Romanian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

1-4

Authors: Costin Pribeanu

In recent years there is an increasing interest in the quality of the educational software. Augmented Reality (AR) learning platforms have the potential to improve the understanding of specific concepts of a discipline. This paper aims to explore the effects of gender differences on the perceived learning quality of an AR-based learning scenario for Chemistry. A formatively measured model with causal indicators has been developed that has as focal construct the perceived Chemistry learning quality. An invariance analysis has been carried out to test if the model is invariant across. The results show that although the gender differences as regards the perceived learning quality are not significant, the boys and the girls have different perceptions as regards the contribution of the specific AR features to Chemistry learning.

12-17

Authors: Ștefan Cojocaru, Dorin-Mircea Popovici

life conditions, many people find themselves living long and healthy lives until they reach old age, when the body starts decaying, and the brain is no exception. The primary objective of this paper is to introduce a novel approach on the evaluation, prevention and training of the elderly afflicted by cognitive disorders, within a virtual reality environment. By adapting and enhancing examinations normally used in the specialized medical field combined with the potential of virtual reality, a path to new possibilities opens up. The data gathered from various studies strongly suggests that mental exercise is a key factor in the prevention and alleviation of the evolution of dementia. The aim of our system is not only to detect and mitigate early signs of dementia, but to offer a mentally stimulating VR-assisted activity for the elderly, an important step in the rehabilitation of the elderly and potentially a forward step in the research field of cognitive impairments.

24-29

Authors: Oana Balan, Alin Moldoveanu, Florica Moldoveanu

Human spatial representation is determined by the interaction of a wide range of stimuli, including visual, neuromotor and acoustic information. In a virtual acoustic environment that intends to simulate the perception of sound as in real-world conditions by rendering the audio stimuli over headphones, the accuracy of audio presentation is of the utmost importance. Nonetheless, a well-known problem which affects binaural audio localization is represented by the front-back confusion, a situation in which the listener perceives the sounds which come from the front as coming from the back and vice-versa. Over the years, many theoretical and practical approaches have been devised in order to reduce the incidence of front-back confusions, including head movement, source movement, sound filtering using early reflections, the simulation of reverberant environments or anthropometric estimation. This paper aims to study, review and compare the most relevant methods and experiments designed to decrease the rate of front-back confusion errors that appear in the case of synthesized 3D sound delivered over headphones in virtual auditory displays and in real-world conditions.

34-37

Authors: Irina Cristescu, Dragoș Daniel Iordache, Marilena Ianculescu

Recently, the number of e-Health applications that aim to streamline relationships between relevant institutions, physicians, health professionals and other interested entities has increased. One of these applications is the Integrated Information System of the Romanian Health Insurance (CNAS-SIUI Portal). The main objective of this paper is to assess the usability of CNAS-SIUI Portal using expert evaluation. The results revealed several usability problems that were mainly related to the difficulty to access the user account section, to patient authentication to the electronic health record and the lack of voice alternative to create the account for blind people.

42-45

Authors: Silviu Vert, Diana Andone

Usability evaluation is a crucial step in ensuring the success and adoption of a mobile application. Several usability evaluation techniques have been developed over the time, each one with its own advantages. In this paper, we present a usability test that was done for the mobile application Art Encounters 2017, an app developed by Politehnica University of Timisoara, that promotes the Romanian biennial contemporary art exhibition with the same name. We applied the observation session and the focus group techniques, having as participants 20 students attending an Interactivity and Usability master course. The usability test indicates issues in the areas of navigation, menu, event searching and filtering, or getting to a venue, and received suggestions from the participants on how to further improve the application. Based on the result an improved version is to be developed for the next year event

54-62

Authors: Eugeniu Vezeteu, Dragoș-Florin Sburlan, Elena Pelican

The present paper illustrates the main methods that can be employed to build a speech and speaker recognition system for Romanian language. To this aim, we start by presenting the classical approach of extracting the Mell Frequency Cepstral Coefficients features from a dataset of speech signals (which represents some words/phrases in Romanian language). The recognition is done either by using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) or by training an Convolutional Neural Network. A comparison between these models is presented and commented. Once such a system is developed, we proceed further by implementing an application that listens and executes some predefined commands. In our setup, the system performs two main tasks: it recognizes the user by his voice and executes a task corresponding to the vocal command. Source code can be downloaded at: click to download

71-75

Authors: Teodor Lucian Anton, Stefan Trausan-Matu

This paper presents a project that applies Markov Models improved with similarity metrics to produce computer-generated Byzantine music. An implementation over a data set of Romanian music in eighth mode, stichiraric style is described. The importance of the similarity mechanism is highlighted, in particular in regard to melodic transition tables. Results of the implementation are presented, which show both strengths and limitations of the model.

84-90

Authors: Ioana-Crinela Potinteu, Teodor Stefanut

This paper describes a system for gesture recognition based on a smart watch and a mobile phone. Our system also integrates a Web API for saving, retrieving and processing data about the gestures and a web application to visualize the saved data. We propose a button-based segmentation method that uses Dynamic Time Warping and One Nearest Neighbors to classify the data from a single 3-axis accelerometer. The system distinguishes 4 arm gestures using a variable number of labeled templates for the classifier. To emphasize the practical utility of the system the recognized gestures are used to control a music player. This is just an example. This form of user interaction can be exploited by many different types of applications, for instance applications for home automation.

