bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Investment Strategy for Integrating Wireless Technology into Organizations
Authors: Lawson-Body Assion
Published: May 2011

Firms rely on IT investments (Demirhan et al., 2002; Tuten, 2003), because a growing number of executives believe that investments in information technology (IT) (i.e., wireless technologies) help boost firm performance. The use of wireless communications and computing is growing quickly (Kim & Steinfield, 2004; Leung & Cheung, 2004; Yang et al., 2004). But issues of risk and uncertainty due to technical, organizational, and environmental factors continue to hinder executive efforts to produce meaningful evaluation of investment in wireless technology (Smith et al., 2002). Despite the use of investment appraisal techniques, executives often are forced to rely on instinct when finalizing wireless investment decisions. A key problem with evaluation techniques, it emerges, is their treatment of uncertainty and their failure to account for the fact that outside of a decision to reject an investment outright, firms may have an option to defer an investment until a later period (Tallon et al., 2002).
Leadership Competencies for Managing Global Virtual Teams
Authors: Wong-MingJi Diana J.
Published: May 2011

The demand for leadership competencies to leverage performance from global virtual teams (GVTs) is growing as organizations continue to search for talent, regardless of location. This means that the work of virtual leaders is embedded in the global shifting of work (Tyran, Tyran & Shepherd, 2003). The phenomenon began with the financial industry as trading took place 24/7 with stock exchanges in different time zones. It is expanding into other industries such as software programming, law, engineering, and call centers. GVTs support the globalization of work by providing organizations with innovative, flexible, and rapid access to human capital. Several forces of competition contribute to the increasing adoption of GVTs, including globalizing of competition, growing service industries, flattening of organizational hierarchies, increasing number of strategic alliances, outsourcing, and growing use of teams (Pawar & Sharifi, 1997; Townsend, DeMarie & Hendrickson, 1998). The backbone of GVTs is innovation with computer-mediated communication systems (CMCSs). Advances with CMCSs facilitate and support virtual team environments.
Learning Networks
Authors: Angehrn Albert A. , Gibbert Michael
Published: May 2011

Herb Simon once said that “all learning takes place inside individual human heads[;] an organization learns in only two ways: (a) by the learning of its members, or (b) by ingesting new members who have knowledge the organization didn’t previously have” (as cited in Grant, 1996, p. 111). What Simon seems to be implying is that while organizational learning can be seen as linked to the learning of individuals, these individuals need to be employed by the organization intending to appropriate the value of learning.
Migration to IP Telephony
Authors: Shuaib Khaled A.
Published: May 2011

There are mainly two types of used communication systems; circuit switched and packet switched networks. In circuit switched networks, there must be a dedicated path and a sequence of connected links between the calling and called stations. A connection with the proper resources has to be established prior to the start of information exchange. An example of circuit switched network is the phone network. On the other hand, packet switched networks rely on allowing multiple communicating end systems to share the entire or part of a path simultaneously. The Internet, a world wide computer network, is based on the concept of packet switching empowered by the Internet Protocol (IP). IP is basically a transmission mechanism used by devices communicating in a network as part of a protocol suite.
Mobile Computing for M-Commerce
Authors: Sofokleous Anastasis , Angelides Marios , Schizas Christos
Published: May 2011

The ubiquitous nature of modern mobile computing has made “any information, any device, any network, anytime, anywhere” a well-known reality. Traditionally, mobile devices are smaller, and data transfer rates are much lower. However, mobile and wireless networks are becoming faster in terms of transfer rates, while mobile devices are becoming smaller, more compact, less power consuming, and, most importantly, user-friendly. As more new applications and services become available every day, the number of mobile device owners and users is increasing exponentially. Furthermore, content is targeted to user needs and preferences by making use of personal and location data. The user profile and location information is becoming increasingly a necessity.
Multimedia Content Representation Technologies
Authors: Hurson Ali R. , Yang Bo
Published: May 2011

