Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator

307-322

Authors: Alexandra Negoescu, Cristian Mihăescu, Ilya Shmorgun, Mihai Mocanu

Depending on the size and functionality, kiosks have become an outstanding way for improving customer service and gaining users’ loyalty. In the educational domain most of the available kiosks contain just general knowledge about the university in question or information about campus and local buildings. In addition, the majority of kiosks available in universities don't have support for touch or multi-touch, most probably due to the high prices involved. We proposed to design and build our own version of an interactive touch- kiosk using up-to-date technologies that best fit the current needs of TallinnUniversity. Our aim was to design and implement an interface that should be completely dedicated and self-contained, thus minimizing user awareness of operating system components or software and hardware infrastructure. Moreover, we proposed the usage of technologies such as Windows 8 operating system and infrared-based touch-screens. Touch the Exchange is a digital environment running on a touch-screen kiosk that provides essential support for persons interested in international exchange possibilities. The aim of the project is to encourage local students and university staff members to take advantage of the opportunities available to them. This paper presents a description of the hardware and software technologies used within the project, as well as the reason why these specific implementation decisions have been chosen. Also, special attention is also given to the design process of the interface, its evaluation and testing and to the manner in which human-computer communication is facilitated. The whole process: the initial design concept, evaluation of the needed components, modelling, certification and construction of the prototype as well as its production are outlined in this article. The result, an attractive, modern and user-friendly system that ensures direct access to information can serve as a model for the educational institutions interesed in developing similar devices with minimum costs.

339-356

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

One of the most challenging tasks in natural language processing is related to the evaluation of textual complexity and of cohesion. Thus, automatic analyzers represent a special interest for their ability of predicting textual complexity having as basis: syntactic, sematic, morphological and lexical factors. Nevertheless, the elements used for evaluating textual complexity are tightly connected to scope and context. For this reason a purely technical analysis based only on individual metrics, without taking into account the constraints of psychology, human model, age and motivation is insufficient in order to make a proper prediction. Additionally, there are third party aspects which are correlated with the analysis of complexity like: stages of acquisition, fluency or accuracy. To resume, textual complexity metrics represent important indicators which help to better understand online texts, publications, books, papers or other forms of written textual representations.

195-210

Authors: Yoann Gabillon, Gaëlle Calvary, Nadine Mandran, Humbert Fiorino

In Human Computer Interaction engineering, both the context of use () and the user task () are supposed to be set at design time. However, in ubiquitous computing, the context of use is dynamic, making user needs possibly emerge on the fly. As a consequence, there is a need to go beyond pre-computed User Interfaces (UIs) and to be capable of dynamically composing UIs for fulfilling such emergent needs. This paper relates a user study conducted for understanding to which extent dynamic composition of UIs can match user needs. The study consists of 26 qualitative interviews and 3 focus groups. It provides interesting insights for future research.

249-268

Authors: Gervasio Varela, Alejandro Paz-Lopez, Jose A. Becerra, Richard J. Duro

Natural user interfaces want to liberate the user from having to learn new concepts to interact with computers. They do that by taking advantage of our senses and our own knowledge about world in order to build the user interface. Physical user interfaces are a prominent example, where physical objects are enhanced to represent actions or information that the system must exchange with the user. One of the main drawbacks of physical user interfaces is often related with the difficulty to decouple system logic from the specific technology used to build the user interface, especially when multiple environments or scenarios should be supported. This paper presents an abstraction technology for user interaction devices that allows the building of physical user interfaces that are physically and logically decoupled from the system logic.

127-140

Authors: Camelia Popa, Adela Ciobanu

Excessive use of mobile telephony and Internet has become a public health problem in many developed countries. In solving this problem have been strongly involved psychologists and psychiatrists. Worldwide, the research on all new IT&C dependencies are numerous and often have surprising conclusions, highlighting the psychopathological aspects of the so-called "unhealthy consumption" of SMS and Internet (social networks, online games, etc.). In Romania, however, despite the strong intrusion of mobile telephony and the Internet, such issues have been too little reviewed by the researchers. To provide a starting point for future Romanian studies in the field, this article aims to explore meta analytical the recent scientific information dedicated to the consumption problem of mobile communication.

155-168

Authors: Paul Fogarassy-Neszly, Vasile Gherhes

This paper briefly presents several aspects concerning automatic language recognition and continues with particularities for algorithms used in language differentiated speech synthesis. Several algorithm optimization methods are presented, as well as performance criteria in language recognition; particularities concerning screen readers in multicultural context are also discussed.

23-34

Authors: Ion Smeureanu, Narcisa Isaila

The innovative learning environments are a preoccupation for both educators and developers, this concern being encouraged by information technologies which are in a continuous development. On the other hand, European legislation encourages the creation of learning environments based on the innovative teaching methods, taking into account the principle of "lifelong learning". Closely related to the purpose of education, in terms of informatics, it is desirable that by coupling the learning components at lesson level to be diminished the effort to integrate educational resources into an innovative environment, highly personalized and adapted to the learning needs of students. The paper aims to investigate the extent to which the components technology allows to achieve this, taking into account the benefits for students and teachers, through releasing the capacities of creativity and innovativity.

57-78

Authors: Stefan Trausan-Matu

Polyphonic music and counterpoint are a model for creativity because they appeared naturally in musical composition processes for developing a theme in the context of a community of voices and they were validated by listeners. The paper studies how polyphony, counterpoint, ventriloquism may be a model of creativity and, particularily, of knowledge building in virtual collaborative systems on the web. As I mentioned in previous papers, colaborative interfacing tools may stimulate inter-animation, with beneficial effects on creativity fostering. Repetitions and echoes of words make them get a special importance, sometimes becoming artefacts. The paper presents several examples that evidentiate the polyphonic concepts in chat conversations in which appear micro-creativity processes.

97-109

Authors: Emil Stanescu

In this period ends switchover from analogue to digital TV. At the same time is accelerating the pace of diversifying multimedia resources, facilities offered by the receiving devices and communication technologies transmitting multimedia content. In this context, the factors that influence consumer satisfaction with multimedia content transmitted through digital TV services and, possibly, through the Internet, is an important indicator for the user loyalty to a service provider. In the article we make an analysis of the link between three important concepts in the provision of digital multimedia: QoS, QoE and customer satisfaction. Digital television brings picture quality elements that positively influences QoE. But, if TV service provider not effectively controls the encoding parameters of the video stream and does not allocate sufficient transmission bandwidth, it can lead to degradation of received images, leading to lower QoE and lower loyalty for TV service provider. Another factor influencing QoE is interactivity, and, in this paper, we present a method of selecting important events in the video stream so that they can subsequently be requested on demand by subscribers.