Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
A Method and Experimentation to Benchmark XR Technologies Enhancing Archeological Museum Experience

The use of eXtended Reality (XR) technologies, including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR), has become increasingly popular in museums to enhance the visitor experience. However, the impact of XR technologies on Learning Performance in the context of archeological museums needs to be better understood. This study aims to investigate the relationships between Usability, Presence and Learning Performance by developing XR experiences showcasing archeological artefacts and conducting user testing to evaluate their effectiveness. A laboratory test is conducted to compare a VR application with a mobile AR one, presenting the digital models of five archeological findings. Descriptive statistics are used to compare the two case studies, providing valuable insights into the impact of XR technologies on the visitor experience from a learning perspective. The study confirms that Usability has a more significant effect on learning than Presence and can help designers and museum managers better understand the factors contributing to a successful XR experience. The findings suggest that while Presence is an important factor in improving visitors’ experience, Usability should be the priority when designing XR experiences for museums.
Virtual Clinic – AI Used in the Teaching of Medical Interviews, Diagnosis, and Treatment Planning

The Virtual Clinic is an artificial intelligence-based software that provides a safe environment for medical students and young doctors to simulate medical interviews and treatment. What sets the Virtual Clinic apart is its high degree of case realism. Users can ask patients any questions (including spoken language) and order various tests (objective and physical). The user trains their ability to think independently, combine facts, diagnose, and treat. After completing work with the case, the user receives detailed feedback, learning what they did well, and where they made mistakes or missed important information. The system tracks the user's (the person using the system) progress, informs them of the time and cost of the tests, offers suggestions, and finally informs the patient (the person receiving treatment) how they (the patient) feel after receiving treatment. This brings significant benefits and improvement of the quality of medical services.
NUWA: Lifelike as a Design Strategy to Enhance Product’s Hedonic Qualities

Lifelike design is an approach trying to enrich the experience and strengthen the emotional bond between humans and artifacts. However, there is very little understanding of the design strategies that create lifelike experiences, and even less research has been done to understand the experience from a holistic perspective. In this project, a lifelike desk lamp, NUWA, was designed based on a systematic review of lifelike characteristics. Five participants were invited to use NUWA and a normal lamp for three days. Both quantitative measures and qualitative interviews were conducted to understand their perceived lifelikeness, user experience, human-artifact attachment, and social relationship. The results show the successful design of a lifelike artifact. The hedonic and pragmatic qualities of both lamps are exactly opposite. Participants scored higher on hedonic qualities and attachment to NUWA. Also, they reported a partnership-like experience with NUWA. The findings could inspire future lifelike design and its research.
LINE Chatbot for Recording Elderly Cognition to Screen Cognitive Impairment

The elderly population is growing, and with that the number of people suffering from dementia, which has become the seventh leading cause of death among all diseases. Early detection of symptoms is crucial for effective treatment of dementia. However, people with dementia often do not realize their symptoms in the early stage. To tackle this problem, a study aims to use the LINE chat platform to design a chatbot system for recognizing the early stages of dementia. The system is based on cognitive assessments in a conversational form, and the conversations between the elderly and the bot are recorded. This provides family members with an easy-to-use interface to track the records and receive recommendations about the elderly's dementia status. The study was conducted in two stages: user research and user testing. The first stage involved expert interviews and discussions with the elderly and their family members to understand their perspectives on dementia and their experience with the LINE and AD8 questionnaire. The second stage involved designing a chatbot-based cognitive assessment prototype and pilot implementation. The results showed that the interactive chatbot-based assessments were attractive to the elderly and enhanced their engagement. The long-term records of the elderly also made it easier for family members to understand the cognitive changes. The study has the potential to increase awareness of dementia by using chatbots to integrate with the elderly and family members to detect dementia early.
TextureAda: Deep 3D Texture Transfer for Ideation in Product Design Conceptualization

