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We are living in an extremely globalized and digitalized world where social media represent the core of our existence whether for personal or professional reasons. Social media impact on business in general caught the attention of researchers (Grizane & Jurgelane, 2017) during the last years, especially to measure the impact of their use in business growth, increasing sales and/or customer loyalty. There are more and more studies that focus on the harmful effect of fake news on specific markets, news that may appear easily and are difficult to control. Fake news can affect both the customers and/ or the business depending on the context. The purpose of this study is to identify how are the fake news appearing in a world where access to information is so simple and everybody can check the truthfulness of information and what kind of barriers are used to protect the business from being affected and the customers from being misinformed. Data for this paper are gathered using in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs from real estate businesses. The results show that the level of increasing fake news is affecting the trust building process. Recommendations are put forward for organizations to analyze more user behavior and use it for the decision-making process in order to limit the negative effects of fake news. Also, customers need to learn to identify quality brand communication, pay attention to details and be very precautions while taking decisions based on news that may be fake.

Leiomyosarcoma (LMS) of the inferior vena cava (IVC) is a rare malignant tumor, accounting for 2% of all LMSs. Less than 400 cases have been reported in literature. Computed tomography (CT) is the most accurate imaging method in assessing the location of the tumor within the IVC and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) accurately identifies its extent and the potential for surgical resection. We present the case of a patient with inferior vena cava leiomyosarcoma (IVCL), for whom the pathological diagnosis was different from the initially expected one, the tumor appearance on pre-operative imaging mimicking renal cell carcinoma. The intraoperative difficulty of approaching renal hilum and IVC was a factor suggesting the vascular origin of the tumor, which was confirmed at pathological analysis. The extensive defect in the IVC after tumor excision led to the decision of complete transverse suturing of IVC, as significant collateral venous circulation was already present. Because IVCL is a rare disease, there is scarce data regarding the prognosis and treatment options. Long-term survival depends on the extent of the surgery. The need of vascular reconstruction is not always mandatory. Despite high recurrence rates, no consensus regarding adjuvant treatment exists yet. A multidisciplinary approach including surgical oncologists and vascular surgeons is mandatory to achieve the best patient outcomes. Perioperative planning, coordination and adherence to oncological techniques are critical.

Our paper tackles the development of media reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the January - November 2020 time span, in France, Germany, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. We aim to make media reporting transparent on two dimensions: the coverage of COVID-19-related topics and the negativity of the COVID-19 media reporting. To achieve this goal, we analysed a large news dataset with 841,415 pieces of news—including 202,608 COVID-19 media reports—on an LSTM neural network. The news sentiment data and the corresponding coverage are set in relation to the WHO data on COVID-19 and to Google Trends. This compares the reality, that is WHO data, the perceived and reported reality, that is news data, and the actions based on the perceived and the actual reality, that is Google Trends. The results show that media reporting on COVID-19 is unprecedented in terms of coverage and negativity. Furthermore, the study quantifies how far media reporting detached from the facts after the first wave of COVID-19 and how an Infodemic spread across Europe.

In exposure therapy and virtual reality exposure therapy, therapists face highly individual patients that have individual conditions. This leads to the challenge of individualized therapy, for which virtual reality systems need to account for. This paper investigates a prototype that allows a flexible therapy of public speaking anxiety using live-interactions from a therapist, which contain transitions from 2D to 3D interactions. Therapists are able to embody an avatar in the patient’s virtual audience on purpose. We oriented our design at continuous interactions in the three dimensions: cognitive, perceptual, and functional continuity. We evaluated whether the design is beneficial for the users. For this evaluation, we conducted a study with eight non-therapist participants to assess the general usability and design aspects of continuous interaction. Our results indicate that using continuous interactions is beneficial for the use in this kind of system. For the design, we need to find ways to balance the cognitive load with the opportunities that arise, especially when these systems are scaling bigger.

