Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Review of the Contemporary Eco-Agricultural Technologies in China

Abstract: Eco-agriculture is the principal measure for addressing the environmental issues caused by agriculture and an essential direction for agriculture in the future. Meanwhile, the development of eco-agriculture is inseparable from its technical support. At present, the eco-agricultural technologies commonly used in China can be divided into three categories according to their theoretical basis and practical types: the technologies used to realize the precision input of material resources, the technologies used to improve material circulation efficiency, and the technologies that use the principle of species symbiosis. Although these technologies provide essential support for developing eco-agriculture in China, there are also problems associated with their implementation, such as poor technical application and a low level of industrialization. Therefore, in the future development of eco-agriculture technology in China, the technologies producers should take the actual problems as guide and pay attention to the popularization, industrialization, and application of the technologies.
On the role of surface roughness in the aerodynamic performance and energy conversion of horizontal wind turbine blades: a review

Renewable energy is one of the main pillars of sustainable development, especially in developing economies. Increasing energy demand and the limitation of fossil fuel reserves make the use of renewable energy essential for sustainable development. Wind energy is considered to be one of the most important resources of renewable energy. In North African countries, such as Egypt, wind energy has an enormous potential; however, it faces quite a number of technical challenges related to the performance of wind turbines in the Saharan environment. Seasonal sand storms affect the performance of wind turbines in many ways, one of which is increasing the wind turbine aerodynamic resistance through the increase of blade surface roughness. The power loss because of blade surface deterioration is significant in wind turbines. The surface roughness of wind turbine blades deteriorates because of several environmental conditions such as ice or sand. This paper is the first review on the topic of surface roughness effects on the performance of horizontal‐axis wind turbines. The review covers the numerical simulation and experimental studies as well as discussing the present research trends to develop a roadmap for better understanding and improvement of wind turbine performance in deleterious environments. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
“It would probably turn into a social faux-pas”: Users’ and Bystanders’ Preferences of Privacy Awareness Mechanisms in Smart Homes

The opaque data practices in smart home devices have raised significant privacy concerns for smart home users and bystanders. One way to learn about the data practices is through privacy-related notifications. However, how to deliver these notifications to users and bystanders and increase their awareness of data practices is not clear. We surveyed 136 users and 123 bystanders to understand their preferences of receiving privacy-related notifications in smart homes. We further collected their responses to four mechanisms that improve privacy awareness (e.g., Data Dashboard) as well as their selections of mechanisms in four different scenarios (e.g., friend visiting). Our results showed the pros and cons of each privacy awareness mechanism, e.g., Data Dashboard can help reduce bystanders’ dependence on users. We also found some unique benefits of each mechanism (e.g., Ambient Light could provide unobtrusive privacy awareness). We summarized four key design dimensions for future privacy awareness mechanisms design.
Understanding Screen-based Dining Practices through the Lens of Mindful Eating

Our eating practices are increasingly overshadowed by the presence of screen-based media technologies that conflict with the ideologies of mindful eating. However, little is known about whether and how screens influence our eating behaviors. To contribute to this understanding, we present a rich account of dining practices of ten participants with and without screen. Our study revealed that eating with screens was found more enjoyable than eating alone. Screens can influence one's awareness of hunger and other behaviors like chewing rate and food gaze, whereas screen-media did not trigger any judgements for food. Drawing on the study insights, we highlight the role of technology to support bodily awareness, savoring, a non-judgmental attitude to eating and on rethinking distractions as companions. The outlined considerations encourage a creative yet careful take on making mindful eating more accessible within the realities of screen-based dining cultures.
Users’ Expectations About and Use of Smartphone Privacy and Security Settings

With the growing smartphone penetration rate, smartphone settings remain one of the main models for information privacy and security controls. Yet, their usability is largely understudied, especially with respect to the usability impact on underrepresented socio-economic and low-tech groups. In an online survey with 178 users, we find that many people are not aware of smartphone privacy and security settings, their defaults, and have not configured them in the past, but are willing to do it in the future. Some participants perceive low self-efficacy and expect difficulties and usability issues with configuring those settings. Finally, we find that certain socio-demographic groups are more vulnerable to risks and feel less prepared to use smartphone settings to protect their online privacy and security.
Social Control Interaction Framework: Design to Technically Support a Group of Users in Making Control Decisions Together