In recent years, the rapid expansion of multimedia applications, partly due to the exponential growth of the Internet, has proliferated over the daily life of Internet users. Consequently, research on multimedia technologies is of increasing importance in computer society. In contrast with traditional text-based systems, multimedia applications usually incorporate much more powerful descriptions of human thought – video, audio and images (Auffret, Foote, Li & Shahraray, 1999). Moreover, the large collections of data in multimedia systems make it possible to resolve more complex data operations, such as imprecise query or content-based retrieval. For instance, image database systems may accept an example picture and return the most similar images of the example (Cox, Miller & Minka, 2000, Huang, Chang & Huang, 2003). However, the conveniences of multimedia applications come at the expense of new challenges to the existing data management schemes
Multimedia Data Mining Concept
Authors: Swierzowicz Janusz
Published: May 2011

The development of information technology is particularly noticeable in the methods and techniques of data acquisition, high-performance computing, and bandwidth frequency. According to a newly observed phenomenon, called a storage low (Fayyad & Uthurusamy, 2002), the capacity of digital data storage is doubled every 9 months with respect to the price. Data can be stored in many forms of digital media, for example, still images taken by a digital camera, MP3 songs, or MPEG videos from desktops, cell phones, or video cameras. Such data exceeds the total cumulative handwriting and printing during all of recorded human history (Fayyad, 2001). According to current analysis carried out by IBM Almaden Research (Swierzowicz, 2002), data volumes are growing at different speeds. The fastest one is Internet-resource growth: It will achieve the digital online threshold of exabytes within a few years (Liautaud, 2001). In these fast-growing volumes of data environments, restrictions are connected with a human’s low data-complexity and dimensionality analysis. Investigations on combining different media data, multimedia, into one application have begun as early as the 1960s, when text and images were combined in a document. During the research and development process, audio, video, and animation were synchronized using a time line to specify when they should be played (Rowe & Jain, 2004). Since the middle 1990s, the problems of multimedia data capture, storage, transmission, and presentation have extensively been investigated. Over the past few years, research on multimedia standards (e.g., MPEG-4, X3D, MPEG-7) has continued to grow. These standards are adapted to represent very complex multimedia data sets; can transparently handle sound, images, videos, and 3-D (three-dimensional) objects combined with events, synchronization, and scripting languages; and can describe the content of any multimedia object. Different algorithms need to be used in multimedia distribution and multimedia database applications. An example is an image database that stores pictures of birds and a sound database that stores recordings of birds (Kossmann, 2000). The distributed query that asks for “top ten different kinds of birds that have black feathers and a high voice” is described there by Kossmann (2000, p.436).
Multimedia Information Design for Mobile Devices
Authors: Ally Mohamed
Published: May 2011

There is a rapid increase in the use of mobile devices such as cell phones, tablet PCs, personal digital assistants, Web pads, and palmtop computers by the younger generation and individuals in business, education, industry, and society. As a result, there will be more access of information and learning materials from anywhere and at anytime using these mobile devices. The trend in society today is learning and working on the go and from anywhere rather than having to be at a specific location to learn and work. Also, there is a trend toward ubiquitous computing, where computing devices are invisible to the users because of wireless connectivity of mobile devices. The challenge for designers is how to develop multimedia materials for access and display on mobile devices and how to develop user interaction strategies on these devices. Also, designers of multimedia materials for mobile devices must use strategies to reduce the user mental workload when using the devices in order to leave enough mental capacity to maximize deep processing of the information. According to O’Malley et al. (2003), effective methods for presenting information on these mobile devices and the pedagogy of mobile learning have yet to be developed. Recent projects have started research on how to design and use mobile devices in the schools and in society. For example, the MOBILearn project is looking at pedagogical models and guidelines for mobile devices to improve access of information by individuals (MOBILearn, 2004). This paper will present psychological theories for designing multimedia materials for mobile devices and will discuss guidelines for designing information for mobile devices. The paper then will conclude with emerging trends in the use of mobile devices.
Principles for Managing Information Security
Authors: Tassabehji Rana
Published: May 2011

