| Satellite images visualization techniques based on geospatial services | | BIBAK | PDF | 1-22 | |
| Vasile Danut Mihon; Vlad Colceriu; Victor Bâcu; Dorian Gorgan | |||
| The analysis of large volumes of data, the extraction of relevant
information, and the interactive exposure and visualization of the results
represent the basic processes in modeling the natural phenomena, based on
satellite image processing. Due to the large dimension and their high frequency
of acquisition, the satellite images are stored within specialized data
repositories and accessed by means of standards. The paper presents the
experiments through the GreenLand platform to achieve high usability user
interaction techniques for accessing, searching, extracting, and visualizing
the satellite images. The implemented solutions use the geospatial services
provided by the OGC standard. The benefits resulted by integrating this
standard with the GreenLand platform and the services given by the Grid
infrastructure represent another main subject of this paper. Keywords: OGC standards, interaction techniques, dynamic visualization, satellite
images, geospatial services | |||
| The coupling of active components for innovative learning environments | | BIBAK | PDF | 23-34 | |
| 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. Keywords: complex learning components, component coupling, "point & shoot", "drag
& drop", mathematics, innovation | |||
| 3DUPB -- The Mixed Reality Campus: A glimpse at how mixed reality systems can shape the future | | BIBAK | PDF | 35-56 | |
| Alin Moldoveanu; Anca Morar; Victor Asavei | |||
| Mixing concepts and techniques coming from 3D MMO games, virtual reality,
mixed reality and ubiquitous computing, the 3DUPB project challenges the
traditional ways of our daily activities and interaction. In a few words, as a
computer system, it can be described as "3D MMO Virtual and Real-Time Replica
of the POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest campus". However, tightly integrated
with the educational, social and organizational life of the university, 3DUPB
will be more than just a computer system and will open new possibilities for
human activity and interaction, a glimpse at how mixed reality systems can
shape the future. This paper describes the main reasons while 3D UPB was
started, its up to date concept, relation with other systems, the basic
software architecture, the main technical issues and solutions, as well as the
perspectives. Keywords: MMO, mixed reality, virtual educational environments, virtual social
environment | |||
| A Polyphonic Model for Creativity in Small Virtual Collaborative Groups | | BIBAK | PDF | 57-78 | |
| 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, particularly, of knowledge building in virtual collaborative
systems on the web. As I mentioned in previous papers, collaborative
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. Keywords: creativity, polyphony, dialogism, brainstorming, sinectics, ventriloquism | |||
| Software solution for proximities representation in GIS using adjacency matrix | | BIBAK | PDF | 79-96 | |
| Marian Dârdala; Titus Felix Furtuna; Adriana Reveiu | |||
| This paper presents how to design and implement a software module to achieve
an alternative description of a map thematic compositions and applications of
this representation. It starts from a layer containing spatial data of polygon
type that can be described through adjacency matrix that holds neighborhood
information for each of the existing vectors in the spatial feature. There are
also presented applications of this representation: coloring maps with a
minimum number of colors and the Moran index of spatial correlation
calculation. The maps coloring is done thus for any two neighboring polygons
they do not have the same color. The Moran spatial correlation coefficient is
the standard used to determine the degree of dependence between the values of a
variable in neighboring locations. It is used to identify a pattern in the
spatial distribution of the values of an economic variables and the existence
of common factors that influences the obtaining of these values. Keywords: adjacency matrix, GIS, Backtracking, Greedy, symbology, Moran index of
spatial correlation | |||
| Multimedia Content Consumption in the Context of Digital TV | | BIBAK | PDF | 97-109 | |
| 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. Keywords: digital TV services, multimedia content, quality of services | |||
| Study on a design methodology for an intelligent interface of a recommender system | | BIBAK | PDF | 111-126 | |
| Marian Cristian Mihaescu | |||
| This paper presents a study on a design methodology for the interface of a
recommender system. A usability evaluation is designed for an intelligent
interface of a recommender system that runs along Tesys e-Learning platform.
