Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator

209-224

Authors: Alexandru Bardas, Mihai Dascalu, Stefan Trausan-Matu

The classification of conversations in collaborative environments is needed for a better understanding of discussed subjects. Ontologies represent an efficient and representative method of conceptualising a domain. Starting with a predefined set of ontologies for multiple domains, a precise conversation classification between multiple members is wanted. To facilitate this process, the language in which the messages are written must be detected and there should be as little grammatical errors as possible. In this manner, the keywords used by the conversation’s participants can be found among the concepts from the ontologies, while the dominant and central concepts determine the domains on which the conversations are classified. For doing this analysis, we built a web collaborative platform that enables realtime communication between users, the visualisation of keywords within ontologies using radial graphs and the transcript export in an accessible format for further analysis. The platform is accessible on any type of device, being capable of displaying the minimal needed information for a mobile device and automatically rescaling on a bigger screen. In this paper we provide details regarding the application’s implementation, the advantages of using it and its classification system, as well as the benefits of integrating it in different educational contexts.

239-258

Authors: Bradi Rares, Dorian Gorgan

The task of hand gesture recognition is actively researched and challenging because of complex backgrounds, different lighting environments and unpredictable hand movements. This paper presents an analysis along with an implementation of a system that can recognize the hand center, the fingers and the hand wrist. Hand center recognition is done by finding the minimum inscribed circle in the hand contour. Fingers are detected using the k-curvature algorithm. The hands positions along a trajectory are analyzed and based on those a general direction is established. The features are tracked in time using Kalman filter in order to achieve robustness in use and have stability in the features locations. The hand gestures are made out of a desired direction and a certain positioning of the fingers. An analysis is performed on three levels with the purpose of: quantifying the robustness of the system to lighting and background, determining the error rate and the processing rate.

93-116

Authors: Josefina Guerrero-García, Juan González-Calleros

n recent years, there has been a wide interest on how groups of people work together, and on how collaboration might be supported. Many authors, rely on Task Modeling to design collaborative information systems. Task models can be represented at various abstraction levels. When designers want to specify only requirements regarding how activities should be performed, they consider only the main high-level tasks. On the other hand, when designers aim to provide precise design indications then the activities are represented at a small granularity, thus including aspects related to the dialogue model of a user interface (which defines how system and user actions can be sequenced). In this paper a comparative analysis of selected models involving multiple users in an interaction is provided in order to identify concepts which are underexplored in today’s multi-user interaction task modeling. This comparative analysis is based on three families of criteria: information criteria, conceptual coverage, and expressive¬ness. Merging the meta-models of the selected models enables to come up with a broader meta-model that could be instantiated in most situations involving multi-user interaction, like workflow information systems, CSCW.

139-160

Authors: François Beuvens, Jean Vanderdonckt

User interfaces allowing gesture recognition and manipulation are becoming more and more popular these last years. It however remains a hard task for programmers to developer such interfaces : some knowledge of recognition systems is required, along with user experience and user interface management knowledge. It is often difficult for only one developer to handle all this knowledge by itself and it is why a team gathering different skills is most of the time needed. We previously presented a method along with a tool in order to ease the collaboration between members of such a team. In this paper, we present results and feedbacks collected by observing different teams that followed the method and/or used the proposed tool.

21-36

Authors: Serban Ungureanu, Andrei Panu, Lenuta Alboaie, Sabin-Corneliu Buraga, Adrian Iftene

Cloud Gaming is a mechanism that enables users to play various games without having them installed on their computers. Games are running on servers in cloud and graphic output is compressed and sent over network. This offer major advantages that we will underlie in Section 1. In Section 2 we present how cloud gaming has become an effervescent field in computer science and we make a brief introduction of similar solutions. In section 3 we describe our solution and in next section we present a usage scenario and the results obtained comparing our proposal with an existing trading platform.

53-70

Authors: Electra Mitan, Ana-Maria Borozan

This paper presents IMM-Market, an interactive marketing system on Internet, that can be used by any organization for the future development of business in a modern manner. The system was developed as a web portal and includes the following modules: information, networking, management, marketing. Users that can access the system are divided in: authorised users (having operating function; can access the system public zone), experts (having leading function; can access the expert area), and administrators (can access the expert area and the Administration component of the system). IMM-Market can be accessed by anyone, anytime, and from anywhere. With a friendly interface IMM-Market is an interactive business process management tool that can support: the investigation of the market and consumption, testing of the products acceptability on the market, sales modeling, tracking of the consumption products, evaluation and testing of products, price research.

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.