Mixed and Virtual Reality (XR) have seen an important development since the advent of low-cost technologies. The application space is still diversifying, opening up new opportunities and application areas for such technologies. An important common feature of Mixed and Virtual Reality applications is that designers and engineers need to orchestrate virtual content and user experience. We regard orchestration of Mixed and Virtual Reality as invisible work: in many cases, orchestration is hidden within the task of story scripting of applications. It is often occluded by designing and programming Mixed and Virtual Reality. As such, orchestration is regarded as a means to a goal, which occludes its importance for the design of XR systems. We would like to invite the research community to address this issue, by focusing this workshop on highlighting and exemplifying orchestration challenges and best practices, and to systematise the orchestration topic in the context of the recent technology advances. We will consider a wide range of orchestration cases, from completely pre-orchestrated to live-orchestrated Mixed and Virtual Reality. Based on that knowledge, we aim to consider novel tools to support designers and users in their orchestration work. We invite scholars and practitioners to contribute to our workshop, with cases from their work.

Nowadays, the use of smartphones has become essential for daily activities that have either a personal or professional purpose. A large number of resources is necessary for both the production and the use of these devices, which means that solutions in terms of sustainability are needed. The purpose of this research is to highlight the concept of sustainability when talking about smartphones, as well to underline the possibilities that exist for the consumers. This study examines the habits of young consumers in Romania, the reasons behind a mobile phone replacement, and the factors that influence the purchase decision. The methodology section follows quantitative and qualitative market research. An analysis was performed in order to have a deep understanding of trends in terms of mobile phone ownership and preferred brands. This study also provides a general view on the neglectfulness of the young population of Romania regarding the dangers to which the environment is exposed because of the purchasing habits that go against sustainability. For accomplishing this purpose, important results have been discovered through the analysis of the data obtained from self-administered questionnaires and interviews. The results show that people are usually using only one mobile phone at a time and they change it once every two years for sustainability and financial reasons. The same applies when it comes to choosing a certain brand. The reasons behind the purchase of a new phone and the decisions regarding an old one are based on healthy principles of the circular economy and sustainability. The preferences in terms of technology and design, and the decision process are correlated with incomes.

In this article, we lever on matters of concern (MoC) as a way to reflect on the articulation of collaborative design processes. We do this by focusing on an international project for the development of an ICT platform for energy management at the household and housing cooperative levels. We analyse retrospectively how the project development process captured and accompanied several MoC in two piloting areas, where all authors were directly involved. Our work contributes to the body of knowledge that builds on Science and Technology Studies scholarship to enrich the understanding of complex design processes. In particular, the paper goes beyond a descriptive take on MoC and provides ontological and methodological considerations on the use of user stories. Ultimately, the paper argues that scaffolding tools, such as user stories, can capture and convey MoC, and they can facilitate a transparent process of actor-networks alignment and emergence.

In today’s era of digitalization of education, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning is becoming increasingly important in higher education. This type of learning has been frequently associated in the recent research literature with student regulation, feedback from peers and a student assessment schema which can incorporate both formative and summative assessment strategies. This work-in-progress paper presents the CLASS system which caters for all these aspects. Furthermore, the system supports mechanisms for the prevention of the free riding phenomenon, which has been reported in the literature as one of the most important disadvantages in group student work. The paper discusses the higher education context in which the CLASS system was developed and used, along with its design affordances and how these affordances can facilitate CSCL. The paper can be useful to designers and developers of CSCL systems as well as to practitioners that are interested in how they can exploit CSCL with their students working in groups.

Digital backpropagation (DBP) is a promising digital-domain technique to mitigate Kerr-induced nonlinear interference. While it successfully removes deterministic signal-signal interactions, the performance of ideal DBP is limited by stochastic effects, such as polarizationmode dispersion (PMD). In this paper, we consider an ideal full-field DBP implementation and modify it to additionally account for PMD; reversing the PMD effects in the backward propagation by passing the reverse propagated signal also through PMD sections, which concatenated equal the inverse of the PMD in the forward propagation. These PMD sections are calculated analytically at the receiver based on the total accumulated PMD of the link estimated from channel equalizers. Numerical simulations show that, accounting for nonlinear polarization-related interactions in the modified DBP algorithm, additional signal-to-noise ratio gains of 1.1 dB are obtained for transmission over 1000 km., Swedish Research Council (VR) (2012-5280); UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) (EP/J017582/1, UNLOC).

