Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator

269-284

Authors: Irina Toma, Andrioaie Iustinian, Mihai Dascalu, Ștefan Trausan-Matu

Serious games based on reading strategies are an efficient alternative for improving students’ capabilities of text understanding. In today’s industry and academic environments, there are various games that target reading strategies, but unfortunately most keep focus only on the educational component, leaving the user experience behind. These games are not appealing to young students and thus, may not fully achieve the desired outcomes. The serious game described in this paper puts emphasis on the user experience, tightly coupled with keeping a high standard of its educational focus. Preliminary validation experiments denote a high user acceptance of the proposed educational scenario as an alternative to the traditional scenario that consists of a lecture followed by a self-explanation of the input narrative text.

305-333

Authors: Jorge Luis Pérez Medina

In previous work, we proposed a method to facilitate the tabletop collaborative prototyping of model-based user interfaces in early steps of the design process when multiple stakeholders have only a vague goal in mind of what should be produced. We also developed UsiSketch, a Java-based software supporting our modeling sketching method. In this paper, we present the main functionalities and the software architecture of UsiSketch.

347-361

Authors: Angela Patricia Villareal Freire, César Alberto Collazos Ordoñez

This article presents a proposal for construction of a guide which aims to contribute to the lack of guidelines for the design of therapeutic interfaces for attention deficit disorder in children, and describes the first version of the EMOINAD Guide (Emotive Interfaces for Attention Deficit) methodology. The EMOINAD Guide is composed of a set of design principles contributing to interfaces design for the treatment of children with this specific need. This paper examines the problematic situation, then, describes the state of art of attention deficit therapy applications and presents the developed methodology. A preliminary approximation of one of the design guidelines included in the Guide is also performed.

183-216

Authors: Jorge Luis Pérez Medina

Cross-functional teams with different technical backgrounds working on cross-platform environments require the production of flexible modeling of user interfaces in early steps of a design process. We observe that model-driven engineering (MDE) is currently gaining acceptance in many domains. However, existing solutions have no support for collaborative prototyping of user interfaces by sketching recognition for multiple stakeholders (e.g., designers, developers, final end users) working with heterogeneous computing platforms (e.g., smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktop), on different, perhaps separate or shared, interaction surfaces (e.g., tables, whiteboards) in a co-located way or remotely. This requires flexibility to explore and reuse vague and uncertain ideas as model sketching. This paper presents UsiSketch, an MDE method for modeling sketches that offers the following novel features resulting from a requirement elicitation process: sketching recognition on different surfaces based on a new recognition algorithm that accommodates very large surfaces and model-based design of user interfaces with collaboration.

233-254

Authors: Alexandru Hulea, Traian Rebedea

In this paper, we present an automatically annotated corpus based on movie screenplays (script) and subtitles. We extract the relevant textual information from movie screenplays and subtitles using a regular expression approach. Then, we synchronize screenplays with subtitles using a matching algorithm, thus bounding each sentence from a script between two temporal limits. We also developed an application using the corpus to test our approach and to show practical situations where this corpus is useful. The application employs topic detection and it involves searching for a specified topic in the movie text and marking the topic as non-existent, episodic or primary topic for the analyzed text. The major problem we faced while working on this system was the unexpected structure of the screenplay sheets as this kind of files are not entirely written using a standardized format which can be easily parsed and structured automatically. Some types of errors can be overcome with regular expressions, but there are other errors that need a machine learning approach to be surpassed.

85-102

Authors: Oana Ferche, Alin Moldoveanu, Florica Moldoveanu

As part of the TRAVEE (Virtual Therapist for Neuromotor Rehabilitation through Augmented Feedback) project we require a device for a precise tracking of the movements of the human hand. We concluded that the most appropriate for our purpose (due to its lightweight design and ease of use) would be a solution based on optical tracking. In this paper, we presented the way in which we evaluated two such optical tracking devices: Leap Motion and Intel RealSense. We used this method because we believe it fits the best our particular scenario.