99-106

Authors: Bogdan-Florin Gheran, Ovidiu-Ciprian Ungurean, Radu-Daniel Vatavu

In this position paper we highlight the potential of finger augmentation devices, such as smart rings, for designing assistive technology for people with upper body motor impairments. We review the literature on assistive input for motor impairments and point out the fact that no prior work has examined the application opportunities of finger augmentation devices for people with motor impairments, despite vast attention dedicated to other input devices and modalities, such as touch, voice, eye gaze tracking, and direct brain-computer input. To foster explorations of smart rings as assistive devices for users with motor impairments,we recommend several directions of investigation, such as designing one-button or microswitch interactions, design of multi-device user interfaces that combine smart rings with touch input on mobile devices, recognition of mid-air gestures performed by movements of the upper arm and shoulder, and application of the principles of ability-based design for self-adapting smart ring gesture user interfaces to accommodate a wide range of motor impairments.

111-118

Authors: Bianca-Cerasela-Zelia Blaga, Dorian Gorgan

Game development is a complex task that requires a lot of hard work and patience because it contains various elements such as 3D objects, collision detection, scripting, sound management, animation, rendering, control, and artificial intelligence. Video games are also interactive applications; therefore, they need to be designed in such a way that would enable a high level of usability. In this paper, the development methodology steps that were done for creating a video game are presented. The goal is to gain knowledge in game development with a hands-on experiment and to obtain a highly functional and usable game.

127-134

Authors: Andrei Gabriel Morar, Dorian Gorgan

This paper describes the methodology of creating an interactive computer game. It analyzes the necessary phases by which the functional and non-functional requirements related to a computer game are transformed into a final product. The presentation of the game development methodology is based on YAMS interactive multiplayer dice game. The description of each development phase includes both different implementation ideas for some features and changes based on the objective analysis of the previous phase.

141-146

Authors: Bogdan Maxim, Daniel Ciugurean, Dorian Gorgan

In this paper we explore different types of procedurally generated content to see if and how it can affect the game play experience of the player. We conduct a survey with different types of procedurally generated content in order to see if and how it affects the player when playing a game. The paper presents a simple turn based tactical strategy game where the objective of the player is to eliminate the enemy team. The player must achieve this goal in different circumstances: from a simple grid to a procedurally random generated levels. The experiments conducted will show the way procedurally generation will enhance the game play experience of the player and where it should be used.

155-158

Authors: Gabriel Gorghiu, Irina Cristescu, Dragoș Daniel Iordache, Costin Pribeanu

Social media technologies stimulate the implementation of the social learning paradigm. Online discussion groups created by educators to support a closer relationship with students are widely used in universities. However, the research on this topic has been carried on mainly by qualitative studies and there are few approaches aiming to measure the educational support provided by the online discussion groups. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the educational support provided by the online discussion groups. A multidimensional model has been developed and tested on a sample of 302 students from various specializations of Valahia University Targoviste, Romania (bachelor and master studies). The educational support has been conceptualized as a global factor that manifests along three dimensions: support for teaching, support for personal development and support for professional formation. The results show that the social learning support the most appreciated by students, leaving the formation for the future profession and the training ones in the secondary plans.

167-174

Authors: Selma Evelyn Cătălina Goga, Bianca-Cerasela-Zelia Blaga, Flavia Andrada Pop, Dorian Gorgan

This article discusses the evaluation stages of the MagicHerbs game using the ten usability principles of Nielsen along with the four severity ratings for the found usability problems. MagicHerbs is a new action-adventure game of type Role Playing Game (RPG) found in its prototyping stage. Three persons evaluated the application: one was the designer and developer of the game, and two other users which were already familiar with the game as they have given feedback throughout the development of the current application version. In the end, an analysis on the results of the evaluation is made and solutions for the most critical detected problems are proposed.

1-10

Authors: Christian Stary

In this contribution, user-centered design and the generation of human support systems based on apps as behavior encapsulations are addressed from a conceptual and engineering perspective. Specific ingredients, in particular Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory, a System-of Systems (SoS) perspective, semantic interoperability of apps, and Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) are detailed with respect to user-centered development. They allow the contextual alignment of application behavior from a role perspective, based on communication and interaction models that can be executed automatically. Users can set up the design space, validate specifications, and evaluate the context-sensitive alignment of apps. They primarily detail communication flows to meet their requirements and can experience the aligned apps interactively.

15-20

Authors: Paul Ștefan Popescu, Marian Cristian Mihaescu, Mihai Mocanu, Costel Ionascu

E-learning platforms are educational environments that have grown once with the information technology. They bring several features and advantages but there are also enough features that may be developed and others that may be explored. This paper presents an exploratory analysis regarding how the professor perceive the ease of use of the Tesys e-Learning platform. In order to perform the analysis, we use R and Wilcox statistics. We separated the data in two groups using the number of years and hours spent on the platform and tested them for group significant separation. The results show no difference between groups and so, we can conclude that all the subjects that completed the questionnaire are not influenced by other factors. There is also another implication of the results of this study because having the same results for both groups there is a consistency between all answers and the average grade a question got.

