualization.

This article introduces a classification system for user-authored annotations in the domain of data visualization. The classification system was created with a bottom-up approach, starting from actual userauthored annotations. To devise relevant dimensions for this classification, we designed a data analysis web platform displaying four visualizations of a common dataset. Using this tool, 16 analysts recorded over 300 annotations that were used to design a classification system. That classification system was then iteratively evaluated and refined until a high inter-coder agreement was found. Use cases for such a classification includes assessing the expressiveness of visualizations on a common ground, based on the types of annotations that are produced with each visualization.

Parallel Bubbles - Evaluation of Three Techniques for Representing Mixed Categorical and Continuous Data in Parallel Coordinates.

Parallel Coordinates are a widely used visualization method for multivariate data analysis tasks. In this paper we discuss the techniques that aim to enhance the representation of categorical data in Parallel Coordinates. We propose Parallel Bubbles, a method that improves the graphical perception of categorical dimensions in Parallel Coordinates by adding a visual encoding of frequency. Our main contribution consists in a user study that compares the performance of three variants of Parallel Coordinates, with similarity and frequency tasks. We base our design choices on the literature review, and on the research guidelines provided by Johansson and Forsell (2016). Parallel Bubbles are a good trade-off between Parallel Coordinates and Parallel Sets in terms of performance for both types of tasks. Adding a visual encoding of frequency leads to a significant difference in performance for a frequency-based task consisting in assessing the most represented category. This study is the first of a series that will aim at testing the three visualization methods in tasks centered on the continuous axis, and where we assume that the performance of Parallel Sets will be worse.

Expectation and Experience: Passenger Acceptance of Autonomous Public Transportation Vehicles

Passenger acceptance is a key factor for the successful integration, uptake and use of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the domain of public transportation. Especially knowing opinions and attitudes around safety, comfort and convenience. We discuss a pilot study conducted as part of a larger research project where AVs are being tested to transport members of the general public on a specified route with designated stops. We present preliminary findings of fieldwork conducted where people were asked their opinions and attitudes both before and after riding on an AV shuttle as a passenger for the first time. This allows us to compare user expectation beforehand with actual experience afterwards.

Parallel bubbles: categorical data visualization in parallel coordinates

In this article we discuss the techniques available to represent categorical data in Parallel Coordinates, a widely used visualisation method for multivariate datasets analysis tasks. We propose Parallel Bubbles, a frequency-based method improving the graphical perception of categorical dimensions in Parallel Coordinates plots. We compare the performance of three variations of Parallel Coordinates in a user study, with similarity and frequency tasks. Parallel Bubbles are a good tradeoff in terms of performance for both types of tasks, and adding a visual encoding causes a significative difference in performance. This study is the first of a series of papers which will aim at testing the three visualisation methods in tasks centered on the numerical axis, and where Parallel Sets performance will probably be worse.