Entertainment is enjoyable and helps people to feel socially connected with others. However, the control of entertainment applications in group situations is often restricted to one person. This especially limits group decision-making where people sit in close proximity such as in the living room or inside a car. Restricting users in group decision-making can cause interpersonal conflicts and frustration. To overcome these aspects, my PhD research aims to articulate design principles to support social control. I specifically focus on distributing control across group members to support collaborative group decision-making and enhance social connectedness. To achieve this, I will design entertainment-oriented social control services for the car and the living room. Based on the exploration and designs for the car domain, I will transfer the gained knowledge to the living room, to verify and generalize my findings. This should support in drawing an overall conclusion for the design of general social control entertainment services. Thus, my dissertation contributes to the understanding of the design for future, entertainment-oriented, distributed control systems to best support group collaboration.
A State-Based Medication Routine Framework

Forgetfulness is a primary factor of medication nonadherence, a problem that contributes to worse health outcomes and increased mortality among people with chronic conditions. Common strategies to address forgetfulness, such as timed reminders, have limited effectiveness. However, there is limited information about why these strategies fail. To address this gap, we conducted interviews with people who take medications daily and miss doses at least twice a month. We contribute a state-based Medication Routine Framework composed of four states (Wellness, New Task, Erratic, and Disruption) in two axes (regularity and time scale). Because most nonadherence due to forgetfulness occurs in nonroutine states (i.e., Erratic and Disruption state), we argue that improving technology for medication adherence requires designing for these states. In this paper, we describe each state in detail and discuss opportunities for adapting medication reminder strategies to overcome the challenges of nonroutine states.
Terrain Modelling with a Pen & Touch Tablet and Mid-Air Gestures in Virtual Reality

World building or terrain modelling is an essential task when designing games, natural simulations or artistic creations involving virtual 3D landscapes. To support this task, we propose a virtual reality (VR) system based on a pen and touch tablet used in a sitting position (desktop VR) such that both hands are free to interact in an asymmetric way (pen hand + other bare hand). We present and compare several techniques to perform navigation, sculpting and menu operations using the two hands, which interact on and above the tablet surface, i.e. using the pen, touch and mid-air input spaces. A qualitative evaluation with 16 participants confirms the entertaining nature and practical benefits of our system. The study further underlines the complementarity of the different modalities and identifies the promising—and as of yet underexplored—combination of bimanual touch + pen + mid-air interaction in desktop VR.
FAR: End-to-End Vibrotactile Distributed System Designed to Facilitate Affect Regulation in Children Diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder Through Slow Breathing

To address difficulties with affect dysregulation in youth diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), we designed and developed an end-to-end vibrotactile breathing pacer system and evaluated its usability. In this paper we describe the system architecture and the features we deployed for this system based on expert advice and reviews. Through piloting this system with one child diagnosed with ASD, we learned that our system was used in ways we did and did not anticipate. For example, the paced-breathing personalization procedure did not meet the attention span of the pilot participant but two instead of one pacer devices encouraged caregiver’s involvement. This paper details our learnings and concludes with a list of system design guidelines at the system architecture level. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully functional vibrotactile system designed for ASD children that withstood usability testing in vitro for two weeks.
Remotely Co-Designing Features for Communication Applications using Automatic Captioning with Deaf and Hearing Pairs

Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) users face accessibility challenges during in-person and remote meetings. While emerging use of applications incorporating automatic speech recognition (ASR) is promising, more user-interface and user-experience research is needed. While co-design methods could elucidate designs for such applications, COVID-19 has interrupted in-person research. This study describes a novel methodology for conducting online co-design workshops with 18 DHH and hearing participant pairs to investigate ASR-supported mobile and videoconferencing technologies along two design dimensions: Correcting errors in ASR output and implementing notification systems for influencing speaker behaviors. Our methodological findings include an analysis of communication modalities and strategies participants used, use of an online collaborative whiteboarding tool, and how participants reconciled differences in ideas. Finally, we present guidelines for researchers interested in online DHH co-design methodologies, enabling greater geographically diversity among study participants even beyond the current pandemic.
Can a Recommender System Support Treatment Personalisation in Digital Mental Health Therapy? A Quantitative Feasibility Assessment Using Data from a Behavioural Activation Therapy App