In the product design life-cycle, the conceptual design stage is an important and time-consuming phase where designers ideate in the form of sketches and 3D renderings of a product. Specifically, with 3D renderings, the choice of material texture and color is an important aspect that is often critiqued by designers because it impacts the product’s visual aesthetic and the impression it evokes in the customer when first viewing the product; thus, making material selection and the conceptual design stage, overall, challenging. In this study, we turn to deep texture synthesis for generating material textures and propose a novel method, TextureAda. TextureAda creates high-fidelity textures by performing adaptive instance normalization between multiple layers of a texture generator and a pre-trained image encoder. Our experiments show that our method beats previous methods in texture synthesis visually and quantitatively. Lastly, we show how TextureAda can be applied for ideation in product design conceptualization by material texturing 3D models of furniture.
PromptIE - Information Extraction with Prompt-Engineering and Large Language Models

Extracting triples of subjects, objects, and predicates from text to populate knowledge bases traditionally involves several intermediate steps such as co-reference resolution, named entity recognition, and relationship extraction. Treating triple extraction as translation task from source sentences to sets of triples, we present an end-to-end solution for information extraction that uses task prefixes to prompts a fine-tuned large language model to extract triples from text. Thus, the need for data labeling and training multiple models is reduced.
A Usability Study of a Research Institute Website with Eye-Tracking Devices

In this paper, we present the results of our study conducted at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media $$\vert $$ Georg Eckert Institute to assess the usability of the institute’s website before the re-design of the same and the subsequent development of the new version. In particular, four specific pages are evaluated, i.e. Home, Institute, Departments and Publications. The aim of the presented usability studies is to uncover positive and negative usability findings in order to properly plan the potential corrective actions for the upcoming restyling. The experimental outcomes are displayed in form of aggregated heat maps and mainly focus on the ease of use of the different analysed sections.
Do Not Shoot the Messenger: Effect of System Critical Feedback on User-Perceived Usability

Measuring perceived usability with questionnaires is a common practice for usability researchers and practitioners. This paper investigates whether there is any user bias towards the perceived usability of a system, when this system administers critical feedback to its users. These systems make decisions that substantially affect their users’ lives, such as automated medical diagnosis, bank loan approval etc. In our study, we gathered data from three, almost identical, systems used to apply for a consumer loan and communicate the decision to the applicant. Our dataset involves a total of 332 applicants who completed the UMUX-LITE questionnaire after receiving the system decision (approved, rejected) for their loan. Results showed that participants who had their loans approved (positive system critical feedback) provided significantly higher UMUX-LITE scores compared to participants who had their loans rejected (negative system critical feedback). This finding suggests that one should pay attention when measuring perceived usability of critical feedback administering systems as it tends to be biased from the critical feedback that users received.
Mutual Recall Between Onomatopoeia and Motion Using Doll Play Corpus

Onomatopoeia is used to describe the state and degree of movement. Since onomatopoeia is a linguistic symbol, it is expected that many people will recall the same image corresponding to the onomatopoeia. Is this really true? In this paper, we focus on playing with dolls, collect onomatopoeia uttered during doll play, and construct a corpus of co-occurrence relations between onomatopoeia and doll movements. In order to verify the value of this corpus, we confirm the recall of movement from onomatopoeia and vice versa. As an application example based on this corpus, we also present a prototype of “onomatopoeia camera,” a system that automatically adds onomatopoeia and comic-like expressions to subjects’ movements.
Study on Narrative Visualization Design of Rare and Endangered Plants in Deserts

Protection of rare and endangered plants remains to be the world hot topic all the time. As an important part of the ecological system, rare and endangered plants possess ecological value, economic value, medicinal value, etc., and play a very important role in ecological environmental protection. Narrative visualization combines narratology with information visualization to form a visualization mode for various territories, and creates a new dissemination mode for rare and endangered plants. This study puts forward a study architecture for exploring narrative visualization of rare and endangered plants in deserts, and designs the narrative visualization design path for rare and endangered plants in deserts based on analysis of the dissemination of existing rare and endangered plants to provide reference for following dissemination and popularization.
The Bottomline Usability Measurement and Evaluation System for Enterprise Products

