Re-imagining commonly used mobile interfaces for older adults

Many countries have an increasingly ageing population. In recent years, mobile technologies have had a massive impact on social and working lives. As the size of the older user population rises, many people will want to continue professional, social and lifestyle usage of mobiles into 70s and beyond. Mobile technologies can lead to increased community involvement and personal independence. While mobile technologies can provide many opportunities, the ageing process can interfere with their use. This workshop brings together researchers who are re-imagining common mobile interfaces so that they are more suited to use by older adults.

Consideraciones alrededor de la Danza-movimiento Terapia y sus aplicaciones en el ámbito social

El artículo presenta aspectos generales sobre la Danza Movimiento Terapia (DMT). Aborda sus orígenes históricos y su evolución en las últimas décadas. La DMT es un modelo de intervención psicoterapéutica, que comparte numerosos elementos con otras terapias creativas, y cuya singularidad se encuentra en la consideración de las manifestaciones no verbales y el movimiento creativo dentro de un proceso terapéutico. Se hace hincapié en su aspecto multidisciplinar y en su creciente aplicación en entornos sociales y educativos como un modo de promover y potenciar la salud. Finalmente, se presenta brevemente la situación actual de la profesión en España enmarcada en el contexto europeo.

ReaderBench goes Online: A Comprehension-Centered Framework for Educational Purposes

In this paper we introduce the online version of our ReaderBench framework, which includes multi-lingual comprehension-centered web services designed to address a wide range of individual and collaborative learning scenarios, as follows. First, students can be engaged in reading a course material, then eliciting their understanding of it; the reading strategies component provides an in-depth perspective of comprehension processes. Second, students can write an essay or a summary; the automated essay grading component provides them access to more than 200 textual complexity indices covering lexical, syntax, semantics and discourse structure measurements. Third, students can start discussing in a chat or a forum; the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) component provides indepth conversation analysis in terms of evaluating each member’s involvement in the CSCL environments. Eventually, the sentiment analysis, as well as the semantic models and topic mining components enable a clearer perspective in terms of learner’s points of view and of underlying interests.

Building autonomous sensitive artificial listeners (Extended abstract)

This paper describes a substantial effort to build a real-time interactive multimodal dialogue system with a focus on emotional and non-verbal interaction capabilities. The work is motivated by the aim to provide technology with competences in perceiving and producing the emotional and non-verbal behaviours required to sustain a conversational dialogue. We present the Sensitive Artificial Listener (SAL) scenario as a setting which seems particularly suited for the study of emotional and non-verbal behaviour, since it requires only very limited verbal understanding on the part of the machine. This scenario allows us to concentrate on non-verbal capabilities without having to address at the same time the challenges of spoken language understanding, task modeling etc. We first summarise three prototype versions of the SAL scenario, in which the behaviour of the Sensitive Artificial Listener characters was determined by a human operator. These prototypes served the purpose of verifying the effectiveness of the SAL scenario and allowed us to collect data required for building system components for analysing and synthesising the respective behaviours. We then describe the fully autonomous integrated real-time system we created, which combines incremental analysis of user behaviour, dialogue management, and synthesis of speaker and listener behaviour of a SAL character displayed as a virtual agent. We discuss principles that should underlie the evaluation of SAL-type systems. Since the system is designed for modularity and reuse, and since it is publicly available, the SAL system has potential as a joint research tool in the affective computing research community.

Turing's menagerie:Talking lions, virtual bats, electric sheep and analogical peacocks: Common ground and common interest are necessary components of engagement

This theoretical paper attempts to define some of the key components and challenges required to create embodied conversational agents that can be genuinely interesting conversational partners. Wittgenstein's argument concerning talking lions emphasizes the importance of having a shared common ground as a basis for conversational interactions. Virtual bats suggests that-for some people at least-it is important that there be a feeling of authenticity concerning a subjectively experiencing entity that can convey what it is like to be that entity. Electric sheep reminds us of the importance of empathy in human conversational interaction and that we should provide a full communicative repertoire of both verbal and non-verbal components if we are to create genuinely engaging interactions. Also we may be making the task more difficult rather than easy if we leave out non-verbal aspects of communication. Finally, analogical peacocks highlights the importance of between minds alignment and establishes a longer term goal of being interesting, creative, and humorous if an embodied conversational agent is to be truly an engaging conversational partner. Some potential directions and solutions to addressing these issues are suggested.

Fast classification in incrementally growing spaces

[EN]The classification speed of state-of-the-art classifiers such as SVM is an important aspect to be considered for emerging applications and domains such as data mining and human-computer interaction. Usually, a test-time speed increase in SVMs is achieved by somehow reducing the number of support vectors, which allows a faster evaluation of the decision function. In this paper a novel approach is described for fast classification in a PCA+SVM scenario. In the proposed approach, classification of an unseen sample is performed incrementally in increasingly larger feature spaces. As soon as the classification confidence is above a threshold the process stops and the class label is retrieved...

