Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator

257-260

Authors: Philippe Dessus

As an editorial to this special issue, we pinpoint some ways on how visual representations of educational processes can help analyzing these processes, and in turn lead to designing of new tools informed by interdisciplinary research.

281-302

Authors: Kalliopi Benetos, Mireille Bétrancourt

The development of argumentative writing skills is necessary and expected in secondary and higher education to foster critical thinking, but they are difficult to master. A computer-supported argumentative writing application, C-SAW, was designed to support this process. In its development and testing, scripts were written to record the use of embedded scaffolding devices and textual changes made. For research purposes, a concept mapping and visualization software (VUE) was used to manipulate and code recorded data to visualize writing process stages for each participant. Further analyses using transitional probability matrices revealed what types of aid were consulted during different stages of writing and which aids and actions were involved in effectively regulating writing processes and strategies. In addition to being useful in analyzing the usability and effectiveness of the technology-enhanced environment, this type of analysis also gave insight into individuals’ writing processes and difficulties and could be used by instructors wishing to provide feedback or adapt their instructional designs.

321-340

Authors: Ben-Manson Toussaint, Vanda Luengo, Francis Jambon

This paper presents our methodology to capture and model multimodal interactions in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). We are specifically interested in perceptual-gestural interactions combining perceptions, gestures and other types of actions. Traces of such interactions are multisource and heterogeneous. The challenge is to foster their representation into sequences that render their multimodal nature. In this work, we want to show how the proposed representation yields the analysis of the influence of visual perceptions on learners’ performance. Our case study is the ITS TELEOS, a simulation based Intelligent Tutoring System dedicated to percutaneous orthopedic surgery. We also conducted an experiment on PILOTE 2, a flight simulation environment, to give a proof of concept of the genericity of our propositions.

173-194

Authors: Iulian Radu, Traian Rebedea

Publishing of comments is a form of interaction that has become an important part of the Social Web phenomenon. Comments are enhancing online interaction, however their visualization and ranking becomes extremely difficult or even impossible for videos or other types of online articles that have millions of comments linked to them. This paper presents a method to identify the most relevant comments published for a video uploaded on the YouTube video-sharing platform, offering at the same time a detailed analysis of the features that are relevant for the most important comments linked to an article. The analysis we have performed shows that videos from different categories have different relevant attributes and there are important differences between these attributes for specific pairs of categories (e.g. Music vs. Education).

209-222

Authors: Maria Gheorghe-Moisii

The accessibility of public websites is essential for the successful implementation of the information society. Given that the society includes people with various forms of disability (visual impairments, cognitive, hearing, etc.) they should also have equal opportunities in accessing and using the public information. This paper presents the results of a study carried on in 2015 that assess the accessibility of 150 municipal web sites. The evaluation was done with Total Validator. The accessibility issues have been compared with the results of previous studies. The results show a low level of web accessibility and instability of results in time.

237-255

Authors: Dorian Gorgan, Mircea Catalin Catana, Teodor Stefanut

The paper proposes visual analysis techniques as a solution to the scientific community concerned with developing performant algorithms for exploring and analyzing massive and multidimensional data. The actually high performance computation infrastructures such as cloud, grids, multicore, and clusters, are able more or less to cover the computation requirements for transformation, classification, and highlighting of significant data. Even so, the analytical capacity of these systems is still limited. Nevertheless the human brain has a much greater analytical and synthetic capacity. This paper presents the development and the experiments on the visual analyzing techniques in the domain of strategic games. The visual techniques of developing strategies for the tower defense games are exemplified and evaluated. The metrics for strategy evaluation and the experiments on interactive visual navigation techniques throughout the value space in order to support the convergence toward the optimum solutions are detailed. The visual analyzing techniques and the exemplified solutions could be of interest for players who wish to improve their performance and for strategic game developers as well.

79-100

Authors: Vlad Doru Colceriu, Victor Bacu, Teodor Stefănut, Dorian Gorgan

This paper presents a case study and a proposed solution for a train localization system, designed to satisfy the safety requirements specific to the railway domain, and the limits imposed by the low cost regional railway platforms. Information and data flows are used to establish a global context for train localization through a software railway platform. The train localization is based on GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) low precision sensors and MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems) inertial sensors integrated in commercial mobile devices, such as PC tablets and smart-phones. The integrity requirements of such a solution, on which the life safety is the main reason of localization, are stringent. In order to satisfy all the requirements put forward the current solution proposes to source out to the crowd the localization and other services traditionally offered by train personnel. The issues raised by storage, communication, processing and visualization of data throughout the processing flow are highlighted in the paper.