The state of polarization and the carrier phase drift dynamically during transmission in a random fashion in coherent optical fiber communications. The typical digital signal processing solution to mitigate these impairments consists of two separate blocks that track each phenomenon independently. Such algorithms have been developed without taking into account mathematical models describing the impairments. We study a blind, model-based tracking algorithm to compensate for these impairments. The algorithm dynamically recovers the carrier phase and state of polarization jointly for an arbitrary modulation format. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, having a fast convergence rate and an excellent tolerance to phase noise and dynamic drift of the polarization. The computational complexity of the algorithm is lower compared to state-of-the-art algorithms at similar or better performance, which makes it a strong candidate for future optical systems.

Introduction Atrial fibrillation (AF) is nowadays considered to be one of the most important causes of heart failure, stroke, cognitive decline, vascular dementia, sudden death and overall cardiovascular morbidity. Recently were published a few articles suggesting a possible involvement of telocytes in the development of atrial fibrillation. The purpose of this article is to analyze the results obtained in the field systematically, and to see if there is enough data to support a possible involvement of telocytes in arrhythmogenesis. Materials and methods To this end, we performed a systematic review of the relevant scientific literature, indexed in PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus. Results and discussions Our systematic review of the published data identified five articles containing original data, based on which the association between telocytes and atrial fibrillation was inferred in later studies. We analyzed the usefulness of the information contained in the original articles to support this association, showing a lack of definite proofs correlating telocytes with atrial fibrillation. Conclusions Even if a few articles implied a potential association between AF and telocytes, the current data is not enough to support it. Moreover, even an association between the morphology, characteristics, or density of the telocytes in the atrium/pulmonary veins and AF is potentially speculative, and more studies should be performed before implying it with a reasonable degree of certainty.

We propose and validate a discrete-time channel model for the temporal drift of the absolute polarization state and polarization-mode dispersion for coherent fiber optic systems. The model can be used in simulations to test and develop DSP for coherent receivers.

Aim A collaborative exercise with several institutes was organized by the Forensic DNA Service (FDNAS) and the Institute of the Legal Medicine, 2nd Faculty of Medicine, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, with the aim to test performance of different laboratories carrying out DNA analysis of relatively old bone samples. Methods Eighteen laboratories participating in the collaborative exercise were asked to perform DNA typing of two samples of bone powder. Two bone samples provided by the National Museum and the Institute of Archaelogy in Prague, Czech Republic, came from archeological excavations and were estimated to be approximately 150 and 400 years old. The methods of genetic characterization including autosomal, gonosomal, and mitochondrial markers was selected solely at the discretion of the participating laboratory. Results Although the participating laboratories used different extraction and amplification strategies, concordant results were obtained from the relatively intact 150 years old bone sample. Typing was more problematic with the analysis of the 400 years old bone sample due to poorer quality. Conclusion The laboratories performing identification DNA analysis of bone and teeth samples should regularly test their ability to correctly perform DNA-based identification on bone samples containing degraded DNA and potential inhibitors and demonstrate that risk of contamination is minimized.

This paper presents YouPower, an open source platform designed to make people more aware of their energy consumption and encourage sustainable consumption with local communities. The platform is designed iteratively in collaboration with users in the Swedish and Italian test sites of the project to improve the design and increase active user participation. The community-oriented design is composed of parts that link energy data to energy actions, provide comparisons at different levels, generate dynamic time-of-use signals, offer energy conservation suggestions, and support social sharing. The goal is to bridge people's attitude-behavior gap in energy consumption and to facilitate the behavior change process towards sustainable energy consumption that is implementable in people's daily life. Preliminary results show that community-oriented energy intervention has the potential to improve user engagement significantly. QC 20170816 EU FP7 CIVIS

Electric cars (EVs) are a promising alternative to combustion engine cars to lower emissions and fossil fuel dependencies. On the downside, in comparison to internal combustion engine cars (ICE), the user experience (UX) of EVs is seriously compromised due to shorter and more varied driving range depending on driving style other context of use. A further complication is that recovering from unexpectedly low battery levels is tedious due to long charging times. This causes range stress among drivers and research has highlighted a need to improve the information and tools available in order for drivers to better understand range-influencing factors and estimations, leading to increased reliability, and trust in the information. This currently leads to poor UX that may shadow all the benefits and other important environmental and experiential qualities of electric cars. In this chapter, we will provide an introduction to the subject and go through some of our studies and key lessons that have emerged from our research. In particular, we have come to the realisation that we need to energy-empower electric car drivers in order for them to be able to conceptualise how energy is intertwined with their actions and behaviour while driving. This is important, as current tools fail to provide such empowerment, causing unnecessary surprises and worries among the drivers who call the standard tool available in the electric car for the ‘guess-o-meter’. Through our designs and discussion we demonstrate how some aspects might be addressed to energy empower electric car drivers.