The millennial mum: technology use by new mothers

Becoming a mother presents a woman with new challenges and a need to access new sources of information. This work considers the increase in the use of online parenting support as the first group of millennials become parents. Initial results from a survey comparing the use of technology pre and post the experience of childbirth is presented. The survey reveals that mothers are likely to increase the time they spend online and are strongly motivated by seeking social contact. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this survey for healthcare professionals wishing to give information and support through online media and suggests how HCI professionals can become involved in this work.

Seguimiento a la interacción del estudiante con recursos educativos desplegados en contextos diferentes al LMS a través de la implementación del estándar Tin Can Api

Los maestros deben fortalecer desde el currículo ambientes adecuados para que los estudiantes se apropien del manejo de las TIC (Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación) y las involucren en el proceso de enseñanza - aprendizaje; favoreciendo con esto el desarrollo de los contenidos en todas las áreas -- Cuando se pretende hacer uso de las TIC para mejorar el aprendizaje significativo de los estudiantes, se evidencia la debilidad que tiene el maestro para realizar un seguimiento a las actividades informales que realiza el estudiante para comprender un tema o adquirir una competencia -- El primer acercamiento para mejorar esta problemática, es realizar una integración de un estándar educativo para llevar un control y registrar las actividades informales que el estudiante realice a través de Internet, empleando un sinnúmero de aplicaciones que la web ofrece -- Para el mejoramiento del proceso evaluativo de los estudiantes de la Institución Educativa San José, se implementará la integración del estándar Tin Can Api dentro de un prototipo para realizar seguimiento a las actividades informales que realicen los estudiantes con el fin de llevar un registro de experiencias de aprendizaje -- Teniendo en cuenta lo anterior el maestro debe estar preparado para utilizar metodologías apoyadas en las herramientas tecnológicas, así el aprendizaje se logra con mayor disfrute y calidad

The role of make-believe in Foley.

The acts of pretending and make-believe are almost exclusively studied in the context of child development and child psychology. This study was therefore an exploratory investigation of these functions in adulthood. Ten Foley artists were interviewed about the role of pretending and make-believe in their occupation, and the results supported our prediction that adults are capable of, and readily partake in, pretending and make-believe. We discuss the existing literature on pretending and make-believe, the methodological challenges we faced, and our conclusions based on extended quotes from the participants. It is hoped that our identification of ‘professional make-believers’ can instigate further research, and the study of pretending beyond childhood.

A framework for abstraction and virtualization of sensors in mobile context-aware computing

110 p.

User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

199 p.

Interfaces for Intelligent Environments

Presentaciones de la asignatura Interfaces para Entornos Inteligentes del Máster en Tecnologías de la Informática/Machine Learning and Data Mining.

Improving surgery operations by means of cloud systems and distributed user interfaces

Surgical interventions are usually performed in an operation room; however, access to the information by the medical team members during the intervention is limited. While in conversations with the medical staff, we observed that they attach significant importance to the improvement of the information and communication direct access by queries during the process in real time. It is due to the fact that the procedure is rather slow and there is lack of interaction with the systems in the operation room. These systems can be integrated on the Cloud adding new functionalities to the existing systems the medical expedients are processed. Therefore, such a communication system needs to be built upon the information and interaction access specifically designed and developed to aid the medical specialists. Copyright 2014 ACM.

Improving user-insurance communication on accident reports

This paper presents an easy to use methodology and system for insurance companies targeting at managing traffic accidents reports process. The main objective is to facilitate and accelerate the process of creating and finalizing the necessary accident reports in cases without mortal victims involved. The diverse entities participating in the process from the moment an accident occurs until the related final actions needed are included. Nowadays, this market is limited to the consulting platforms offered by the insurance companies. Copyright 2014 ACM.

Untangle sustainable development goal 8 through data visualization and HCI methods

Following the approval of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015, sustainability became a hotly debated topic. In order to build a better and more sustainable future by 2030, this agenda addressed several global issues, including inequality, climate change, peace, and justice, in the form of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), that should be understood and pursued by nations, corporations, institutions, and individuals. In this thesis, we researched how to exploit and integrate Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Data Visualization to promote knowledge and awareness about SDG 8, which wants to encourage lasting, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all. In particular, we focused on three targets: green economy, sustainable tourism, employment, decent work for all, and social protection. The primary goal of this research is to determine whether HCI approaches may be used to create and validate interactive data visualization that can serve as helpful decision-making aids for specific groups and raise their knowledge of public-interest issues. To accomplish this goal, we analyzed four case studies. In the first two, we wanted to promote knowledge and awareness about green economy issues: we investigated the Human-Building Interaction inside a Smart Campus and the dematerialization process inside a University. In the third, we focused on smart tourism, investigating the relationship between locals and tourists to create meaningful connections and promote more sustainable tourism. In the fourth, we explored the industry context to highlight sustainability policies inside well-known companies. This research focuses on the hypothesis that interactive data visualization tools can make communities aware of sustainability aspects related to SDG8 and its targets. The research questions addressed are two: "how to promote awareness about SDG8 and its targets through interactive data visualizations?" and "to what extent are these interactive data visualizations effective?".