119-144

Authors: Alexandre Philippe Mangra, Adrian Sabou, Dorian Gorgan

This paper presents an approach to terrain synthesis from minimal-detail user-provided height-maps. There is no assumption regarding the level of detail provided, in order to allow users without access to powerful height-map tools and/or resources to generate usable terrain based on a self-provided crude feature plan. We present the issues stemming from a lack of detail in user input, notably sharp altitude increases and oversimplified feature edges, and proceed to elaborate on using the terrain synthesis algorithm to solve the issues and create a level of detail that more closely resembles realistic terrain models. The algorithm pipeline is presented and parameterized to show how the user can influence the resulting model.

159-182

Authors: Mihaela Ciugudean, Dorian Gorgan

This paper aims to illustrate a methodology for identifying and assessing a set of performance issues encountered in a particular web application, with impact on the usability level. Throughout this methodology, several visual techniques are determined and investigated by taking advantage of the functionalities offered by available performance monitoring tools such as JMeter and VisualVM. This way, the major performance concerns and their impact on the web application usability are easily determined. Therefore, by identifying the problematic parts of a system, corrective measures could be taken, particularly designed to operate on the root cause of the problem, thus leading to the targeted objective. Moreover, some performance improvement recommendations are further on presented in order to enhance the overall usability and the user experience, the actual goal of the research and development activities conducted. These performance concerns might be designed and implemented after fixing the critical parts causing usability problems and consequently, maximizing the user satisfaction and comfort when exploring the functionalities offered by a particular web application.

1-18

Authors: Alexandru Gradinaru, Alin Moldoveanu

The technology advancements greatly improved the medical services over time with virtual reality (VR) devices and applications. Currently taking advantage of these recent advancements is the medical rehabilitation field, heavily studied in past few years as a promising VR area. VR-based rehab brings several advantages over the traditional therapy and could deliver personalized in-home treatment without the need of a permanent dedicated supervisor. A device that could make this technology possible is the Microsoft’s new Kinect v2, an improved motion capture sensor available at low prices for personal use. This promising high-tech device can track body movements without the need of additional attached devices that could prove unconformable and expensive. In order to evaluate the medical rehabilitation utility for in-home usage we conducted some research studies and practical experiments focusing on the upper-part of the body in a seated pose in front of a desk. Results indicate that the Kinect sensor can successfully track the body in the proposed scenario and showed great reliability. Occlusion interferences can highly impact the sensor’s overall performance, but in a normal prepared in-home environment the sensor proves to be very efficient.

35-52

Authors: Stefan Trausan-Matu

Natural language interfaces and, in general, Natural Language Processing (NLP) state of the art applications cannot handle satisfactory (if they can at all) conversational implicatures, illocutionary force, stylization, parody, inner disguised polemic, disguised dialogue and other similar phenomena. Considering the ventriloquism perspective in the context of the dialogic-polyphonic theories of Mikhael Bakhtin may provide a basis on trying to cope with such phenomena. The paper introduces some basic ideas of Bakhtin related to ventriloquism in an extended sense, discusses the approaches based on ventriloquism in other domains than NLP, then it analyzes several NLP applications from the perspective of this concept. Several ideas on how the analysis of ventriloquism might be done in NLP are introduced.

71-84

Authors: Mihai Gheorghe, Marian Dardală

This paper aims to showcase a set of features which enables users to develop custom processing models using a specific interface for the workflow. The component presented in this paper, part of the ArcGIS software suite, is called ModelBuilder and allows a visual description of the processing flow, which enable users who do not have extensive programming knowledge to define custom processing models. The tool is also addressed for experienced programmers by having the ability to include scripts within the models and setting them parameters for integration with the workflow. This way, the models can be run either as stand-alone tools, on demand using specific interaction routines - GIS Add-ins, or can be embedded in WebGIS applications by exporting them as geoprocessing services and run through ArcGIS Server or through Cloud services provided by ESRI (the company that develops ArcGIS).