35-42

Authors: Peter Forbrig, Gregor Buchholz

Agile software development asks for seamless integration of software engineering methods and approaches from HCI. A process model will be discussed that includes HCD as one sprint ahead in the corresponding process model. Additionally, model simulations are suggested for improved evaluation of design decisions. The language CoTaSL (Cooperative Task Specification Language) is introduced for specifying the activities of users and certain context aspects. Its editor was developed based on the Xtext framework. The language is a human-centered form of CoTaL (Cooperative Task Language) that can be simulated by CoTaSE (Cooperative Task Simulation Environment). CoTaL and CoTaSE will be discussed as well. Different approaches for specifying collaborative work are presented. Advantages and disadvantages are discussed. An outlook is provided that suggests some further support for CoTaSL by other tools.

49-52

Authors: Ionuţ Petre, Dragoş Marian Smada, Radu-Marius Boncea

Modern society is imposing a faster rhythm in most of the life aspects, with software development being in the front line. Business requirements are stressing development teams for faster releases of new features and functionalities of the applications. The software developers adapted to the market demands by migrating from traditional development models to what is known as “continuous delivery”. This implies short cycles of software development to ensure a higher degree of reliability for application releases. The use of this approach leads to a frequent building, testing and releasing of the software. Modern web applications offer a wide palette of user interactions and reached the level where their behavior is very similar to native applications. As a result, automation of the tests on the app behavior on the client side should be a priority for software development teams. For web-based apps, the client-side experience is the most important factor, as it is the most important factor deciding the application success. Frequent releases can induce many errors in the app’s source code and can affect the functioning on the user side; tests automation is the solution that can prevent flaws in the app behavior at the user.

65-68

Authors: Lidia Bajenaru, Ion Alexandru Marinescu, Costin Pribeanu, Dragos Daniel Iordache

In the last years, there is an increasing demand to develop a national repository for software programs, especially in the area of public administration. This kind of e-service is required both by vendors interested in promoting their products and funding institutions, interested to estimate the costs and to improve the cost/benefit ratio. The National Library of Software Programs (BNP) is a software application that has been developed during a national research project. This paper presents a case study of usability inspection of this web application. The results revealed several usability problems that were mainly related to the difficulty to create an account and to register online a new product, failure to download the information about a product and the lack of information about products.

75-80

Authors: Adrian Iftene

This paper presents main activities of UAIC (“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University) team from the MUCKE project. MUCKE addressed the stream of multimedia social data with new and reliable knowledge extraction models designed for multilingual and multimodal data shared on social networks. Credibility models for multimedia streams are a novel topic, and constituted the main scientific contribution of the project. UAIC group was involved in the main tasks of the project: building the data collection, text processing, diversification in image retrieval and data credibility.

87-90

Authors: Maria Gheorghe-Moisii, Eugenia Tirziu, Dragoș Daniel Iordache

In this research paper we analyze the extent and manner in which e-government institutions from public administration currently use social media networks. The sample consist in a number of 30 local e-government institutions analyzed using the collective case study, based on a set of indicators for three social media networks, frequently used in Romania. The results showed a larger representation of Romanian local e-government institutions on Facebook and less on Twitter or YouTube.

95-100

Authors: Cetin Rasid, Ștefan Trăușan-Matu

A recent pedagogical approach is computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) where by means of collective interaction through collaborative interfaces on internet, learning is accomplished by joint knowledge building. One of the most relevant tools that a CSCL uses is chat, which is an effective way to transfer information and collaborate. The purpose of this paper is to offer a technique of analyzing the composition of chats with a design to find the points of convergence and divergence between participants. The points of convergence that are detected in a chat discussion could emphasize a moment where a fact is validated, or a better solution for a problem is discovered or a new concept was assimilated by someone. Going in the same direction, the points of divergence also provide valuable information, because they capture moments where a fact is invalidated or a new idea about an existing topic is introduced. The starting point of this method has its origins in Bakhtin’s dialogism and Trausan-Matu’s polyphonic model.

107-112

Authors: Iulia-Cristina Stănică, Florica Moldoveanu, Maria-Iuliana Dascălu, Alin Moldoveanu, Dan Alexandru Mitrea

Nowadays, engineers have to face a lot of challenges before going to a job interview. Introversion, insecurity or lack of experience are some of the reasons that can lead to poor interview performances. Through training, such difficulties can be overcome, leading to significant skill improvement. Our paper presents the advantages of using emerging technologies to facilitate job interview training. Our proposed model for a training system is based on virtual reality and chatterbots. Hard skills and soft skills training, various 3D virtual environments and domains modularity could ensure the personalization of the system for any job training situation.

119-124

Authors: Lorena Adina Sfat, Teodor Stefanut

This article presents an approach on dealing with the engagement of mobile devices users, with the purpose of increasing productivity. As it seems that more and more smartphone users acknowledge the benefit of tracking down things they do, from physical to social activities and doing so in a competitive way, a lack of solutions that address a wider range of coverage was noticed. The proposed solution provides motivation and a competitive environment for users, while tracking their objectives and challenging others, by using an approach that covers the best practices of the concept in use and by being developed in a user-centered manner. Unlike existing applications, our proposed model covers a wider range of objectives and encourages the engagement in a game-like manner. The application’s fundamental background consists of the concept of gamification, applied in a day-to-day environment. This concept, together with a series of other user-oriented concepts implemented in the proposed application, have as main goal maintaining users’ interest while ensuring increased productivity. This application is meant to cover a wide range of necessities, for smartphone users, by allowing users to track objectives proposed by themselves or others, as well as ensuring motivation through a gamification system.

