Vagner Figueredo de Santana

Building Socially Connected Skilled Teams to Accomplish Complex Tasks

Solving todays problems demands more than the effort of an individual, however, brilliant mind. Collaboration and team work are fundamental skills for tackling such problems. The ability of team members to work together and communicate with one another thus becomes an uppermost concern. In this context, to assemble an effective team requires an approach that goes beyond the analysis of individual skills. This paper proposes and examines the problem that takes into account different skill attributes and social ties to build an interconnected team. Our proposed solution is evaluated by means of building one team to defeat an opposite team defined in the same social network. Our experimental results show that our algorithms produces meaningful socially collaborative skilled teams.

GraPhys: Understanding Health Care Insurance Data through Graph Analytics.

Healthcare insurance data represent a rich source of information and has the potential to contribute significantly in guiding business decision making. In this work we present GraPhys, a Graph Analysis platform designed for exploration, visualization and analysis of healthcare insurance data and its corresponding metadata. By taking advantage of relationships contained in healthcare claims data, we are able to apply Graph Analytics methods and algorithms in order to devise useful business metrics to guide data analysis and exploration. Our tool focuses in better understanding physicians, patients and their practices. We illustrate our approach by demonstrating two use cases where we show how graph analytics metrics, combined with other data, may lead to useful insights not directly available to traditional Business Analytics.

Web accessibility snapshot: an effort to reveal coding guidelines conformance

In the last decades, the Web has grown from dozens of webpages to the current 13.5 billion pages. This growth was not followed by a major conformance to markup coding guidelines. This impacts negatively the access of people with disabilities to the vast socio-economic-cultural transformations the Web engenders. For example, a form field without the proper label markup is an accessibility barrier for blind users. In this context, this work presents a study involving the Alexa.coms top 1,000 popular websites and a sample of random 1,000 websites to verify and contrast the conformance of these disjoint sets with the accessibility markup guidelines. The initiative proposed in this paper is the first iteration of the Web Accessibility Snapshot (WAS) project, which will from now on present regular updates on the numbers regarding the status of Web accessibility. With the presented results, one expects to support accessibility professionals, researchers, and practitioners by providing up-to-date information. Beyond that, we expect governments and other accessibility governance agency to consider the provided information when designing programs for fostering and enforcing the conformance to existing accessibility regulations and laws accordingly.

Computer Anxiety and Interaction: A Systematic Review

With the increasing use of technology in everyday life, one would expect that the use of computers would be comfortable and straightforward for everyone. However, some people still feel intimidated when using computers. Those people experience multiple levels of anxiety and, for high levels of anxiety, manifest what is known as Computer Anxiety. People with Computer Anxiety (PwCA) face problems when using computers/technology at home, in the workplace, or for study purposes, which might result in multiple forms of barriers. This work contributes with a systematic review, summarizing the main approaches related to Computer Anxiety and the understanding of the contexts of use involving PwCA. The main results are that Computer Anxiety Rating Scale (CARS) is the most popular scale for measuring Computer Anxiety, Computer Self-Efficacy has a negative strong relationship with Computer Anxiety, experience in using computers reduces Computer Anxiety, PwCA tend to take more time to complete tasks, and that higher education levels are related with lower levels of Computer Anxiety. The results obtained are valuable for researchers working on identifying and removing barriers in systems targeting the population of older adults, given that they are greatly impacted by factors leading to Computer Anxiety.

An eye gaze model for seismic interpretation support

Designing systems to offer support to experts during cognitive intensive tasks at the right time is still a challenging endeavor, despite years of research progress in the area. This paper proposes a gaze model based on eye tracking empirical data to identify when a system should proactively interact with the expert during visual inspection tasks. The gaze model derives from the analyses of a user study where 11 seismic interpreters were asked to perform the visual inspection task of seismic images from known and unknown basins. The eye tracking fixation patterns were triangulated with pupil dilations and thinking-aloud data. Results show that cumulative saccadic distances allow identifying when additional information could be offered to support seismic interpreters, changing the visual search behavior from exploratory to goal-directed.