Building intelligent e-Learning systems enables students to access the
educational resources is such a way that the learning effort is optimal when a
high degree of knowledge is required. The design of the interface follows an
iterative process in which low fidelity prototypes are built and evaluated. The
usability evaluation is performed in two ways. A questionnaire is proposed for
evaluation of low fidelity models. For high quality results a data analysis
procedure of task completion times is used. Keywords: interface design, usability evaluation, recommender system | |||
| Psychopathological symptoms of the cell phone addiction | | BIBAK | PDF | 127-140 | |
| 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. Keywords: mobile phone, addictive behavior, text-messaging dependency, psychopathology | |||
| The ergonomic quality of an educational application based on augmented reality -- a measurement model with causal indicators | | BIBAK | PDF | 141-154 | |
| Costin Pribeanu | |||
| In recent years the educational applications based on augmented reality (AR)
gained interest due to the opportunities provided by the integration of real
objects from the traditional didactics on a hardware-software platform. The
implementation of the AR concept, which is based on the superposition of
computer generated images over the observed image of a real object on the
screen, may lead to specific usability problems that are reflected on the ease
of learning how to operate, ease of use, and comfort in use. In this paper a
model with causal indicators is presented that is influencing the ergonomic
quality of an AR-based educational application. The results show that the ease
of reading the information on the screen and the ease of selecting a chemical
element are the most important causal indicators for the ergonomic quality of
the application. Keywords: usability, ergonomic quality, formative measurement model, causal
indicators, augmented reality, e-learning | |||
| Automatic Language Recognition with application in Differentiated Speech Synthesis | | BIBAK | PDF | 155-168 | |
| 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. Keywords: language recognition, speech synthesis, accessibly, assistive technology | |||
| Recognizing named entities, quotes and events in news and social media items in Romanian | | BIBAK | PDF | 169-192 | |
| Adrian-Nicolae Zamfirescu; Traian Eugen Rebedea | |||
| At the border of natural language processing and information retrieval,
named entity recognition has represented one of the most important research
problems of the two domains, that has not been solved perfectly yet even for
English texts. Furthermore, named entity recognition has opened up the path of
solving other problems that use these linguistic constructs, such as the
identification of quotes and declarations made by persons, in general, but also
by companies or other types of organizations, or the extraction of events from
texts. The problem of named entity identification and classification has
appeared from the necessity of being able to report the appearances of names of
persons, organizations and other types of named entities relevant for various
domains within written documents. In this article we shall present a solution
for solving these three aforementioned problems for texts written in Romanian
from various sources, like news items, blog articles or comments from social
networks. The paper starts with a short overview of the theoretical
underpinnings used for solving these problems, then we will present the methods
actually used for the designed solution for Romanian. It combines machine
learning algorithms with heuristics based on text patterns and regular
expressions. At the end, we shall highlight the accuracy of the various methods
used for solving the tasks, together with a comparison between the results
obtained by each method. Keywords: natural language processing, information extraction, machine classification,
named entities, quotes, events | |||
| Context aware adaptation of user interfaces | | BIBAK | PDF | 193-194 | |
| Jean Vanderdonckt | |||
| Context-aware Adaptation (CAA) of user interfaces involves the
identification of the relevant context information that surrounds the user
during her interaction in order to properly adapt elements of an interactive
system aiming at enhancing the end user interaction. The main goals of CAA are
improving the usability levels of the system by using the relevant information
of the user context to properly transform a system. In this special issue the
authors are presenting various model-based approaches to user interface design
and evaluation aiming to support the context aware adaptation. Keywords: context aware adaptation, user interfaces, model-based development | |||
| A need, no app: just do it! But do people support dynamic composition of interactive systems for fulfilling emergent needs? | | BIBAK | PDF | 195-210 | |
| Yoann Gabillon; Gaëlle Calvary; Nadine Mandran; Humbert Fiorino | |||
| In Human Computer Interaction engineering, both the context of use
(<user, platform, environment>) and the user task (<goal,
procedure>) 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. Keywords: Ambient computing, User Interface, dynamic composition, social study,
qualitative interview, focus group | |||
| A Unified Model for Context-aware Adaptation of User Interfaces | | BIBAK | PDF | 211-248 | |
| Vivian Genaro Motti; Jean Vanderdonckt | |||
| The variety of contexts of use in which the interaction takes place nowadays
is a challenge for both stakeholders for the development and end users for the
interaction. Stakeholders either ignore the exponential amount of information
coming from the context of use, adopting the inaccessible approach of
one-size-fits-all, or they must dedicate a significant effort to carefully
consider context differences while designing several different versions of the
same user interface. For end users, web pages that are not adapted become often
inaccessible in non-conventional contexts of use, with mobile devices, as smart
phones and tablet PCs. In order to leverage such efforts, we propose in this
paper a meta-model that by means of a unified view supports all phases of the
implementation of context-aware adaptation for user interfaces. With such a
formal abstraction of an interactive system, stakeholders can generate
different instantiations with more concrete UI's that can properly handle and
adapt accordingly to the different constraints and characteristics of different
contexts of use. We present CAMM, a meta-model for context-aware adaptation
covering different application domains and also a complete adaptation
lifecycle. Moreover we also present various instantiations of such a model for
different scenarios of a car rental example. Keywords: modeling, context-awareness, adaptation, user interfaces | |||
| The Generic Interaction Protocol: Increasing portability of distributed physical user interfaces | | BIBAK | PDF | 249-268 | |
| 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. Keywords: UsiXML, distributed user interfaces, physical user interfaces, ambient
intelligence, ubiquitous computing | |||
| Sustaining Designers' and Users' Quality of Life in the Paradigm of Plastic UIs | | BIBAK | PDF | 269-289 | |
| Eric Ceret; Alfonso García Frey; Sophie Dupuy-Chessa; Gaëlle Calvary | |||
| Modern User Interfaces need to dynamically adapt to their context of use,
i.e. mainly to the changes that occur in the environment or in the platform.