131-134

Authors: Mathias Kühn, Peter Forbrig

Service-oriented architectures as instruments for distributed applications can be used in contexts that are grounded on networked devices. Specifications of web service interfaces can be instantiated across different platforms. Combining this method with specifications of platform-independent user interface models would allow to access applications from various interactive devices. According to this, application states and events need to be considered for individual consumers. Additionally, interpreters and generators need to be available for each consumer. The paper proposes an approach for consumer-specific configurations of mentioned tools that are based on models derived from the Cameleon Reference Framework. In the end, pipes are configured that allow using web services by generated user interfaces. Configuring these pipes with models for layouts and dialogs is focus of the paper.

143-146

Authors: Jullia Birsan, Diana Stavarache, Maria-Iuliana Dascalu, Alin Moldoveanu

Back pain is among the most common causes of missing work and contributes to about 93 million lost workdays and $5 billion in health care costs every year. Sitting in an office chair for long periods of time can create lower back pain and can worsen problems that already exist. There are a number of factors that affect back pain, including level of movement, schedule, and desk set-up. Posture is a key factor that can induce pain over time; this includes sitting in the same position for too long or leaning too close to the screen. One may be able to avoid back pain or prevent its recurrence by improving the physical condition and learning and practicing proper body mechanics. We propose an efficient and time-effective tool to support the maintenance of a healthy position - a smart pillow. This pillow will track one’s sitting posture on the chair, provides alerts when you don’t have a right posture, provide you tips for exercises based on your posture, allow you to set up goals regarding your position and remind you when to take a break and sit-up. The current paper offers development details related to the proposed innovative product, both from the hardware point of view (the pillow with sensors) and from the software point of view (the mobile application gathering signals from the pillow and providing learning alerts to the user), in the context of other similar applications available on the market and useful in learning how to have a healthier lifestyle.

155-158

Authors: Marius Valeriu Stanciu, Eugen Vasilescu, Stefan Ruseti, Traian Rebedea

This paper describes a statistical method to identify ontology components within natural language questions. The main purpose for this step is to improve question answering systems over linked data by reducing the ambiguity in the subsequent matching and query generation steps. To accomplish this task, we have trained a Conditional Random Field (CRF) classifier to label sentence tokens with the core data elements of the DBpedia ontology. The classifier was trained on a manually annotated corpus labelled with ontology elements for each token. Several features were investigated for the classifier and the results (F1=0.92) prove that this task can be successfully solved using the CRF tagger.

163-168

Authors: Mihaela Colhon, Dan Cristea

In this article we extend our previous work [3] dedicated to developing an automatic method for generating and applying syntactic patterns intended to recognize noun phrases. The intended scope of our studies is to automatically detect dependency relations within noun phrases exploiting some syntactic information of the phrases’ words. The patterns are extracted from a corpus that has been automatically annotated for token and sentence limits, part of speech and noun phrases and manually annotated for dependency relations between words. The patterns have been generalized in order to cover more instances that were present in the corpus and to reduce the size of the grammar. In this paper we refine the syntactic patterns by considering not only the two terms of the dependency relation but also the terms surrounding these two that will be treated as contexts: left, middle, right depending on their position from the dependency terms

2-5

Authors: Paul Fogarassy-Neszly, Aurel Patru, Dragoș Daniel Iordache, Costin Pribeanu

The text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is widely used in the area of assistive technologies for visually impaired people as well as for people with dyslexia or related learning disabilities. In the case of multilingual text-to-speech synthesis, both the language identification and voice switching are desirable. This paper presents the implementation of a multilingual text-to-speech in two assistive technologies: the automatic reading machine POET and the portable organizer for blind people Pronto. Both implementations have been tested with visually impaired users. The evaluation results show that the implementation of this software component makes these devices more easy and comfortable to use.

11-21

Authors: Sara Bouzit, Gaëlle Calvary, Denis Chêne, Jean Vanderdonckt

This paper presents ERGOSIM, a software that automatically evaluate the design of menu bars, pull-down menus, and sub-menus of a graphical user interface by reviewing usability guidelines related to menu design. In this method, a menu design is parsed against the definition of usability guidelines in order to detect potential usability problems manifested by any occurrence where a guidelines is not respected. Four evaluation strategies are enabled depending on the end user’s preferences: an active strategy initiated by the system, a passive strategy initiated by the designer, a mixed strategy collaboratively initiated by both the designer and the system, and a strategy by conceptual units based on the domain. From an initial corpus of 312 usability guidelines compiled from different sources on menu design, a final knowledge base of 58 implemented usability guidelines has been obtained for automatic evaluation. By examining how each usability guideline for menu design is expressed, we discuss to what extent such guidelines could be automated in an automated process by guidelines review.