This paper describes how people make sense of and use constellations of technologies in a nomadic setting, and it illustrates how maintaining and orchestrating a variety of applications and devices becomes an essential part of nomadic practices. The data were collected over a period of 3 years at a technical university by means of two field studies. Particular attention is drawn to how the situated orchestration of devices and applications within a group’s constellation reflects university students’ concern to manage their projects at a number of locations, as well as issues of time and circulation of resources. The analysis brings into focus how constellations of technologies emerge and dissolve within collaborative ensembles that only exist for the duration of a project, and how this can cause appropriation issues within groups.

Design of eco-feedback has primarily aimed at persuading individuals to change behaviours into more environmentally sustainable ones. However, it has been questioned how effective such feedback is in supporting long-term change. As an alternative focus for energy feedback, we present a case study of amateur energy management work in apartment buildings owned by housing cooperatives, and the design of an app that aims to stimulate and support cooperatives in taking energy actions that significantly reduce the cooperative’s collective energy use. By linking energy data to energy actions, the users can see how actions taken in their own and other cooperatives affected the energy use, learn from each other’s experiences and become motivated as energy amateurs. Based on our housing cooperative case, we reflect on design aspects to consider when designing for energy management in amateur settings. QC 20160714

The use of practices as a unit of analysis has been suggested in order to scale up efforts within sustainable HCI and to shift the focus from changing individual behaviours to supporting transitions at a societal level. In this paper, we take a practice approach to the case of sustainable transportation, and more specifically to car-free transportation. Car use is intertwined in many practices and managing life without a car is difficult, particularly for people in contexts where owning at least one car per family is the norm. We studied three families in Stockholm who replaced their cars with different combinations of light electric vehicles during one year. From the families' experiences, we identified a number of opportunities for designers of interactive technologies to support environmental pioneers in the particular case of car-free living, as well as to support transitions towards sustainable practices in general.

The trend of Open Data and Internet-of-Things initiatives contribute to the ever growing amount of data available through web APIs. While building web applications has become easier with recent advancement in web development technologies and proliferation of JavaScript frameworks, the access to data from various APIs and data stores still poses certain challenges. It often requires complex setup and advanced programming skills that hinder the rapid prototyping efforts. Therefore, we propose Endev, a declarative framework for prototyping applications that is built on modern web technologies and supports building modern web applications, that utilize the vast amount of available data, without the need for setup or write complex JavaScript code.

The trend of “open data” coupled with the recentsadvancement in web development technologies and thesproliferation of JavaScript frameworks has helped popularizesprogramming of interactive web applications. Still, some of thescommon features of today’s web applications that access datasfrom own data stores or from web services require a complexssetup or a significant amount of programming knowledge, andsthus make it hard for developers to quickly prototype applicationssand iterate on solutions. Therefore, we propose Endev,sa declarative framework for prototyping applications that usescloud data storage or web service data. By not needing to writesany JavaScript code or set up any servers, Endev provides a lowslearning threshold. We show that Endev is perceived useful andseasy to use through a study with 15 developers. QC 20161124

International audience; This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 13.2/13.5 Joint Working Conferences: 6th International Conference on Human-Centered Software Engineering, HCSE 2016, and 8th International Conference on Human Error, Safety, and System Development, HESSD 2016, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 2016. The 11 full papers and 14 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 32 submissions. The papers cover various topics such as integration of software engineering and user-centered design; HCI models and model-driven engineering; incorporating guidelines and principles for designing usable products in the development process; usability engineering; methods for user interface design; patterns in HCI and HCSE; software architectures for user interfaces; user interfaces for special environments; representations for design in the development process; working with iterative and agile process models in HCSE; social and organizational aspects in the software development lifecycle; human-centric software development tools; user profiles and mental models; user requirements and design constraints; and user experience and software design.

