Vânia Paula de Almeida Neris

Can Common Sense uncover cultural differences in computer applications

Cultural differences play a very important role in matching computer interfaces to the expectations of users from different national and cultural backgrounds. But to date, there has been little systematic research as to the extent of such differences, and how to produce software that automatically takes into account these differences. We are studying these issues using a unique resource: Common Sense knowledge bases in different languages. Our research points out that this kind of knowledge can help computer systems to consider cultural differences. We describe our experiences with knowledge bases containing thousands of sentences describing people and everyday activities, collected from volunteer Web contributors in three different cultures: Brazil, Mexico and the USA, and software which automatically searches for cultural differences amongst the three cultures, alerting the user to potential differences.

Using common sense to recognize cultural differences

This work focuses on evaluating whether cultural differences can be recognized in knowledge bases that store common sense. We are studying this issue using knowledge bases in different languages that contain thousands of sentences describing people and everyday activities, collected from volunteer Web contributors, in three different cultures: Brazil, Mexico and the USA. We describe our experiences with these knowledge bases, and software which automatically searches for cultural differences amongst the three cultures taking into account the eating habits of those cultures, alerting the user to potential differences. Though preliminary, we hope that our work will contribute to software that takes better account of such differences, and fosters inter-cultural collaboration.

Design Guidelines for Audio Games

This paper presents guidelines to aid on the design of audio games. Audio games are games on which the user interface and game events use primarily sounds instead of graphics to convey information to the player. Those games can provide an accessible gaming experience to visually impaired players, usually handicapped by conventional games. The presented guidelines resulted of existing literature research on audio games design and implementation, of a case study and of a user observation performed by the authors. The case study analyzed how audio is used to create an accessible game on nine audio games recommended for new players. The user observation consisted of a playtest on which visually impaired users played an audio game, on which some interaction problems were identified. The results of those three studies were analyzed and compiled in 50 design guidelines.

Methodology for Data and Information Quality Assessment in the Context of Emergency Situational Awareness

Situation Assessment (SA) approaches aim to provide powerful resources to support decision makers in enhancing their Situational Awareness (SAW). The process of SA in emergency response systems is of utmost importance once the information acquired and inferred from human reports is used to support the deployment of tactics and resources to attend incidents. However, operators of such systems may face informational barriers leading to an erroneous SAW and consequently jeopardize the assessment process if they are not handled. One of such barriers in this context is the presence of low-quality data or information. Hence, a challenging issue in this field is to determine how to generate, score, update and represent data and information quality cues to support operators to reason under uncertainties and improve their understanding about an ongoing situation. The state of the art in this area presents a research gap regarding methodologies for the information quality assessment which can be used in the emergency management domain. Also, there is a lack of approaches that interface with different levels of situational information during an assessment routine. Hence, in order to enhance operators situational awareness, a new methodology is presented to improve the capabilities of SA systems by enriching knowledge about situations with reliable metadata. Such methodology, named Information Quality Assessment Methodology in the Context of Emergency situational awareness, is composed by: elicitation of data and information quality requirements; definition of functions and metrics to quantify quality dimensions, such as completeness, timeliness, consistency, relevance and uncertainty; and the representation of situational information by the instantiation of a situation model, which can be consumed by an ontology. Finally, a case study is addressed to verify the applicability of the methodology using data and information from a robbery event. The results obtained show situational models with qualified information that feed SA systems, enabling them to be aware of information quality.

Providing adaptive smartphone interfaces targeted at elderly people: an approach that takes into account diversity among the elderly

Abstract The growth of the elderly population in many countries makes it necessary to develop appropriate technologies for them. These include mobile phones, as they are increasingly becoming cheaper and more widespread. Furthermore, many families would like their elderly relatives to use this technology as a means of fostering digital inclusion. However, the current designs for mobile devices software are aimed at a young audience, rather than taking account of the different needs of the elderly. The elderly population can be characterized by their wide diversity which can be attributed to decades of varied experiences. Moreover, this is heightened by sharp differences in acquired education levels, use of technology at work, cognitive skills and physical dexterity. The authors believe that this diversity is even more striking in developing countries, such as Brazil, since in these countries a huge economic gap still exists between different elderly people. This paper seeks to investigate: (1) What can be done to solve the problem of enabling the elderly to use smartphone interfaces and (2) how one should develop adaptive smartphone interfaces that can be targeted to the elderly. With this in mind, this paper shows how a prototyped platform was implemented and evaluated. It is worth stressing that real-life experiments with Brazilian elderly people were carried out. The results suggested that there had been a reduction in the interaction time as well as a significant increase in user satisfaction.