26-35

Authors: Iyad Khaddam, Hanaa Barakat, Jean Vanderdonckt

This paper presents UIDLC Manager, a software that provides user interface designers and developers with methodological guidance throughout user interface development life cycle. A methodologist firstly creates a dashboard model of the life cycle according to a corresponding meta-model in order to define a development path, decomposed into development tasks which structure the path into actions, and dependencies which serve as methodological milestones. A user interface designer or developer then enacts a previously defined development path by instantiating and interpreting a dashboard model while being provided with methodological guidance to conduct this development path. This guidance consists of steps, sub-steps, cheat sheets, and methodological actions. This approach is validated by applying it on nine classical user interface development life cycles, on two approaches for forward model-driven engineering of user interfaces based on a user interface description language, and on a linguistic approach for user interface software evolution.

42-45

Authors: Catalin Damian, Lenuta Alboaie, Adrian Iftene

This paper presents a complex system (hardware and software) that is used to monitor and control some ambient parameters (temperature, humidity, light intensity, etc.). Monitoring parameters are temperature, humidity and light intensity. The system provides remote and automated control of local devices that can be used to assure the security or to increase the comfort indicator of the air.

50-57

Authors: Sobhi Ahmed, Laure Leroy, Ari Bouaniche

Despite the advantages of gestural interactions, they involve several drawbacks. One major drawback is their negative physical impact. To reduce them, it is important to go through a process of assessing risk factors to determine the interactions’ level of acceptability and comfort so as to make them more ergonomic and less tiring. We propose a method for assessing the risk factors of gestures based on the methods of posture assessment in the workplace and the instructions given by various standards. The goal is to improve interaction in virtual environments and make it less stressful and more effortless. We present our experiment which aims at validating our approach of evaluating gestural interactions.

65-68

Authors: Cristian-Valeriu Soare

This paper presents the design and development of a complete hardware and software solution for a brain computer interface (BCI). It consists of a non-intrusive multiple channel data acquisition device which captures the electrical brain wave signals and passes the data to a computer. The computer then uses signal processing and machine learning algorithms to identify patterns in the signals received from the BCI. The goal of the device is to be a highly adaptable BCI, able to be used in a multitude of applications ranging from object recognition to basic control functions. Currently, the system is work in progress.

76-80

Authors: Alexandru Balog, Costin Pribeanu

Social networking websites, in general, and Facebook, in particular, gained a lot of popularity among university students. The increasing rate of the Facebook adoption stimulates the researchers to analyze and explain its usage. A well known model able to do this is the technology acceptance model (TAM) that has been tested on a large diversity of computer systems. This paper presents a case study in testing TAM to explain the adoption of Facebook by Romanian university students. The model estimation results show that the perceived ease of use and the perceived enjoyment have a stronger influence on the intention to use Facebook than the perceived usefulness. This study found that the most important determinant is the perceived enjoyment.

86-90

Authors: Paul Stefan Popescu, Marian Cristian Mihaescu, Mihai Mocanu, Costel Ionascu

Online educational environments became more and more popular as a method for implementing distance learning programmes at universities. E-learning platforms serve as means of interaction for online educational environments and so they need to be well optimized for offering a better user experience. In this paper is presented the methodology and results obtained after the evaluation of the Tesys e-learning platform. The survey was taken by a group of students that saw the first time the e-Learning platform and they did several actions. After that they had to complete three surveys, one for every testing purpose targeted in the paper and we analyzed the results. The results offered us an overview on the actual state of the elearning platform; on one side there are still some improvements to be done and on the other some interfaces and controls were validated via this study.

95-102

Authors: Gabriel Gutu, Mihai Dascalu, Stefan Trausan-Matu, Philippe Dessus

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.

107-112

Authors: Irina-Diana Niculescu, Stefan Trausan-Matu

The paper is introducing a research aiming to analyze rhythm in various genres of texts. After a review of the literature on rhythm formalization in texts, a Natural Language Processing application was developed for analyzing the rhythmicity in three cases: poem, prose, and political speech. The application implemented three formal approaches for rhythm analysis, proposed for the Romanian and French languages. Factors such as: rhythmic unit, rhythmic structure, and rhythmic index were considered. Comparisons are made between different genres, approaches, and languages.

1-4

Authors: Jan Gulliksen

Digitalization is a concept to encompass the fastest growing trend for societal development of modern times. Digitaliza-tion happens everywhere, in schools, in business, in health care and in our private life. The digitalization gives also op-portunities for political decisions and policy making to sup-port turning our society into a modern and efficient society. Research and research funding organizations are becoming more and more aware of the need to conduct research that proves some form of utility to the society and has some form of practical impact. There are several different ways of making research that has practical relevance and that can contribute to changing and improving society. This keynote paper aims at discussing ways to plan, conduct research with the aim of improving the society and also show how we should make use of our research knowledge and positions to influence politics and public policy making.

11-14

Authors: Constanta Zoie Radulescu, Alexandru Balog, Lidia Bajenaru,Delia Mihaela Radulescu

A large number of multi criteria decision making (MCDM) software products have been developed in academia and business. The selection of the appropriate MCDM software product to solve a given decision problem is a difficult task. Users need adequate MCDM software that meets quality standards regarding usability and functionality, utility, reliability and computer efficiency. In this paper we make a comparison of six MCDM software products regarding usability and functional suitability. Then we rank the MCDM software products included in comparison, first for criteria of usability and functionality and second only for criteria of usability. Ranking the six MCDM software products is a multi-criteria problem itself.