Expanding Scientific Community Reach Based on Web Access Data

Knowing the main characteristics of a scientific community, how it reaches all stakeholders, and understanding how individuals engage around a subject is needed in order to support decision makers to plan strategies to maintain and nurture the community. This work presents a new way of interpreting the reach of a scientific community by incorporating Web access data to the co-author network commonly considered. The case presented involves the Brazilian Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community and the access to the website of the XV Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computer Systems, the main HCI conference in Brazil. The proposed method is grounded on Organizational Semiotics and differs from the existing works because it considers a wider population than the conference authors. Inspired by the Organizational Onion, it considers three different levels of connection: Informal, Formal, and Technical. In the presented case, the reach commonly used (i.e., author-author network) counts on 257 authors while the total of people orbiting the event involved 5,432 unique visitors, in other words, the co-author network represents approximately 5% of the population orbiting the event. The presented method shows that data originated from Web accesses support a different way of representing a scientific community reach, including multiple segments that are commonly not considered as the target-audience, resulting in a more inclusive approach in the sense of considering the plurality of people orbiting an event, mediated or not by a computer. Our contribution shows a data informed approach of expanding the scientific community reach in order to characterize people orbiting the conference.

Activity of Brazilian HCI Community from 2012 to 2017 in the Context of the Challenge 'Future, Smart Cities, and Sustainability'

Grand Challenges are ranked and defined to guide an area/discipline so that efforts and long term initiatives focus on providing disruptive solutions. These challenges represent a key component to highlight core issues that cannot be tackled in a short term or by a single person, requiring multiple efforts and sometimes whole communities. This position paper presents a discussion involving activities of the Brazilian Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community in the 2012-2017 period in the context of the challenge Future, Smart Cities and Sustainability, which is part of the Grand Research Challenges in Human-Computer Interaction in Brazil (GranDIHC-BR). The analysis performed shows that this challenge is one of the least addressed by the Brazilian HCI community and that actions fommenting GranDIHC-BR must be taken continuously, e.g., conferences, competitions, or submission tracks related to GranDIHC-BR challenges less covered by the Brazilian HCI community. From the presented results, one expects to summarize: (1) activities performed in the context of the challenge, (2) reflections around the theme, and (3) to outline a research agenda for the next 5 years.

Modeling Task Deviations as Eccentricity Distribution Peaks

Detailed usage data is becoming available through different devices (e.g., personal computer, cell phones, tablets, watches, glasses, wrist bands), in huge volumes, and in a speed that requires new models and visualizations to support the understanding of detailed user actions at scale. Without appropriate methods that summarize or provide means of analyzing large usage data sets, a semantic gap between the event-by-event data and the tasks profile remains. In this context, this work proposes a technique to support the analysis of task deviation from the examination of detailed user interface events streams. From the analysis of 427 event-by-event logged sessions (captured under user consent) of a technical reference website, this work presents how to identify task deviations by using eccentricity distribution. The proposed technique is a promising way of identifying task deviations in large log data sets containing information about how users performed real tasks.

Identifying challenges and opportunities in computer-based vocational training for low-income communities of people with intellectual disabilities

Vocational training of people with disabilities (PwD) can potentially improve social and economic prospects, but at the same time, it can be significantly challenging due to the need for specialized training and technology. Unfortunately, in developing countries this problem is magnified because, in general, low-income groups have limited access to appropriate content and assistive technologies. In this paper, we present initial findings from a qualitative field study of computer-mediated vocational training for low-income students with intellectual disability (ID) in Brazils largest urban area. The observations took place during 3 computer-based training sessions, which involved 23 students with ID. Based on data gathered from observations and semi-structured interviews with 2 instructors, we describe and discuss strategies they employ to teach heterogeneous groups of students with ID. We also examine some obstacles that our participants usually face during the classes at the computer lab and present suggestions for future initiatives that could better support instructors and students with ID in the learning process.

Supporting the selection of web content modality based on user interactions logs

Internet offers a huge amount of services related to government, entertainment, and communication. However, to ensure that any citizen can have proper access to all services and information, it is necessary to think about accessibility in a broader way than it is found in the Web. Universal Design points to a way of thinking about the heterogeneity of capabilities instead of segregating according to individual disabilities. In the Web, applying this approach involves solving the challenge of selecting the appropriate content modality, at the appropriate time. Thus, this work present a study focusing on selecting the modality of a Web content based on the data resulting from a single pageview, minimizing efforts related to profile filling or explicit customization of Web systems. The study involved the analysis of 261 sessions, 31 coming from people that informed being using assistive technology. From the experiment performed it was possible to identify that the algorithm Random Committee provided the best results for the studied problem (precision 94.8%; recall of 94.3%). Results are potentially of interest for Human-Computer Interaction practitioners aiming at providing adequate content modality after minimum usage.