121-138

Authors: Alexandru Butean, Bogdan Troanca, Oana Balan, Florica Moldoveanu, Alin Moldoveanu, Doinita Chirita

Nowadays, the mobile devices are used for accomplishing a wide range of tasks and activities. Nonetheless, interacting with them represents a considerable challenge for the visually impaired people, especially in what concerns the low level of accessibility and usability. At the same time, the visually impaired people cannot use the most common applications for mobile phones and are deprived of access to a wide range of essential information concerning the environment (objects, obstacles, and the presence of other people around, the ability of freely navigating). This paper is a review that aims to present and evaluate some of the most relevant mobile applications designed for the visually impaired users. These applications become accessible to the blind people by using sound, touchscreen and vibration in order to offer the necessary information for HCI. This research is taking into account the main characteristics, limitations, comments and improvement ideas.

157-172

Authors: Alexandru Balog, Costin Pribeanu

The popularity of social networking websites among university students stimulated the interest for studying the potential of use for educational purposes. The objective of this study is to test and validate a multidimensional model for the usefulness of Facebook. The model is specified by a second order factor (Facebook usefulness) and three dimensions specified as first order factors (social usefulness, information usefulness and collaboration usefulness). The model has been tested on a sample of 414 students from the Bucharest University of Economics, by using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Results show that the dimensions have a similar significance and order of importance for male and female students. However, the global factor loadings on the social usefulness and information usefulness dimensions are higher for men than for women while the global factor loading on the dimension collaboration usefulness is higher for women than for men.

1-20

Authors: Melania Duma, Corina Giurgea, Mihaela Ordean, Paula Zălhan

In response to an IT-based, strategic goal of the Romanian Ministry of Justice, the running JustASR project is responsible for developing the architecture and technical elements to be used in implementing a system which mediates the man-computer interaction via the automatic detection of the Romanian language. The project seeks to develop the core of a technology based on the automatic speech recognition of the discourse used in the Romanian court of law. The paper briefly presents the premises and some of the phonetic elements which are paramount to the project’s success. After introducing the Speech Recognition technology, the paper presents the advances of Romanian research in the field. The paper then focuses on the linguistic peculiarities of the Romanian language, the first and foremost element of the technology underlying the JustASR project. The most significant part of the paper deals with the applied aspect of the phonetic theory for the Romanian language. As far as the creation of the dictionary is concerned, the general criteria for constructing the dictionary are illustrated with a special focus on Phonetics and the word categories involved

33-44

Authors: Ştefan Trăuşan-Matu, Alexandru Călinescu

The paper presents the theoretical details and the description of the implementation of a system of sonication of chat conversations, starting from the textual logs and generating MusicXML format files containing a music representation containing several voices. The system is a manifestation of two ideas, the first being that the speech in conversations, in general, and in particular in the instant messaging chats, have a structure similar to the polyphonic music. The second idea is that sonication, that means an audible representation of a given processes, is a very useful way of investigation. The approach was validated by the fact that the results were particularly appreciated by a composer and also a professor at the Academy of Music in Bucharest and, moreover, have been adapted and presented in a concert at the Romanian Athenaeum.

65-80

Authors: Laurenţiu Tănase, Dorin-Mircea Popovici

In response to the decreasing interest in the environment discovery of and direct users interpersonal communication, primary school children, MyDearDaisy application aims to raise awareness and encourage them to study the evolution of the environment, materialized in the form of flowers gardens, as motivational opportunity for personal interaction. Experimentation of the environmental conditions effects on vegetation occurs through natural gestures of young users, detected through Xbox Kinect technology. Virtual environment modeling, rendering and simulation were performed using Unity platform while MS Visual Studio was used to interpret user gestures and translate these gestures in the virtual environment. Usability study prooved the positive appreciation of the educational and motivational side of the system, complete with intuitive, simple and easy to use interface.