21-24

Authors: Dragos Daniel Iordache, Alexandru Balog, Costin Pribeanu, Vincentas Lamanauskas

As social networking websites become more and more widespread there is an increasing interest to analyze and explain their usage. Facebook is a web-based service that is very popular among university students. In this paper a motivational model is presented that explains Facebook acceptance by university students with two key factors: perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment. The results show that perceived enjoyment is a stronger determinant than perceived usefulness.

29-36

Authors: Sandra Al-Assaf, Dorian Gorgan

One particular case of the intersection between the photorealistic presentation and the dynamics of 3D scene of objects is snow in nature, which presents behavioral aspects of the environment such as accumulation, particle movement, and redistribution, with the added time element that allows change and progress analysis. Due to the complexity of the phenomenon, little to no attention has been given to the realism of the interaction, the attention being channeled only on the visual aspects of it. The focus of this paper is to analyze different approaches of representing snow fall and accumulation effects in real time in such a digital ensemble in order to add a layer of realism and accurately reflect natural processes. The emphasis is put on the actual manifestations that take place in nature and the micro physics that pertain to the processes. Comparisons are made between different existing approaches to snow accumulation and a new particle hierarchy is imposed to suit both the technological requirements and to maintain the realism of scenes.

41-48

Authors: Mircea Catalin Catana, Dorian Gorgan

The paper presents and analyzes an application that can emulate different types of strategy games and provide significant specifications as to how the strategy impacts the outcome of the player experience. This application is meant to be used as a tool both by game developers, which can use it to calibrate their products and also by the game players, who will want to use it as a means to improve their strategies. The research explores the concept of strategy in games and tries to define a metric for evaluating this concept. Due to the complexity of videogames, the computation of every outcome for every possible decision a player can make is impossible, so the research proposes a method of combining the human familiarity with the game concept and the processing power of the computer to search the wide solution space. The paper analyses a concrete example by building a test bed for the tower defense type games.

55-60

Authors: Dragos Alexandru Cojocaru, Ştefan Trăuşan-Matu

The subject of this paper is the development of an application which generates natural language text, starting from an OWL ontology. The Natural Language Generation, in the context of Semantic Web, represents a relatively new field of research, but due to the capabilities of the ontologies (central element of the Semantic Web) of being dynamically modified and completed with new information, the theme of the application is of great importance. The project employs Rhetorical Structure Theory to structure hierarchically the ontological content, resulting in a human-like discourse structure. Since the Semantic Web is continuously adding machine-readable content, the user can take advantage of this impressive database of knowledge transformed into coherent texts for human with the aid of our application.

67-74

Authors: Bogdan Marchiș, Alexandru Țifrea, Mihai Volmer, Traian Rebedea

This paper presents a new approach for finding the best n-grams that efficiently summarize a large set of reviews. The proposed unsupervised method uses a readability score and a representativeness score to select those n-grams that best convey the main opinions contained in the processed reviews. In order to further refine the selected n-grams, we use sentiment analysis and part of speech (POS) tagging to impose certain requirements that the n-grams that we are looking for should meet. Furthermore, the best n-grams were classified into several topics, which allowed a better prevention of redundancy among the summarizing n-grams. Therefore we offer an unsupervised, mostly non-aspect based, unstructured opinion summarization algorithm that can be easily implemented for any web platform that accepts reviews, due to its genericity. In order to assess the results of our algorithm, we summarized hotel reviews extracted for the TripAdvisor1 website. The algorithm produces readable results that convey relevant opinions about the hotels that we used for testing.

81-86

Authors: Adrian Bogatu, Dorin Rotarescu, Traian Rebedea, Stefan Ruseti

In this paper we discuss the current approaches in question answering (QA) and their applicability in building a conversational agent that models a historical figure that gives informative and relevant answers to user questions about the life of that personality. We analyze two main methods: one in which we use an ontology to build our knowledge base and one where we don't have a knowledge base and we solve the answer sentence selection problem for question answering. We observed that the first method is better for answering more general questions and the second method can deal with more specific and complex lexically and syntactically questions. The implementation of the conversational agent relies on the two combined approaches, the second being a fallback option if the first method is not able to provide an answer.

91-94

Authors: Bogdan Troanca, Alexandru Butean, Alin Moldoveanu, Oana Balan

The problem of blindness and other eye disabilities is highly important as it affects millions of people on the globe. In the same time, the number of modern touchscreen devices is increasing fast. They are widely spread and becoming accessible for education purposes. For those who suffer from congenital visual disabilities is very difficult to imagine the world as it is and the struggle begins from the early school stages and continues for the rest of their lives. Modern touchscreen devices, also called smart devices, represent a viable solution for people with sight problems due to their rich multimedia experience. Thus, they can be used as assistive devices. This paper describes how learning basic geometric shapes using a smartphone or a tablet can improve several important aspects like: general feeling of using touchscreen devices, perception of a basic figure’s shape by simply touching the screen, intuition on how to follow a GPS map. This methodology represents only the initial stage from a long-term learning process that aims to help visually impaired people to understand and use the power of smart devices in order to perceive the world around them as normal people do.