Designing tailorable software systems with the users’ participation

There are several barriers that prevent Brazilian citizen to access knowledge, including the way in which computational technology is presented considering the diversity of interaction skills in our population. One approach for suiting the diverse and mutable interaction requirements is to tailor interfaces according to the users’ preferences or needs. Although literature regarding tailoring presents results with diverse foci, there has been a lack of works considering methods and techniques to support designers in their practice. This paper presents a practical approach to elicit and formalize the tailorable behavior making interactive systems more flexible. The elicitation of the different possible interfaces is performed with users’ participation and the tailorable behavior is formalized with a norm-based structure. A case study, in the context of an inclusive social network system, is described as well as the evaluation with final users.

Assessing users’ emotion at interaction time: a multimodal approach with multiple sensors

Users’ emotional states influence decision making and are essential for the knowledge and explanation of users’ behavior with computer applications. However, collecting emotional states during the interaction time with users is a onerous task because it requires very careful handling of the empirical observation, leading researchers to carry out assessments of emotional responses only at the end of the interaction. This paper reports our research in assessing users’ behavior at interaction time and also describes the results of a case study which analyzed users’ emotional responses while interacting with a game. We argue that capturing emotions during interaction time can help us in making changes on users’ behavior (e.g., changing from stressed to a less stressed state) or even suggesting an user to have a break. This can be all possible if both (1) emotions are captured during interaction and (2) changes are suggested at runtime (e.g., through persuasion). The results of this study suggest that there are significant differences between emotional responses captured during the interaction and those declared at the end.

SAW-Oriented User Interfaces for Emergency Dispatch Systems

Situational awareness (SAW) is a concept widely spread in application areas that require critical decision-making, such as in emergency dispatching systems. SAW is related to the level of consciousness that an individual or team has to a situation. SAW-oriented UI for critical systems require specialized user interfaces to provide operators a dynamic understanding of what is happening in an environment. The information to be managed by such interfaces affects the way operators in an emergency dispatch system acquire, maintain and recover SAW. A challenging issue on the design of SAW-oriented interfaces is how the human-system interaction process can be redesigned for the enhancement of SAW considering environments with potential large scale heterogeneous multi sensors data in complex, ever-changing situations. The problem is increased when such information is subject to uncertainty, which may compromise the acquisition of the situational awareness. Also, humans are expected to make decisions based on their own understanding of what is going on, which allied to experience and expertise can be valuable assets to be used to process refinement during the construction of an incremental knowledge. The goal of this paper is to introduce a conceptual framework to create specialized interfaces that support the participation of operators in the process of SAW acquisition. Such SAW-oriented interface presents a tight integration between the operator and the other phases of an assessment process, such as information quality assessment, information fusion and information visualization. A robbery event report, in an emergency dispatch system, is used as a case study to demonstrate practical and promising results of the applicability of our solution.

A Systematic Review of Sustainability and Aspects of Human-Computer Interaction

Sustainability is the term employed for the practice of ensuring that goods and services are produced in ways that do not use resources that cannot be replaced. This practice has been in focus on several different research agendas. In the area of Human-Computer Interaction, studies devoted to works investigating this matter began to appear eight years ago. It is a timely moment to look back and see how much the community has achieved. This paper provides the results of a Systematic Review carried out in four scientific databases. The selected papers were grouped considering the topics they present, the methodological approach adopted and the kind of outcomes that emerged. The results suggest that among the different methodological approaches adopted, literature reviews and criticism still form the main basis to underpin the outcomes. Moreover, climate change and energy savings were found to be the specific areas that were most researched. The results obtained make it possible to suggest opportunities for further research.

Applying common sense to distance learning: the case of home care education

One of the challenges of Distance Learning (DL) over the Web is that it imposes physical distance between teachers and students, and thus reduces opportunities for teachers to fully understand the state of student knowledge and adapt instructional material to their needs. While the knowledge to be taught is usually well expressed in the curriculum material, the knowledge of a typical student is harder to codify. In this paper, it is shown how a large knowledge base of common sense statements can be used to help model student knowledge and consequently to help teachers plan learning actions by • Identifying topics that need coverage by the curriculum; • Identifying what a student is already likely to know; • Locating possible misconceptions that need to be corrected; and • Assuring that the student understands the vocabulary needed to express relevant subject material.