Information security has traditionally been the responsibility of information technology (IT) departments, where information security has commonly been perceived to have a technological solution. During the 1980s, computer usage was mainly concentrated in computer centres, where the implementation of computer security focused largely on securing the physical computer infrastructure of the organisation (Mutsaers et al., 1998), which proved highly effective.
Production, Delivery and Playback of 3D Graphics
Authors: Di Giacomo Thomas , Joslin Chris , Magnenat-Thalmann Nadia
Published: May 2011

Three-dimensional (3D) representation is one of the cornerstones of Computer Graphics (CG) and multimedia content. Advances in this domain, coupled with the highly fuelled progression of 3D graphics cards, have pushed the complexity of these representations into a whole new era, whereby a single real-time model can consist of more than a million polygons. Huge architectural buildings, everyday objects, even humans themselves, can be represented using 3D graphics in such detail that it is difficult to distinguish between real and virtual objects. Concurrently, and much towards the other end of the scale, many devices, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, laptops and so forth, are now “3D capable” to enhance a user’s experience and to provide much more depth to the information presented. In many cases, these devices access the same content from the same service provider; for example, providing virtual maps/guides, multi-user games and so forth. It is this broadness of content and the heterogeneity of devices in terms of performance, capability, network connection and more that is the main concern in a continuously expanding market. It is also the concern of users to obtain the best quality for their device; that is, the general expectation of any device of higher performance is that overall the quality of the experience will be better.
Security Vulnerabilities and Exposures in Internet Systems and Services
Authors: Cardoso Rui C. , Freire Mario M.
Published: May 2011

In order to guarantee a global security solution in network environments, it is necessary to take into account several issues such as security mechanisms for exchange and access to remote information; mechanisms for protection of networked systems and administrative domains; detection of new vulnerabilities and exposures; and monitoring and periodic audit of the implemented security mechanisms and disaster recovery plans.
Supporting Online Communities with Technological Infrastructures
Authors: Ripamonti Laura Anna
Published: May 2011

A lot of experiences with online communities (AOL, CompuServe, The WELL, Listserv and so forth) pre-date the Web, and some researchers have suggested that “the origins of online communities were very close to the counter-cultural movements and alternative ways of life emerging in the aftermath of the 1960s” (Castells, 2001, p. 53). The FreeNets movement, which emerged mainly in the United States (U.S.) and Canada in the second half of the 1980s, was basically aimed at providing citizens with free access to the Internet and providing content free from any form of control. In that framework, both Community and Civic Networks emerged, which are very nearly the same but for emphasis on the empowerment of the proximate community (Carroll & Rosson, 2003), on the “sense of community” and on the promotion of “citizens’ participation in community affairs” (Schuler, 2001). FreeNets, Community and Civic Networks also shared features such as bottom-up development and, especially at their beginning, the use of Bulletin Board System (BBS) technologies (De Cindio & Ripamonti, 2004).
Universal Multimedia Access
Authors: Cavallaro Andrea
Published: May 2011

The diffusion of network appliances such as cellular phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and handheld computers creates a new challenge for multimedia content delivery: how to adapt the media transmission to various device capabilities, network characteristics, and user preferences. Each device is characterized by certain display capabilities and processing power. Moreover, such appliances are connected through different types of networks with diverse bandwidths. Finally, users with different preferences access the same multimedia content. To cope with the challenge of delivering content to such a variety of conditions while maximizing user satisfaction, multimedia content needs to be adapted to the needs of the specific application, to the capabilities of the connected terminal and network, and to the preferences of the user (Mohan, Smith, & Li, 1999a; Van Beek, Smith, Ebrahimi, Suzuki, & Askelof, 2003). This adaptation enabling seamless access to multimedia content anywhere and anytime is known as universal multimedia access (UMA). The UMA framework is depicted in Figure 1. Three main strategies for adaptive multimedia content delivery have been proposed, namely, the info pyramid, scalable coding, and transcoding. These strategies, emerging trends in UMA and standardization activities, are discussed in the following sections.
Usability
Authors: Singh Shawren
Published: May 2011