101-104

Authors: Paul Strîmbeanu, Alexandru Butean, Diana Butean, Florica Moldoveanu

All over the world, the voting systems are very important tools that contribute to the basic principles of democracy and equality. In every developing country, the problem of online voting becomes a necessity, therefore solutions must be found. Nowadays mobile smart devices are equipped with high performance lens and cameras, therefore they can capture high quality pictures in almost no time. Optical character recognition methods (OCR) are getting 99% accuracy on standard font documents with little or no noise at all. Having this in mind we propose a system that verifies in real-time the ID of an elector, right before a traditional voting system procedure. This solution is based on a stand containing a mobile device that takes a quality picture of that ID and sends it to a server to extract the data. The use of such a system does not affect the actual voting process and does not interfere or relate with the voter’s choice at all.

111-114

Authors: Saleh Salous, Julien Newton, Laure Leroy, Safwan Chendeb

Among the various types of interactions in a virtual reality (VR) room, physical gestures such as moving one’s hands are one of the ways to communicate with the virtual environment. It is possible to capture those gestures with sensors, in our case the Microsoft Kinect. In the context of a large CAVE, not one but four Kinects are used to track the user and capture its gestures. However, the question of the detection of specific gestures by this system comes into play as the CAVE requires recognizing the user’s gestures in order to interpret them into an input. In this paper we focus on the gestural recognition ability of our CAVE applied to three specific gestures: Raising the right hand, raising the left hand and short hopping. Moreover, we provide experimental results showing that a Four-Kinect system provides more effective gesture recognition than a single sensor.

121-128

Authors: Dan Răzvan Ilieș, Adrian Sabou, Dorian Gorgan

This paper presents an approach to real-time simulation of crowd dynamics on GPU enabled computing architectures. We discuss challenges with parallelization of agent-based models, implementing parallel simulation algorithms, visualization and interaction with the simulated scene and, most importantly, ensuring communication and synchronization between all these processes. Our main objective is to provide interactive simulation of realistic models such as pedestrian dynamics, in which large crowds move and interact among themselves and with the environment. Simulation parameters like scene complexity, scene composition, as well as the number of agents are varied in order to simulate different scenarios and to assess the impact on performance.

133-136

Authors: Cristian Neamtu, Adrian Iftene

In the last years, multimedia content has grown increasingly over the Internet, especially in social networks (like Facebook or Flickr), where users often post images using their mobile devices. In these networks, the content is later used in search operations, when some users want to find something using a specific query. Nowadays, searching into these networks is primarily made using the title, description and the keywords associated to resources added by users that have posted the content. In this paper we address the problem of query ambiguity. The usage of semantic resources, like ConceptNet and DBpedia ontologies, has been proven to retrieve a better set of results.

141-144

Authors: Daniel Gavril, Adrian Iftene

Every device that is released nowadays has the capability to display videos. From small devices like smart phones to bigger ones likes desktops or smart TVs, movies are available at any time. Therefore, getting important, fast and reliable data about movies at any time and everywhere is very important when it comes to money. Computer users like to get live experiences based on their interests, searches or their personal profile and their needs include movies. When people gather to someone’s place or a family unites on holidays, finding a good movie to watch for that moment becomes hard. There are different tastes in movies, persons that like drama more than science-fiction or some that will enjoy movies based on the director of that movie or important actors. Using a good search engine that might understand users desires based on recent searches or interests might come in handy. Movies Classification application runs on Windows operating systems and tries to understand user perspective when he tries to find a movie that might suit his tastes. The app updates live the suggested movies based on the customizable profile that every registered user must set.

1-4

Authors: Jens Gerken

Looking at early examples of Human-Computer Interaction (e.g. Sutherland’s Sketchpad 1964 or Bolt’s Put-that-there 1980), we see a strong connection between technology and the support for creative practices. These examples contrasted absolutely with common computer use at that time, which required systematic development of programming solutions to well specified problems. However, the ongoing shift from desktop- to ubiquitous computing, has again put the focus on designing not just individual functions and features, but interactive creative spaces. At ICT AG, we are excelling in creating such spaces as brand experiences for companies such as Audi, Siemens, or Mercedes-Benz. Thereby, my talk about our work will give a brief glimpse into how the future of interactive creative spaces might develop and which challenges are still on our way

15-18

Authors: Valentin Dobre, Alin Moldoveanu, Victor Asavei

Summary: This article refers to the problem of moving in virtual reality using natural movement motion to increase immersion when using head mounted displays. It analyzes different hardware and software solutions using some proposed criteria and offers a new solution that tries to minimize the drawbacks the come with a system that relies heavily on the user’s motion, while maintaining a high level of immersion.

25-28

Authors: Florin Gîrbacia, Teodora Gîrbacia

Natural User Interfaces (NUI) is a relatively new area of research that aims to develop human-computer interfaces, natural and intuitive, using voice commands, hand movements and gesture recognition, ways that coincide with the way a person communicates his ideas to another person. In this papper is presented a VRAD interface for direct modeling CAD using natural interface technologies (Microsoft Kinect sensor and autostereoscopic 3D visualisation system). From the conducted experiments is established that NUI technologies provide an intuitive tool for editing CAD models, even by users with no experience in CAD modeling.