Model-Driven Engineering offers powerful solutions to handle the design and the
implementation of such User Interfaces. However, this approach requires the
creation of an important amount of models and transformations, each of them in
turn requiring specific knowledge and competencies. This leads to the need of
adapted process models and tools sustaining the designers' work. Moreover,
automatic adaptation to new devices implies that users could have questions
about the interaction with the same UI in such new devices. As this adaption is
automatically performed at runtime, designers cannot foresee all the possible
combinations of contexts of use at design time in order to conveniently support
the users. For this reason, dynamic help systems are necessary to generate
dynamic explanations to the end-user at runtime. This paper presents (1) a new
vision of process model flexibility that makes it possible to adapt the process
model to the designer's knowledge and know-how, (2) the "flexibilization" of
the UsiXML methodology, (3) the principles supporting self-explanatory UIs and
(4) the integration of all these notions in UsiComp, an integrated and open
framework for designing and executing plastic User Interfaces. UsiComp relies
on a service-based architecture. It offers two modules, for design and
execution. The implementation has been made using OSGi services offering
dynamic possibilities for using and extending the tool. This paper describes
the architecture and shows the extension capacities of the framework through
two running examples. Keywords: UI Plasticity, Self-Explanatory Interfaces, Process Model Flexibility,
Model-Driven Engineering; User Interfaces; Design Tools | |||
| An empirical study of the determinants factors and gender differences in the acceptance of e-learning technology | | BIBAK | PDF | 291-306 | |
| Alexandru Balog | |||
| The UTAUT model (Venkatesh et. al., 2003) was tested in different domains
and contexts of use. In the interpretation and comparison of results from
different studies is important to assess whether the model and the constructs
are perceived in the same way by individuals in different groups. In this
article is tested a reduced version of the UTAUT in the context of e-learning
using data collected from 220 students (128 women, 92 men). In order to test
model invariance and explore gender differences in the acceptance of technology
is applied multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA). The results show
that the model and the constructs are invariant in the two groups of students
in the context of e-learning in Romania. Keywords: e-learning technology acceptance, UTAUT, gender differences, invariance
measurement analysis, MGCFA | |||
| Touch the Exchange: Efficient distribution of information in education using interactive kiosks | | BIBAK | PDF | 307-322 | |
| Alexandra Negoescu; Cristian Mihaescu; 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
Tallinn University. 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 ftor the educational institutions
interested in developing similar devices with minimum costs. Keywords: Interaction design; user experience; touch; multi-touch; wrapper; kiosk,
usability, graphic interface | |||
| Software Model with Potential for Development of Strategy Games | | BIBAK | PDF | 323-338 | |
| Constantin Nandra; Dorian Gorgan | |||
| The purpose of this article is to present and propose a software model which
could lie at the base of the development of strategy games and, in general, of
all kinds of interactive applications which involve the simulation of
interactions between a set of entities and some given environment. The model in
question consists of a set of software components that define the architecture
and several other sets of interchangeable components which can be used directly
in the development of potential interactive graphical applications. This model
could offer an alternative way of software interaction to that based on the
invocation of functionality, which is typical to using software libraries. This
alternative way would offer to the user the ability to build applications as
aggregates made from existing components. In this article, we will emphasize
the strong points of this kind of design approach (flexibility, extensibility,
modularity), and provide proof of the benefits derived from using it in the
process of interactive graphical application development such as the computer
games. Keywords: software library, modular design, reusable components, alternative
interaction | |||
| Textual Complexity Assessment of Primary School French Manuals | | BIBAK | PDF | 339-356 | |
| 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. Keywords: textual complexity analysis, complexity metrics, groups and concept classes | |||
| Criminal Detection -- An Application for Criminal Identification | | BIBAK | PDF | 357-376 | |
| Ana-Teodora Petrea; Adrian Iftene | |||
| This paper aims to help people who want to quickly identify a potential
criminal, based on information that we have available at a given moment. The
system uses as input information from unstructured text that can come from
sources such as newspapers, minutes of the scene, witness statements, etc. and
it uses computational linguistics techniques to extract relevant information to
identify the criminal. The textual processing presented in this paper, enables
(1) extracting entity names (so you can get a group of suspects or the location
where the crime happened), (2) identify relationships between words, to extract
knowledge (thus, it can obtain physical characteristics of criminals, crime
type or weapon type used) and identify the roles (thus, it can identify
victims, villains or witnesses). The application also allows the creation of a
robot portrait of the criminal, can associate pictures or the robot portrait to
a person considered by the application and can display on a map the location of
the event. We believe that the application could be used in a real environment
in the various institutions, where the processing of these types of texts is
currently performed manually, primarily by employees. Keywords: Computational Linguistic, Internet Surveillance, Forensic Linguistics | |||