In this article we will examine some important issues related to human-computer interaction (HCI). This will be followed by a discussion of usability and its underlying principles and properties. The dependability of computer systems is intrinsically multi-faceted. Dependable hardware is patently of limited value unless accompanied by dependable software. Neither helps greatly if human interaction with the hardware and software system is fault-prone and the dependable socio-technical performance of an inappropriate task may cause wider damage (MacKenzie, 2000).
Using Semantics to Manage 3D Scenes in Web Platforms
Authors: Cruz Christophe , Nicolle Christophe , Neveu Marc
Published: May 2011

Computer graphics has widely spread out into various computer applications. After the early wire-frame computer generated images of the 60s, spatial representation of objects improved in the 70s with Boundary Representation (B-Rep) modeling, Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) objects, and free-form surfaces. Realistic rendering in the 90s, taking into account sophisticated dynamic interactions (between objects or between objects and human actors, physical interactions with light, etc.) now make 3D-scenes much better than simple 3D representations of the real world. Indeed, they are a way to conceive products (industrial products, art products, etc.) and to modify them over time, either interactively or by simulation of physical phenomena (Faux and Ellis Horwood Ltd. & Pratt, 1979; Feiner & Foley, 1990; Mortenson, 1985).
Virtual Communities on the Internet
Authors: Roy Abhijit
Published: May 2011

With the advent of the Internet a little over a decade ago, technology has enabled communities to move beyond the physical face-to-face contacts to the virtual realm of the World Wide Web. With the advent of highways in the 1950s and 1960s, communities were created in suburbia. The Internet, on the other hand, over the last fifteen years, has enabled the creation of a myriad of virtual communities that have limitless boundaries around the entire globe.
Webmetrics
Authors: Maggioni Mario A. , Uberti Teodora Erika
Published: May 2011

The Internet is perhaps one of the newest and most powerful media that enables the transmission of digital information and communication across the world, even if there still exist important divides (digital divide) between and within countries in the endowment, access and use of this technology.
Automated Deduction and Usability Reasoning
Authors: Campos José Creissac , Harrison Michael D.
Published: May 2011

Building systems that are correct by design has always been a major challenge of software development. Typical software development approaches (and in particular interactive systems development approaches) are based around the notion of prototyping and testing. However, except for simple systems, testing cannot guarantee absence of errors, and, in the case of interactive systems, testing with real users can become extremely resource intensive and time-consuming. Additionally, when a system reaches a prototype stage that is amenable to testing, many design decisions have already been made and committed to. In fact, in an industrial setting, user testing can become useless if it is done when time or money is no longer available to substantially change the design. To address these issues, a number of discount techniques for usability evaluation of early designs were proposed. Two examples are heuristic evaluation, and cognitive walkthroughs. Although their effectiveness has been subject of debate, reports show that they are being used in practice. These are largely informal approaches that do not scale well as the complexity of the systems (or the complexity of the interaction between system and users) increases. In recent years, researchers have started investigating the applicability of automated reasoning techniques and tools to the analysis of interactive systems models. The hope being that these tools will enable more thorough analysis of the designs. The challenge faced is how to fold human factors’ issues into a formal setting as that created by the use of such tools. This article reviews some of the work in this area and presents some directions for future work.
Human-Centered Conceptualization and Natural Language
Authors: Andrade Javier , Ares Juan , García Rafael , Rodríguez Santiago , Silva Andrés
Published: May 2011

