Nadine Jessel

LAMBDA: a european system to access mathematics with braille and audio synthesis

This paper deals with an innovative method to improve access to mathematics by blind students in an educational setting. It was designed and developed in the European project LAMBDA (Linear Access to Mathematics for Braille Device and Audio-synthesis). This system is made up of two main functional components: the LAMBDA code and the mathematical editor. The research project is funded by the European Union in the framework of the IST Programme. It started in 2002 and will end in 2006.

A community-based algorithm for deriving users’ profiles from egocentrics networks: experiment on Facebook and DBLP

Nowadays, social networks are more and more widely used as a solution for enriching users’ profiles in systems such as recommender systems or personalized systems. For an unknown user’s interest, the user’s social network can be a meaningful data source for deriving that interest. However, in the literature very few techniques are designed to meet this solution. Existing techniques usually focus on people individually selected in the user’s social network and strongly depend on each author’s objective. To improve these techniques, we propose using a community-based algorithm that is applied to a part of the user’s social network (egocentric network) and that derives a user social profile that can be reused for any purpose (e.g., personalization, recommendation). We compute weighted user’s interests from these communities by considering their semantics (interests related to communities) and their structural measures (e.g., centrality measures) in the egocentric network graph. A first experiment conducted in Facebook demonstrates the usefulness of this technique compared to individual-based techniques and the influence of structural measures (related to communities) on the quality of derived profiles. A second experiment on DBLP and the author’s social network Mendeley confirms the results obtained on Facebook and shows the influence of the density of egocentrics network on the quality of results.

Visualizing the Evolution of Users' Profiles from Online Social Networks

Nowadays, online social networks host more and more applications in order to provide their users with the possibility of finding everything they need on a single platform. The number and diversity of interactions that take place over time between users and applications within these platforms make these environments very good candidates for learning various types of information about users’ interests. We are particularly interested in the determination of users’ short-term and long-term interests which are essential for adaptative systems that take into account the evolution of user’s needs. While studies in adaptative systems focus on computing interests’ weight value and time periods to determine user’s short-term and long-term profile, we focus instead on temporal graphs’ visualization of users’ interests. From a case study on Facebook, we use dynamic graphs in order to view the influence of social ties on the user’s interests.

BMML: Braille Music Markup Language

Thanks to the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) guidelines for producing accessible HTML documents, visually impaired people can have better access to a lot of textual information. Concerning musical score, several encoding formats are available, focusing on the representation of different aspects of this kind of content. As XML is the standard for exchanging content through the Web, several XML applications have already been specified for representing musical scores, using the traditional music notation. As a result, users can access and share a lot of different types of musical content using the Web. However, for specific notations – like the Braille one - no dedicated XML application has been developed yet. Therefore, visually impaired musicians cannot easily represent, share, and access scores using the Web. This paper presents the application we have developed to respond to this need: BMML (Braille Music Markup Language). BMML handles specificities of Braille Music notation and takes into account the core features of existing formats. The main objective of BMML is to improve the accessibility of Braille musical scores.

A Reproducible Experiment Towards the Accessibility of a Geographical Map

The “Mappa Mundi d’Albi” is an eighth-century map, registered in the Unesco‘s World heritage list in 2015. Difficult to understand even visually, it requires explanation and contextualization. In accordance with the legislation regarding the accessibility of cultural works, and to allow its understanding, we have implemented various devices, via digital technology, to make it accessible to as many people as possible. Different criteria of accessibility and perception of sensory modalities have been studied. After an analysis of the already existing accessibility design we have designed and evaluated different prototypes of enhanced digital and tangible maps. These prototypes have been put in place through different partnerships and based on a goal of reproducibility at low cost. The other objective was, taking into account the “diy” culture of fablabs, the work in collaboration for teachers specialized in accessibility or not and non-computer scientists.

Dérivation de profils utilisateurs à partir des réseaux sociaux. Une approche par communautés de réseaux égocentriques

Lorsqu’un utilisateur est peu ou pas actif dans un systeme d’information, son profil est peu/mal connu et les mecanismes qui s’y referent (personnalisation de contenus par exemple) sont moins efficaces. Pour ameliorer les resultats de ces mecanismes, plusieurs approches r ecentes montrent la pertinence de l’usage du reseau social de l’utilisateur comme source d’information complementaire au profil de l’utilisateur. Ces approches presentent cependant deux inconvenients majeurs : d’une part, chacune des approches reste tres specifique a son domaine d’application (et au mecanisme associe), et, d’autre part, elles exploitent de maniere unilaterale les profils des individus autour de l’utilisateur pour ameliorer ces mecanismes. Pour pallier ces inconvenients, nous proposons un modele generique et social de profil utilisateur suscep tible d’etre reutilise par plusieurs mecanismes dans differents domaines d’application, et un processus de derivation des elements du profil de l’utilisateur non pas a partir des individus autour de l’utilisateur, mais a partir des communautes autour de l’utilisateur dans une portion de son reseau social (reseau egocentrique). Une evaluation preliminaire menee dans Facebook montre l’interet de cette nouvelle approche.