Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator

105-118

Authors: Adriana-Mihaela Guran, Daniela-Maria Andrei

In this paper the evolution of software design methods is discussed with insights from the usability perspective. Usability is considered an essential factor in the success or failure of an interactive system, determining its acceptance or rejection. Although the software design methods are continuously evolving, as the user are considered essential stakeholders in the design process, there still can be notice shortages in the process of communicating between the users and the developers of the software solution. The paper presents the chronological evolution of design methods in parallel with the evolution of the usability concept, emphasizing the support provided by the design method for developing usable solutions. The article tries to correlate the software design approaches with the solutions provided by Human-Computer Interaction in order to improve the software design process. As the user centered design focuses on an interdisciplinary approach, the paper presents some practical methods of mixing the approaches from software engineering with methods provided by social sciences.

131-146

Authors: Mihai Dascalu, Stefan Trausan-Matu

The paper presents a system developed to assess the skills and evolution of participants in a collaborative environment. To obtain an overall approach, two scenarios have been considered: quantitative approach based on social networks and number of interchanged utterances between participants and the second, qualitative, based on the semantic content analysis of each utterance. Thus, metrics specific for social networks have been applied on the graph obtained after evaluating each utterance under contextual relevance using methods for text mining, natural language processing and latent semantic analysis.An important component of the system is the visualization module which makes possible the modeling and evolution of social networks. A specific view can be generated in order to analyze the whole chat, a discussion thread, the prospective growth/evolution of each participant, and can highlight the contribution of each participant through the statistics generated by the various metrics applied. Other modules have been developed to evaluate and annotate each chat in order to obtain the “golden sample”, to compare notes with the results obtained from automatic analysis and to learn from the corpus using WordNet and LSA.