Summary: Effective communication between those who are not fluent in a non-native language can potentially be quite difficult. The common language selected to be used throughout an exchange can encumber those who might not speak it as proficiently as others. Remote communication further heightens the difficulty since less channels are available for communication. We introduce HandVis, a video conferencing interface that visualizes elements of hand gesture, such as trajectory and amount. Gesture is intended to be a communicative tool that can compensate for language deficits. The results of a user study indicate how HandVis can be utilized constructively by less-proficient speakers during cross-lingual communication.

Keywords: Digital storytelling; interactivity; panoramic images; experience sharing; effective system; effectiveness study; human computer interaction

Summary: Technology advancement has now enabled experience sharing to happen in a digital storytelling environment that is facilitated through different delivery technologies such as panoramic images and virtual reality. However, panoramic images have not being fully explored and formally studied especially to assist experience sharing in digital storytelling setting. This research aims to study the effectiveness of an interactive digital storytelling to facilitate the sharing of experience. The interactive digital storytelling artifact was developed to convey the look and feel of Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS through the panoramic images. The effectiveness of digital storytelling through panoramic images was empirically tested based on the adapted Delone and McLean IS success model. The experiment was conducted on participants who have never visited the university. Six hypotheses were derived and experiment showed that there are correlations between user satisfaction of digital storytelling with panoramic images and user's individual impact of the application to assist experience sharing among users. Hence, this research concludes a model on the production of an effective digital storytelling with panoramic images for specific experience sharing to bloom among users.

Keywords: adaptive page rank, graph processing, neural networks

Summary: Recent developments in the area of neural networks provided new models which are capable of processing general types of graph structures. Neural networks are well-known for their generalization capabilities. This paper explores the idea of applying a novel neural network model to a web graph to compute an adaptive ranking of pages. Some early experimental results indicate that the new neural network models generalize exceptionally well when trained on a relatively small number of pages.