The recovery of genetic information from highly degraded or minute amount of biological samples needs special approaches together with conventional STR multiplex assays. In this respect, the "mini-STR" technology is considered to be remarkable for its capacity to decrease the rate of failures and inconclusive results in forensic casework. By using miniSTRs, the PCR efficiency is significantly improved as shorter PCR amplicons are generated with STR primers located closer to the repeat regions. In this article we aimed to present several practical considerations regarding the miniSTR genotyping for challenging forensic samples. Looking for a robust protocol to re-investigate some of our cases with inconclusive or no typing results we studied the efficiency of a miniSTR approach. We report by comparison our results obtained with a commercial miniSTR multiplex assay on samples previously tested with two different 16 STR commercial kits. Our conclusion is definitely in favor of including in the routine protocol the miniSTR assay as it was able to improve the results, providing better or even complete DNA profiles for the difficult samples where the conventional STR kits failed.

In the last decades, our society and the economy have undergone great changes that led to the emergence of new economic models. These models emerged in the developed countries. Subsequently, the informational revolution has expanded across the globe, and contributed to the development of these new models. The sharing economy is one of them. Through technology and the internet, tools that provide instant access to information from anywhere in the world, the collaborative economy expands and grows continuously. This allows for easier interaction between people of all categories. The aim of this paper is to highlight the challenges, opportunities and benefits brought by the sharing economy regarding the national and international tourism, as well as to find out to what extent is the availability, accessibility, consumer and stakeholders’ degree of acceptance towards the current technological infrastructure. The paper contains the analysis of a study case regarding the Airbnb business model, company that has been involved in the economic transition of the last years and contributed to the emergence of the sharing economy. As well, the article contains a study of collected data with regards to the distributed spaces on the company’s site from 5 Romanian cities, and 5 European cities, in a certain period, statistical data regarding the online bookings made in member countries of the European Union, and data about the accommodation units in Romania, the number of overnight stays and arrivals. This research is useful for all individuals or legal entities involved in the tourism field in order to acknowledge in what way and to what extent the accommodation units in Romania are evaluated and rated. Moreover, the possible options for touristic improvement and development through the sharing economy, in terms of quality, technological infrastructure and approach are evaluated. We consider that it is important how the sharing economy impacts and influences Romania to a lesser extent, and what repercussions or changes will occur in the future.

A theoretical framework is introduced to model the dynamical changes of the state of polarization during transmission in coherent fibre-optic systems. The model generalizes the one-dimensional phase noise random walk to higher dimensions, accounting for random polarization drifts, emulating a random walk on the Poincar\'e sphere, which has been successfully verified using experimental data. The model is described in the Jones, Stokes and real four-dimensional formalisms, and the mapping between them is derived. Such a model will be increasingly important in simulating and optimizing future systems, where polarization-multiplexed transmission and sophisticated digital signal processing will be natural parts. The proposed polarization drift model is the first of its kind as prior work either models polarization drift as a deterministic process or focuses on polarization-mode dispersion in systems where the state of polarization does not affect the receiver performance. We expect the model to be useful in a wide-range of photonics applications where stochastic polarization fluctuation is an issue., Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures

We present and discuss a real four-dimensional (4d) channel model for coherent links, and compare it with the more conventional complex two-dimensional (Jones matrix) model.

There is increasing concern regarding current energy feedback approaches as they focus on the individual level, and mostly on household electricity, while the bulk of energy use often lies in heating and cooling. The aim is typically to change user routines, which does not bring a long-lasting impact. In our case study, we address these concerns for apartment buildings by looking at housing cooperatives, the dominant form of apartment ownership in the Nordic countries. These cooperatives manage the heating costs in common and therefore have a large potential for energy saving through long-lasting improvements and investments. We also emphasise the amateur nature of energy work within such cooperatives and consider the implications of our field study findings, interpreted through these amateur and cooperative perspectives, for the design of interactive artefacts. QC 20150617