35-40

Authors: Stefan Trausan-Matu

This paper analyses the spatial and temporal dimensions of discourse in texts and dialogs (conversations). It also considers chronotopes, their integrated perspective. Different types of chronotopes are analized and a modality of its analysis is presented.

45-50

Authors: Iulia Badea, Stefan Trausan-Matu

This paper presents an approach to text analysis using time series and text mining, in order to extract knowledge from texts in order to analyze the types of texts that are closely related to the time factor, texts whose content can be represented on a temporal axis, such as logs chats. These techniques applied to the document type chat for determining correlations between words that occur most frequently in dialogs, and due to high frequency of occurrence are topics of discussion in the chat, and determine correlations between intervention participants in the dialogue. They can be represented using time series model, the coordinate time is the time of writing reply, and the value at that point is to replicate itself. Based on this representation, can be easily calculated correlations between rhythmic interventions with high occurrence. Research use R package that provides facilities for statistical processing.

55-60

Authors: Mihai Dascalu, Larise Lucia Stavarache, Stefan Trausan-Matu, Philippe Dessus, Maryse Bianco

Research efforts in terms of automatic textual complexity assessment focus mainly on English, as currently there are only a few adaptations for other languages. Starting from validated model for English that addresses discourse analysis and textual complexity assessment, we introduce in this paper a textual complexity model for French trained on 200 documents extracted from French textbooks, pre-classified into five textual complexity classes. Analysis factors cover multiple dimensions and are grouped into the following main categories: surface, syntax, morphology, semantics and discourse analysis. The previous metrics are afterwards combined through Support Vector Machines in order to improve prediction accuracy. At a global level, besides purely quantitative surface factors, parts of speech and different cohesion metrics have proved to be reliable predictors of the textual difficulty of school materials. Overall, our study creates a consistent background for building reliable models that automatically evaluate the complexity of French texts.

65-68

Authors: Laurentiu Tanase, Dorin-Mircea Popovici

In this article we describe the current implementation status of the MyDearDaisy application dedicated to primary school children. The project aims to instill awareness and motivate children to study the development of a virtual environment that simulates a garden. In a working session, based on free natural gesture interaction, the children experiments the direct cause-effect relations between the environmental conditions, and vegetation evolution. Implementation uses Kinect technology to detect the user, Unity for modeling and rendering a virtual environment and to simulate its evolution, and MS Visual Studio development platform for interpreting user gestures and transmission of commands into the virtual environment.

75-80

Authors: Dorin Mircea Popovici, Felix Hamza-Lup, Crenguta Bogdan, Elena Bautu, Cristian A. Corleanca

Haptic feedack is a type of interaction with a computer that is increasingly used in both research and industrial worlds. The visuo-haptic systems allows users to use the tactile sense in the presence of virtual objects. This paper presents the developing stages of a visuo-haptic system designed to improve certain tasks of the medical procedures.

85-90

Authors: Adriana-Mihaela Guran, Grigoreta Sofia Cojocar

In this paper we propose an extensible architecture for the automatic evaluation of some usability factors based on user-performance metrics. The proposed architecture is designed using the Aspect Oriented Programming due to the advantages it brings like code separation for the evaluation module from the business and presentation layers of the application and extensibility. The framework supports the automatic evaluation of performance metrics like task completion time, number of successful tasks, number of errors.

95-98

Authors: Claudia-Elena Juncu, Adrian Iftene

This paper presents an application created for employees in the Human Resources departments that allows a user to simultaneously promote the company where he works at on three social networks: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The application allows the user to monitor such networks through a very intuitive and user-friendly interface, to simultaneously post messages on all three and generate statistics relative to the user’s activity on these networks. In the paper, we make a detailed presentation of the system’s architecture, followed by a presentation of case studies and statistics obtained.

105-108

Authors: Ion Alexandru Marinescu, Lidia Bajenaru, Mihaela Tomescu

One way to highlight and promote the most important and significant elements of the national multicultural heritage is to exploit them through Internet-based technologies. This paper presents the user interface of the interactive system for the management and promotion of multicultural content from the Romanian space "DigiMultiCult", which is in the test phase. The system provides, via a web portal, preservation and promotion services for the national multicultural heritage with relevance at European level.

113-116

Authors: Andrei Simion, Florica Moldoveanu, Victor Asavei, Alin Moldoveanu

This paper presents a case study on methods for real-time visualization and manipulation of medical data using an optimized version of the ray casting algorithm for volumes implemented on GPU's using parallel programming techniques (OpenGL Shading Language).

123-128

Authors: Marinel Popescu, Claudiu-Mihai Balan

The paper presents a graphic editor used to draw the phasor diagrams of electrical circuits that operate under sinusoidal steady state. The editor uses graphic primitives and mouse events to draw the phasors and it allows the measurement of amplitude and phase on an existing chart. The control panel and operation are easy to use by users of popular graphics editors (such as Paint from Windows). The basic elements of this editor can be included into the software application for a data acquisition system used for the measurement and monitoring of electrical quantities in three phase networks. The paper is aimed at students from technical faculties with electric department, which achieved Pascal or Delphi applications and proposes a simple solution to develop their own applications where these simple examples presented can be integrated, adapted or developed.