In the business service industry, product experience is a key factor for winning customer trust and securing business opportunities. However, because enterprise products are usually deployed at the customer side as a private asset and require a long iteration cycle, fixing the issue of usability in a timely manner is challenging. Therefore, controlling the quality of product experience before the release of products into the market is an urgent requirement to the business service industry. In this paper, a set of bottom-line usability measurement and an evaluation system are proposed with regard to the characteristics of enterprise products. With an aim to fulfill the customer’s task, a system of primary indicators has been set up. Based on the characteristics of enterprise products, classic design principle, and high frequency experience problems, an evaluation system of secondary indicators is set up. To ensure market adaptability, multilevel evaluation is set up based on the product versions and the size of market demands. By adopting such usability measurement tools, the development cost can be minimized and the enterprises can be provided more benefits. This evaluation system allows the enterprise products to secure their core competitiveness, as well as enable the customers in various industries to accomplish their business goals.
Automatic Virtual Makeup System Using User-Preference Information

We present an automatic virtual makeup system with an interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) method using user preference information. While purchasing cosmetic items, users try each cosmetic item and check their appearance. Consequently, users feel burdened to try numerous cosmetic products before making a choice. To avoid this burden, some companies have developed virtual makeup applications for cosmetic displays using tablet devices. However, users who try numerous cosmetic items to choose from become confused and burdened with making the correct selection. Therefore, we propose an automatic virtual makeup system to generate users’ favorite makeup patterns using their preferences. The system employs the IEC method to generate a user preferred makeup. The IEC method is a probability retrieval technique adopted to generate designs that satisfy user preference. Moreover, the proposed system contains direct manipulation operations for choosing a user’s favorite makeup part design. We performed evaluation experiments to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed system from the viewpoints of the IEC with paired comparison applications. The subjects were female students in their twenties. From the results, we confirmed that the proposed system was useful from the viewpoint of applying the IEC method to a virtual makeup system.
DeforVerFace: Modular Linear-Deformable Vertical Surface

In recent years, shape change interfaces have been the focus of attention, where novel interaction techniques and application possibilities have been explored through the incorporation of shape change into static objects. In this paper, we focus on the interaction with shape-changing vertical surfaces. Existing work on vertical plane interaction is mainly concerned with visual representation using projection mapping or shape change to present interaction results. We believe that the reason for the limitation of the interaction method is that the vertical surface, such as the wall and the door, is inherently fixed. In this paper, we propose a shape-changing vertical surface that goes beyond mere 2D interaction space, which we call DeforVerFace. DeforVerFace consists of a set of linear deformable elements and modules for sensing the nearby environment. In this paper, we design and implement DeforVerFace and present a user study aimed at understanding the possibilities of a shape-changing vertical surface in our everyday building environment.
Parsing Pointer Movements in a Target Unaware Environment

Analysis of the movements of the Mouse pointer could lead to valuable insights into a user’s mental status in digital environments. Previous research has yielded data showing a significant link between user mental status and pointer movements [1]. However, there is currently no standardized system to detect and parse out individual targeted movements of a mouse pointer by a user in an active environment. Active analysis of mouse movements could be useful in situations where the emotional state of the user is being measured. Data was collected through the Mathspring Project including results of problems solved, the facial expressions and self-reported emotions of students, and the movements of the mouse pointer, which is the focus of this work [3]. Although a connection has been shown in previous research [1], the ability to track this in a live system is held back by the manual process for splitting the motions of the pointer. The focus of this project is the development of a generalizable system to parse these movements automatically without needing much processing power or an immense amount of training data for each time.
Designing Ethics-Aware DecidArch Game to Promote Value Diversity in Software Architecture Design Decision Making

Software systems are increasingly being employed in people’s lives and society. They can improve, but also negatively affect the quality of life and interfere with human rights by, e.g., undermining the individuals’ and society’s values and causing ethical issues. To prevent such issues, software architects need to take ethical considerations into account at the early stages of design, e.g., when making architecture design decisions. Such considerations regard stakeholders, ethical values and their relations, ethical concerns, and ethical decisions. Addressing ethical considerations is especially difficult for software architects because of (i) the lack of training in ethics and philosophy, (ii) the existence of inherent ambiguity in ethical values, and (iii) the lack of methodological support in dealing with ethical and social implications of software systems, and eliciting and operationalizing ethical values. This study employs a design science methodology for developing a card-based game (called Ethics-Aware DecidArch), helping software architects reflect on ethical considerations, and creating an atmosphere to foster inclusivity by supporting the values of different stakeholders when making group decisions. The game was played in four sessions, each including four professional software architects from two multinational IT companies. This study presents lessons learned from playing the game through a participant survey and qualitative data analysis. The results show that the game helped software architects (i) reflect on different solutions for resolving ethical concerns, (ii) make ethical decisions along with providing reasons behind such decisions, and (iii) reflect on the operationalization of ethical values and their trade-offs.
Translators as Information Seekers: Strategies and Novel Techniques