This paper investigates the impact of transceiver noise on the performance of digital back-propagation (DBP). A generalized expression to estimate the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) obtained using DBP in the presence of transceiver noise is described. This new expression correctly accounts for the nonlinear beating between the transceiver noise and the signal in the optical fiber transmission link. The transceiver noise-signal nonlinear beating has been identified as the main reason for the discrepancy between predicted and practical performance of DBP; which has not been previously suggested. This nonlinear beating has been included in the GN model, allowing DBP gains in practical systems to be predicted analytically. Experiments and split-step simulations with and without polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) in the transmission link have been performed. The results show that the impact of transceiver noise greatly outweighs that of PMD, and the analytical expressions are confirmed by the numerical simulations.

Models of high-level interaction design are usually based on procedural representation. For knowledge representation and reasoning, however, declarative representations are preferred. In this paper, we define purely declarative high-level interaction models based on theories of human communication. In contrast, earlier attempts to define purely declarative models resulted for pragmatic reasons in a mixed representation including procedural constructs within the overall declarative model structure. We show how the declarative models can be operationalized into behavioral (abstract) UI models corresponding to those generated from the mixed representation. Based on an implementation integrated with an existing framework for GUI generation, we show that and how it is possible to automatically generate GUIs from purely declarative models as well.

International audience; This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th IFIP WG 13.2 International Conference on Human-Centered Software Engineering, HCSE 2014, held in Paderborn, Germany, in September 2014. The 13 full papers and 10 short papers presented together with one keynote were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. The papers cover various topics such as integration of software engineering and user-centered design; HCI models and model-driven engineering; incorporating guidelines and principles for designing usable products in the development process; usability engineering; methods for user interface design; patterns in HCI and HCSE; software architectures for user interfaces; user interfaces for special environments; representations for design in the development process; working with iterative and agile process models in HCSE; social and organizational aspects in the software development lifecycle; human-centric software development tools; user profiles and mental models; user requirements and design constraints; and user experience and software design.

Query languages are usually small, powerful and easy to learn, and that motivated us to investigate their role in modeling user interfaces. We explore annotation of template user interface with queries, especially embedded queries, to achieve partial generation of user interface with the ability to generate user interface with interaction styles such as form fillin and direct manipulation. Our model-driven development approach targets especially highly interactive data intensive applications. While our query-oriented user interface modeling principles have already been applied in an agile development environment, the role of this paper is to present a generalization of query-oriented modeling towards more interaction styles. Our modeling approach is annotation-based, thereby lightweight, and although it operates at a lower level than most current UI modeling approaches, its shows promising potential.

Energy and design of energy-feedback are becoming increasingly important in the mobile HCI community. Our application area concerns electric vehicles, we thus depart from home and workplace appliances and address range and energy anxiety caused by short driving distance capabilities and long charging times in mobile settings. Meanwhile some research has been done on energy management of mobile devices, less has been done on mobility devices like electric vehicles. We explore this topic by letting conventional fuel car drivers reflect on their current driving habits through an exploration tool that we developed. Our results demonstrate three dimensions related to energy availability to consider for design of energy dependent mobility devices and provide explanations on how these dimensions could be utilize in our design through energy visualizations. With this we contributed not only by demonstrating aspects of energy availability and mobility, but also through opening up for new interesting possibilities and inquires in our and possibly other domains.

Designing in an interdisciplinary context is challenging, and it is even more so when it has to be done remotely. For such remote interdisciplinary designing, we propose video prototypes as artifacts for supporting the interaction design process. In this paper, we present a case study where we have successfully used video prototypes for collaboratively designing a modeling tool. This tool is supposed to provide Dialogue Design Support for creating multimodal user interfaces. The new and important aspect of this case study was using video prototypes for joint interactive designing done remotely, and also between disciplines.