Recommender systems have the potential to improve the user experience of digital mental health apps. Personalised recommendations can help users to identify therapy tasks that they find most enjoyable or helpful, thus boosting their engagement with the service and optimising the extent to which it helps them to feel better. Using a dataset containing 23,476 ratings collected from 973 players of a mental health therapy game, this work demonstrates how collaborative filtering algorithms can predict how much a user will benefit from a new therapy task with greater accuracy than a simpler baseline algorithm that predicts the average rating for a task, adjusted for the biases of the specific user and specific task. Collaborative filtering algorithms (matrix factorisation and k-nearest neighbour) outperform this baseline with a 6.5-8.3% improvement in mean absolute error (MAE) and context-aware collaborative filtering algorithms (factorisation machines) outperform with a 7.8-8.8% improvement in MAE. These results suggest that recommender systems could be a useful tool for tailoring recommendations of new therapy tasks to a user based on a combination of their past preferences, the ratings of similar users, and their current context. This scalable approach to personalisation – which does not require a human therapist to always be in-the-loop – could play an important role in improving engagement and outcomes in digital mental health therapies.
”Chat Has No Chill”: A Novel Physiological Interaction For Engaging Live Streaming Audiences

Now more than ever, people are using online platforms to communicate. Twitch, the foremost platform for live game streaming, offers many communication modalities. However, the platform lacks representation of social cues and signals of the audience experience, which are innately present in live events. To address this, we present a technology probe that captures the audience energy and response in a game streaming context. We designed a game and integrated a custom-communication modality—Commons Sense—in which the audience members’ heart rates are sensed via webcam, averaged, and fed into a video game to affect sound, lighting, and difficulty. We conducted an ‘in-the-wild’ evaluation with four Twitch streamers and their audience members (N=55) to understand how these groups interacted through Commons Sense. Audience members and streamers indicated high levels of enjoyment and engagement with Commons Sense, suggesting the potential of physiological interaction as a beneficial communication tool in live streaming.
A Layered Authoring Tool for Stylized 3D animations

Guided by the 12 principles of animation, stylization is a core 2D animation feature but has been utilized mainly by experienced animators. Although there are tools for stylizing 2D animations, creating stylized 3D animations remains a challenging problem due to the additional spatial dimension and the need for responsive actions like contact and collision. We propose a system that helps users create stylized casual 3D animations. A layered authoring interface is employed to balance between ease of use and expressiveness. Our surface level UI is a timeline sequencer that lets users add preset stylization effects such as squash and stretch and follow through to plain motions. Users can adjust spatial and temporal parameters to fine-tune these stylizations. These edits are propagated to our node-graph-based second level UI, in which the users can create custom stylizations after they are comfortable with the surface level UI. Our system also enables the stylization of interactions among multiple objects like force, energy, and collision. A pilot user study has shown that our fluid layered UI design allows for both ease of use and expressiveness better than existing tools.
Emotional Exploration and the Eudaimonic Gameplay Experience: A Grounded Theory

Research on the emotional experience of playing videogames has increased in recent years, yet much of this work is focused on the hedonistic player experience (PX) commonly associated with the nebulous concept of ‘fun’ and positive affect. Researchers are increasingly paying more attention to the eudaimonic PX commonly associated with ‘appreciation’, mixed-affect and reflection. To further investigate eudaimonic PX we interviewed 24 games players about ‘significant or memorable emotional experiences’ from their games playing and used grounded theory to analyse their responses. This led to the construction of the concept of ‘emotional exploration’ which is used to help explain (i) why players would seek out a eudaimonic PX, (ii) how eudaimonic PX is constituted and (iii) how developers can design for a eudaimonic PX. We further make the case for the ‘eudaimonic gameplay experience’ to be realised as different and separate to pre-existing notions of eudaimonic entertainment.
Improving understandability of feature contributions in model-agnostic explainable AI tools

Model-agnostic explainable AI tools explain their predictions by means of ’local’ feature contributions. We empirically investigate two potential improvements over current approaches. The first one is to always present feature contributions in terms of the contribution to the outcome that is perceived as positive by the user (“positive framing”). The second one is to add “semantic labeling”, that explains the directionality of each feature contribution (“this feature leads to +5% eligibility”), reducing additional cognitive processing steps. In a user study, participants evaluated the understandability of explanations for different framing and labeling conditions for loan applications and music recommendations. We found that positive framing improves understandability even when the prediction is negative. Additionally, adding semantic labels eliminates any framing effects on understandability, with positive labels outperforming negative labels. We implemented our suggestions in a package ArgueView[11].
Designing for Continuous Interaction with Artificial Intelligence Systems

The increasing capabilities of Artificial Intelligence enable the support of users in a continuously growing number of applications. Current systems typically dictate that interaction between user input and AI output unfolds in discrete steps, as is the case with, for example, conversational agents. Novel scenarios require AI systems to adapt and respond to continuous user input, e.g., image-guided surgery and AI-supported text entry. In and across these applications, AI systems need to support more varied and dynamic interactions in which users and AI interact continuously and in parallel. Current methods and guidelines are often inadequate and sometimes even detrimental to user needs when considering continuous usage scenarios. Realizing a continuous interaction between users and AI requires a substantial change in perspective when designing Human-AI systems. In this SIG, we support the exchange of cutting-edge research contributing to a better understanding and improved methods and tools to design continuous Human-AI interaction.
Understanding Challenges for Developers to Create Accurate Privacy Nutrition Labels

