Rafael Brandão

Software Developers as Users

In view of the pervasive role played by Information Technology in contemporary life, a growing community of researchers, practitioners, and educators has been involved with human-centered computing (HCC), a fi eld of studies concerned with the integration of theories and methodologies to support the combined investigation of machines, humans, and domains of applications. Comprehensive HCC studies should then articulate technical, personal, social, and cultural factors, addressing the use of technology, its design, and development. This introductory chapter provides an overview of our incremental contribution to advance HCC studies, a suite of tools called SigniFYI . With this tool, we aim to uncover meanings inscribed in software, their origins, and consequences. We propose to identify and trace instances of consistently related objects across different segments of investigation concerning software production and use. In order to achieve this goal, we rely on semiotic engineering theory, which provides us with conceptual and methodological resources with which to obtain a coherent perspective across multiple segments of investigation. The result is a principled account of relations between the objects in each segment. Following Schön’s perspectives on refl ective practice applied to software design and development, SigniFYI stimulates researchers, professionals, and educators to think critically about what they do and how they do it and with which means and for which ends. Additionally, in research contexts, SigniFYI supports the validation of knowledge produced with interpretive research methods. As cultural, political, social, psychological, and even physical life experiences of individuals all over the world become increasingly tied to the use and effects of Information Technology (IT), a growing number of researchers, practitioners, and educators are concerned with how human values affect or can be affected by software development and use. Members of this community of interest have contributed to establishing a relatively new fi eld of studies called human-centered computing (HCC) , whose aim is to integrate various disciplines that provide us with knowledge and methods with which to search answers for the questions we ask. Theoretical and methodological integration is the key to HCC. Multiple disciplines have been contributing to the study of Computer Science and Informatics, from the more abstract ones (like mathematics and logic) to the ones that are more focused on human experience (like psychology, sociology, and design). However,

NCM 3.1: A Conceptual Model for Hyperknowledge Document Engineering

Most of multimedia documents available today are agnostic to data semantics and their specification language offer little to ease authoring and mechanisms to their players so they can retrieve and present meaningful content to improve user experience. In this paper, we present the main entities of the version 3.1 of the Nested Context Model (NCM), which concentrate efforts at integrating support for enriched knowledge description to the model. This extension enables the specification of relationships between knowledge descriptions in the traditional hypermedia way, composing what we call hyperknowledge in this paper. NCM previous version (NCM 3.0) is a conceptual model for hypermedia document engineering. NCL (Nested Context Language), which is part of international standards and ITU recommendations, is an XML application language that was engineered according to NCM 3.0 definitions. The extensions discussed in this paper contribute not only for advances in the NCL specifications, but mainly as a conceptual model for hyperknowledge document engineering.

Challenges on Multimedia for Decision-Making in the Era of Cognitive Computing

The increasing momentum towards cognitive computing unlocks a diverse set of opportunities and challenges for the multimedia research community. In fact, with a different approach from the one present in the traditional artificial intelligence systems, cognitive computing glimpses a human-machine collaboration, promoting a more natural and symbiotic interaction. The main goal of this paper is to discuss central challenges when the multimedia research area enrolls decision-making processes in the era of cognitive computing. Aiming at supporting the multimedia research community on future investigations in this research area, we present challenges in different topics gathered in specific domains.

Extending Hypermedia Conceptual Models to Support Hyperknowledge Specifications

Most multimedia documents available today are agnostic to data semantics. Moreover, their specification language offers little to ease authoring of meaningful content. In this paper, we present the main entities of a new version (3.1) of the Nested Context Model (NCM), which concentrate efforts at integrating support for enriched concept description to the model. These extensions enable the specification of relationships between concept descriptions and multimedia content in the hypermedia way, composing what we call hyperknowledge in this paper. NCM previous version (3.0) is a hypermedia conceptual model. NCL (Nested Context Language), which is part of international standards and ITU recommendations, was engineered according to NCM 3.0 definitions. The extensions discussed in this paper contribute not only for advances in the NCL, but mainly as a conceptual model for hyperknowledge document engineering.