Energy and design of energy-feedback are becoming increasingly important in the HCI community. Our application area concerns electric vehicles, we thus depart from home and workplace appliances and address range and energy anxiety caused by short driving distance capabilities and long charging times in mobile settings. We explore this topic by letting conventional fuel car drivers reflect on their current driving habits through an exploration tool that we use as a technology probe. Our preliminary results demonstrate the educational values of the energy representations in the tool, and we also identify a design tension for map-related energy representations. © ACM, 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in "CHI EA '12 Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference extended abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2212776.2223766QC 20120607

Computer-support cooperative work has been studied extensively and achieved applications that are widely useful. However, there was not much emphasis on support through robots for cooperative work. So, there is no deep understanding of what is needed to support tasks that involve individually moving communication partners and for which the physical context is relevant. This work shows an example of robot-supported cooperative work, where two robots communicate with each other to indirectly support communication between their human users. This example is a shared-shopping scenario. For its realization, we make use of high-level discourse models both for specifying communication between a robot shopping cart and its human user, and between two robot carts. The emerging communication from such intertwined discourses supports a shared (shopping) task of their two human users, who collaborate based on the shopping list shared in this way. Such support is important in a setting where the physical context is relevant, e.g., the vicinity to products.

Spreading activation (also known as spread of activation) is a method for searching associative networks, neural networks or semantic networks. The method is based on the idea of quickly spreading an associative relevancy measure over the network. The goal is to give an expanded introduction to the method. The authors will demonstrate and describe in sufficient detail that this method can be applied to very diverse problems and applications. They present the method as a general framework. First they will present this method as a very general class of algorithms on large (or very large) so-called multidimensional networks which will serve a mathematical model. Then they will define so-called micro-applications of the method including local search, relationship/association search, polycentric queries, computing of dynamic local ranking, etc. Finally they will present different applications of the method including ontology-based text processing, unsupervised document clustering, collaborative tagging systems, etc.

We address the issue of sustainability of practice, which we regard as crucial for the sustainability of the community at large. In the absence of material reward, sustaining a specialized activity such as programming is not trivial especially when members move often in and out of the community. Our case is the group of voluntary, amateur student programmers from a European-wide student organization. We present this setting as an Amateur Community and as a Community of Practice, and show how such framing helps in understanding sustainability of practice. Although being totally voluntary and managing a large intranet, the group has been thriving for six years. To explain such high practice sustainability we examine the role of the technology framework used by the group during this time. We then propose a more general framework for understanding practice sustainability in the context of amateur communities of practice.

User-interface design is still a time consuming and expensive task to do, but recent advances allow generating them from interaction design models. We present a model-driven approach for generating user interfaces out of interaction design models. Our interaction design models are discourse models, more precisely models of classes of dialogues. They are based on theories of human communication and should, therefore, be more understandable to humans than programs implementing user interfaces. Our discourse models also contain enough semantics to transform them automatically into user interfaces for multiple devices and modalities. This paper presents a two-step transformation approach with an intermediate user interface model. By showing specific transformation rules, we concentrate on a major part of the first step, transforming discourse models to structural user interface models.

Communication between humans is multimodal and involves movements as well. While communication between humans and robots is becoming more and more multimodal, movements of a robot in 2D space have not yet been used for communication. In this paper, we present a new approach to multimodal communication with (semi-)autonomous robots, that even includes movements of a robot in 2D space as a form of expressing communicative acts. We also show how such a multimodal human-robot interface can be generated from a discourse-based interaction design that does not even include information about modalities.

End users of software typically have to let someone else develop it and its user interface, or to learn to design and to program it themselves. Especially user interfaces developed by someone else may not fit well the given task. Designing and programming is hard and takes a lot of effort in general, and even more so for people not especially trained or experienced.Therefore, we propose end-user development of user interfaces through a new approach and interface for discourse modeling. End users may themselves model an interaction design as a discourse (in the sense of a dialogue between human and computer). From such an interaction design, eventually a user interface is to be generated automatically by a tool. As a consequence, end-user development becomes end-user modeling instead of programming.

Programming user interfaces is hard, error-prone and expensive, but recent advances allow generating them from interaction design models. We present an approach for modeling interaction design that is inspired by human communication. Our interaction design models are discourse models, more precisely models of dialogues. They are based on theories of human communication and should, therefore, be more understandable to humans than programs implementing user interfaces. The main ingredients of our models are communicative acts (Speech Act Theory), which are connected as adjacency pairs (Conversation Analysis) and via RST relations (Rhetorical Structure Theory). While RST provides useful means for modeling discourse in the sense of monologue, a dialogue results from connecting monologues via adjacency pairs. This paper presents a new metamodel that integrates these approaches. Based on it, we show how abstract user interfaces can be generated from such discourse models. In a nutshell, we generate finite-state machinery and employ rules devised by us to map parts of a discourse model to abstract widgets.

