Romanian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

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