Communicability Issues on PaaS Application Development

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is becoming a differential product for big technology companies. It delivers hardware, software tools and other resources for application development and hosting, as a service. Its users are developers who need to build and deploy new applications. Besides computational power, PaaS environments (PaaSE) offer services, development tools or even complete apps to be putted together in final applications. These pieces of software can be developed by different parties, presenting a significant challenge from the HCI perspective. Semiotic Engineering (SemEng) views HCI as computer-mediated communication between designers and users at interaction time. In the PaaS context, several designers communicate with PaaSEs users (developers). In this paper, we apply SemEng concepts to analyze diverse software artifacts involved, showing evidence of communication breakdowns between designers and users. Our goal is to provide a better understanding of existing metacommunication processes in PaaSE, offering specific suggestions to emphasize communication boundaries.

The CAS project: a general infrastructure for pervasive capture and access systems

In this paper we describe the CAS (Capture & Access System), a project aimed towards a general infrastructure to support Capture & Access applications in ubiquitous computing environments. Our infrastructure assists various activities, such as capturing media from multiple platforms and devices; transferring, storing and post-processing captured media; and automatic multimedia document generation for the access stage. CAS is a component-based architecture that can be reconfigured and adapted to change the systems behavior dynamically at runtime, in addition to enabling developers to extend the system to match specific requirements.

Understanding Documents with Hyperknowledge Specifications

Finding concepts considering their meaning and semantic relations in a document corpus is an important and challenging task. In this paper, we present our contributions on how to understand unstructured data present in one or multiple documents. Generally, the current literature concentrates efforts in structuring knowledge by identifying semantic entities in the data. In this paper, we test our hypothesis that hyperknowledge specifications are capable of defining rich relations among documents and extracted facts. The main evidence supporting this hypothesis is the fact that hyperknowledge was built on top of hypermedia fundamentals, easing the specification of rich relationships between different multimodal components (i.e. multimedia content and knowledge entities). The key challenge tackled in this paper is how to structure and correlate these components considering their meaning and semantic relations.

Interaction Behind the Scenes: Exploring Knowledge and User Intent in Interactive Decision-Making Processes

Logging user interaction data with computational artifacts can be handy in identifying activities and issues associated with interactive decision-making processes. However, while such data commonly results in a temporally linear construction, information involved in such processes is not well structured from a knowledge engineering perspective. Consequently, both its consumption and understanding are not straightforward processes. Considering highly immersive environments with interaction through multiple modalities, the tracking of such knowledge becomes even more complex. Such environments have been increasingly used to support decision-making practices, which may involve cognitive-intense activities and critical thinking. Inferring concepts and knowledge from logging data in such activities is key for improving design of decision support systems, and general systems as well.

Multimedia in Cognitive-Intensive Practices: A Case with ATLAS.ti Supporting HCI Qualitative Research

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) area uses qualitative research methods to guide its user experience studies. These methods involve collecting and analyzing large amounts of empirical materials registered in different multimedia contents. Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) tools support HCI qualitative research activities in some level, but the cognitive-intense work of producing structured and related data, building meaningful knowledge from it, and making decisions based on this knowledge is mainly the HCI researchers duty. We present a case with Atlas.ti 7, a QDA tool, and in that scenario, we identify and assess key features that support HCI qualitative research. We discuss how those features could evolve to augment human capacity and understanding throughout the qualitative data analysis, considering the cognitive computing approach. We considered multimedia concepts to discuss the evolution of QDA tools as potential investigation paths for research in multimedia and cognitive systems.

MM4DM: How Multimedia Enrolls Decision-Making Processes in the Era of Cognitive Computing

The increasing momentum towards cognitive computing unlocks a diverse set of opportunities and challenges for the multimedia research area. In fact, with a different approach from the one present in the traditional artificial intelligence systems, cognitive computing glimpses a human-machine collaboration, where a more symbiotic interaction is required. The main goal of the Multimedia for Decision-Making (MM4DM) tutorial is to discuss how the multimedia research area enrolls decision-making processes in the era of cognitive computing. In this context, this tutorial discusses topics of multidisciplinary interest, always from a multimedia perspective, aiming to inspire heterogeneous participation of researchers from industry and academia.