As illustrated by the emerging field of Communities and Technologies, the topic of community, whether further qualified by ‘virtual’ (Rheingold 1993), ‘on line’ or ‘networked’ (Schuler 1996), has become a major focus for field study, design, technical infrastructural provision, as well as social, psychological and economic theorising. Let us review some early examples of this ‘turn to community’. (1999) discuss the ‘network communities of SeniorNet’, an organisation that supports people over the age of 50 in the use of computer networking technologies. The SeniorNet study highlights the complex ‘collage’ of participation and interaction styles that community members sustain, many of which go beyond conventional understandings of older people, their practices and relations to technology. While the members of SeniorNet are geographically dispersed, (1996) describe the ‘Blacksburg Electronic Village’, a local community computing initiative centred around Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. As long ago as 1994, (1994) claimed the existence of over 100 such projects in the US with very diverse aims and experiences but all concerned to be responsive to a community’s needs while exploiting the Internet and the technical developments it has made possible. For their part, (2001) offer some generic infrastructural tools for community computing, including support for ‘identity management’.

Most current models of interaction design build on scenarios and task analysis. We think that interaction design should be more along the lines of communication between humans. With this motivation, our paper presents a new approach to modeling interaction design based on insights from theories of human communication. From such discourse models, we aim for automated generation of user interfaces.

For people working in situations with few colleagues around, information technology could be used for increased communication with colleagues at other places. One such group is teachers in rural areas. In our work with teachers in an archipelago school distributed over six islands we have focused on encouraging communication using a digital notice board, providing for quick handwritten notes, connecting all islands. Based on the teachers' collaborative situation, and on the design, implementation and use of the prototype, we illustrate, by a number of recorded notes, how the teachers have been using the prototype, relating the findings to group building, easy access, and playful behaviour.

We present the initial stages of a project in which we focus on participatory design methods to build information and communication technology support that stimulate knowledge sharing in a group of geographically distributed teachers. Teachers in general spend most of their time in a classroom leaving few opportunities for social encounters and chats with their colleagues. The prototype we are developing focuses on informality and playfulness, that would increase the social communication and thereby the community feeling. In turn, this would ultimately increase learning among the setting members.

Extending and reinterpreting earlier work on the 'Spatial Model', this paper presents a generic model for supporting awareness in cooperative systems ('the AETHER model') and an implementation of a prototype awareness engine. The applicability of the approach is investigated by showing how some of the fundamental functionality in CSCW applications (e.g. versioning and access control) can be supported by the engine and by 'simulating' some other applications from the CSCW literature The paper closes with a discussion of how the model facilitates the construction of flexible CSCW systems (e.g. workflow systems) supporting a variety of forms of awareness.

An analytical model to describe the combined drift of the state of polarization and absolute phase is presented. To compensate for this drift, a novel, modulation format independent algorithm is proposed, which outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.

We propose a modified DBP algorithm accounting for PMD. The accumulated PMD at the receiver is factorized into several PMD sections, and inserted into the DBP routine to distributively compensate for PMD, outperforming the conventional approach by 1.1 dB in SNR.

Part 3: Task Modelling and Task-Based Approaches; International audience; Testing interactive systems is known to be a complex task that cannot be exhaustive. Indeed, the infinite number of combination of user input and the complexity of information presentation exceed the practical limits of exhaustive and analytical approach to testing [31]. Most interactive software testing techniques are produced by applying and tuning techniques from the field of software testing to try to address the specificities of interactive applications. When some elements cannot be taken into account by the software testing technique, they are usually ignored. In this paper we propose to follow an opposite approach, starting from a generic architecture for interactive systems (including both software and hardware elements) for identifying in a systematic way, testing problems and testing needs. This architecture-driven approach makes it possible to identify how software testing knowledge and techniques can support interactive systems testing but also where the interactive systems engineering community should invest in order to test their idiosyncrasies too.