Translators search for information to resolve various types of uncertainties they face such as confirming the source of original texts, gaining proper understanding, and verifying whether the selected keywords are spelled correctly, commonly used, or matched properly between source and target languages. Under the constraints of tighter time schedules and stricter cost-effectiveness requirements imposed by the machine translation (MT) plus human post-editing (PE) business model, translators strive to achieve the goals of information seeking with enhanced efficiency and accuracy. This study investigates four information seeking strategies: (1) top-ranked results or featured snippets returned by large-scale web search engines; (2) abductive reasoning based on search result counts returned by large-scale web search engines; (3) direct answers provided by ChatGPT—a long-form question-answering conversational AI; (4) A novel conversational search engine (Perplexity.ai) combining OpenAI’s GPT language modeling technology and a large Internet search engine—Microsoft Bing. Human users should focus on forming effective human queries to develop an effective collaboration between human and large-scale web search engines, long-form question-answering conversational AI systems, and conversational search engine. While top-ranked search results and count-based abductive reasoning are effective strategies, emerging technologies such as long-form question-answering conversational AI and conversational search engine provide accurate and comprehensive answers to specific queries, and additional data and resources such as reference links and related questions.
Ethical AI Based Decision Making to Reduce Tax Related Debts for Governments

Piled up debts, missed revenue targets, inefficient manual processes and large data volumes in tax agencies have created a demand for intelligent systems that can assist tax agents to efficiently handle the tax recovery processes. This could help tax agents focus on strategic initiatives instead of avoidable manual tasks. Design Thinking, generative interviews, and naturalistic observation with a diverse set of user profiles were adopted to get clarity on the revenue authority’s vision, business process flows and user journeys. A risk score-based machine learning application was built to combine the power of AI and human judgement for better informed decision making and explainable AI helped to put humans in the loop. Usability tests were conducted with distinct user groups to refine the user experience. With initial test results of the algorithm showing good accuracy levels, the vision is to help governments to improve overall business efficiency by reducing the tax gap and increasing revenue.
Towards Human-Centered Design of AI Service Chatbots: Defining the Building Blocks

Chatbots have been spread widely to online customer service due to recent technological advancements. For chatbots’ successful utilisation as customer servants, it is essential that they are developed for human users in a way that meets their needs. Human-centred design (HCD) puts humans in the centre of the development. However, research-based information of HCD for service chatbots is still scarce. Hence, we reviewed recent literature to explore and map the relevant themes that are recurrent in chatbot research to determine the building blocks of HCD for service chatbots. Our study reveals three main themes: (i) AI service chatbots’ purpose is to serve humans, (ii) trust is crucial for service chatbot uptake, and (iii) AI chatbot design combines user interface design, dialogue design, and bot persona design to create positive UX. The findings of our study serve as a basis to the understanding of human-centered chatbot design, and can help practitioners develop service chatbots that are successful in supporting users accomplish their tasks.
Mouse-Based Hand Gesture Interaction in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality requires new forms of interaction and input in three-dimensional environments that isolate the user from the physical world. However, existing input methods, such as handheld controllers or hand gestures, are not yet mature or coherent enough to be easily used by the average user. To address this, a universal set of gestures which are easy to use, remember, and expressive is needed. Based on the observation that the mouse in desktop computing can control different applications adequately, four conceptual input types are proposed: primary and secondary clicks, directional input, and a modifier functionality. These provide flexibility without being overwhelming. To find a promising set of gestures, requirements are formulated based on existing research and observations. Three sets of appropriate gesture combinations are carefully selected and proposed, and a user study is conducted to allow a comparison between them. The study involves a virtual testing environment with tasks to be completed using the gestures. Results show positive responses to all proposed gestures, with one set outperforming the other two in most areas. Based on this and participants’ comments, a combination of four top-ranking gestures is proposed as a universal means for virtual reality interaction.