Apple announced the introduction of app privacy details to their App Store in December 2020, marking the first ever real-world, large-scale deployment of the privacy nutrition label concept, which had been introduced by researchers over a decade earlier. The Apple labels are created by app developers, who self-report their app’s data practices. In this paper, we present the first study examining the usability and understandability of Apple’s privacy nutrition label creation process from the developer’s perspective. By observing and interviewing 12 iOS app developers about how they created the privacy label for a real-world app that they developed, we identified common challenges for correctly and efficiently creating privacy labels. We discuss design implications both for improving Apple’s privacy label design and for future deployment of other standardized privacy notices.
“I Wanted to See How Bad it Was”: Online Self-screening as a Critical Transition Point Among Young Adults with Common Mental Health Conditions

Young adults have high rates of mental health conditions, yet they are the age group least likely to seek traditional treatment. They do, however, seek information about their mental health online, including by filling out online mental health screeners. To better understand online self-screening, and its role in help-seeking, we conducted focus groups with 50 young adults who voluntarily completed a mental health screener hosted on an advocacy website. We explored (1) catalysts for taking the screener, (2) anticipated outcomes, (3) reactions to the results, and (4) desired next steps. For many participants, the screener results validated their lived experiences of symptoms, but they were nevertheless unsure how to use the information to improve their mental health moving forward. Our findings suggest that online screeners can serve as a transition point in young people’s mental health journeys. We discuss design implications for online screeners, post-screener feedback, and digital interventions broadly.
Understanding Crowdsourcing Requesters’ Wage Setting Behaviors

Requesters on crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) compensate workers inadequately. One potential reason for the underpayment is that the AMT’s requester interface provides limited information about estimated wages, preventing requesters from knowing if they are offering a fair piece-rate reward. To assess if presenting wage information affects requesters’ reward setting behaviors, we conducted a controlled study with 63 participants. We had three levels for a between-subjects factor in a mixed design study, where we provided participants with: no wage information, wage point estimate, and wage distribution. Each participant had three stages of adjusting the reward and controlling the estimated wage. Our analysis with Bayesian growth curve modeling suggests that the estimated wage derived from the participant-set reward increased from $2.56/h to $2.69/h and $2.33/h to $2.74/h when we provided point estimate and distribution information respectively. The wage decreased from $2.06/h to $1.99/h in the control condition.
Understanding Gesture Input Articulation with Upper-Body Wearables for Users with Upper-Body Motor Impairments

We examine touchscreen stroke-gestures and mid-air motion-gestures articulated by users with upper-body motor impairments with devices worn on the wrist, finger, and head. We analyze users’ gesture input performance in terms of production time, articulation consistency, and kinematic measures, and contrast the performance of users with upper-body motor impairments with that of a control group of users without impairments. Our results, from two datasets of 7,290 stroke-gestures and 3,809 motion-gestures collected from 28 participants, reveal that users with upper-body motor impairments take twice as much time to produce stroke-gestures on wearable touchscreens compared to users without impairments, but articulate motion-gestures equally fast and with similar acceleration. We interpret our findings in the context of ability-based design and propose ten implications for accessible gesture input with upper-body wearables for users with upper-body motor impairments.
Because I’m Restricted, 2 – 4 PM Unable to See Messages: Exploring Users’ Perceptions and Likely Practices around Exposing Attention Management Use on IM Online Status

Attention-management tools can restrict online communication, but may cause collateral damage to their users’ fulfillment of communication expectations. This paper explores the idea of integrating attention management into instant messaging (IM), by 1) disclosing restriction status via an online status indicator (OSI) to manage contacts’ expectations, and 2) imposing communication limits to reduce communication distraction. We used a speed-dating design method to allow 43 participants to rapidly compare 48 types of OSI restriction in various conversational contexts. We identified two “tug-of-wars” that take place when attention management is integrated into IM apps: one between fulfilling one’s contacts’ expectations and protecting one’s own attention, and the other, between protecting one’s privacy and asserting the justifiability of using communication restrictions. We also highlighted the participants’ desire to be diplomatic for sustaining their positive images and maintaining relational connectedness. Finally, we provide design recommendations for integrating attention management into IM apps.