Conceptual modeling appears to be the heart of good software development (Jackson, 2000). The creation of a conceptual model helps to understand the problem raised and represents the human-centered/problem-oriented moment in the software process, as opposed to the computer-centered/software-oriented moment of the computational models (Blum, 1996). The main objective of human computer interaction (HCI) is also precisely to make human beings the focal point that technology should serve rather than the other way round. The conceptual models are built with conceptual modeling languages (CMLs), whose specification involves constructors and rules on how to combine these constructors into meaningful statements about the problem. Considering the criterion of the representation capability of the CMLs in software engineering, their main drawback is that they remain too close to the development aspects (Jackson, 1995). The constructors are too much oriented toward the computational solution of the problem, and therefore, the problem is modeled with implementation concepts (computer/software solution sensitivity) rather than concepts that are proper to human beings (human/problem sensitivity) (Andrade, Ares, García & Rodríguez, 2004). This stands in open opposition to what we have said about the moments in the software process and HCI. Moreover, this situation seriously complicates the essential validation of the achieved conceptual model, because it is drawn up in technical terms that are very difficult to understand by the person who faces the problem (Andrade et al., 2004). The semantics of the constructors determines the representation capability (Wand, Monarchi, Parsons & Woo, 1995). Since the constructors are too close to implementation paradigms, the CMLs that currently are being used in software engineering are incapable of describing the problem accurately. Suitable human/problem-related theoretical guidelines should determine which constructors must be included in a genuine CML. This article, subject to certain software-independent theoretical guidelines, proposes the conceptual elements that should be considered in the design of a real CML and, consequently, what constructors should be provided. The Background section presents the software-independent guidelines that were taken into account to identify the above-mentioned conceptual elements. The Main Focus of the Article section discusses the study that identified those elements. Finally, the Future Trends section presents the most interesting future trends, and the final section concludes.
Information Space
Authors: Benyon David
Published: May 2011

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in the 21st century needs to look very different from its 20th-century origins. Computers are becoming ubiquitous; they are disappearing into everyday objects. They are becoming wearable. They are able to communicate with each other autonomously, and they are becoming self-adaptive. Even with something as ubiquitous as the mobile phone, we see a system that actively searches out a stronger signal and autonomously switches transmitters. Predictive techniques allow phones to adapt (e.g., anticipate long telephone numbers). These changes in technologies require us to change our view of what HCI is. The typical view of how people interact with computers has been based primarily on a cognitive psychological analysis (Norman & Draper, 1986) of a single user using a single computer. This view sees the user as outside the computer. People have to translate their intentions into the language of the computer and interpret the computer’s response in terms of how successful they were in achieving their aims. This view of HCI leads to the famous gulfs of execution (the difficulty of translating human intentions into computer speak) and evaluation (trying to interpret the computer’s response). With the ubiquity of information appliances (Norman, 1999) or information artifacts (Benyon et al. 1999), the single-person, single-computer view of HCI becomes inadequate. We need to design for people surrounded by information artefacts. People no longer are simply interacting with a computer; they are interacting with people using various combinations of computers and media. As computing devices become increasingly pervasive, adaptive, embedded in other systems, and able to communicate autonomously, the human moves from outside to inside an information space. In the near future, the standard graphical user interface will disappear for many applications, the desktop will disappear, and the keyboard and mouse will disappear. Information artefacts will be embedded both in the physical environment and carried or worn by people as they move through that environment. This change in the nature of computing demands a change in the way we view HCI. We want to move people from outside a computer, looking in to the world of information, to seeing people as inside information space. When we think of having a meeting or having a meal, we do not see people as outside these activities. People are involved in the activity. They are engaged in the interactions. In an analogous fashion, we need to see people as inside the activities of information creation and exchange, as inside information space.
The Language of Cyberspace
Authors: Macfadyen Leah P. , Doff Sabine
Published: May 2011

Amid the many published pages of excited hyperbole regarding the potential of the Internet for human communications, one salient feature of current Internet communication technologies is frequently overlooked: the reality that Internet- and computer-mediated communications, to date, are communicative environments constructed through language (mostly text). In cyberspace, written language therefore mediates the human-computer interface as well as the human-human interface. What are the implications of the domination of Internet and computer-mediated communications by text? Researchers from diverse disciplines—from distance educators to linguists to social scientists to postmodern philosophers—have begun to investigate this question. They ask: Who speaks online, and how? Is online language really text, or is it “speech”? How does culture affect the language of cyberspace? Approaching these questions from their own disciplinary perspectives, they variously position cyberlanguage as “text,” as “semiotic system,” as “socio-cultural discourse” or even as the medium of cultural hegemony (domination of one culture over another). These different perspectives necessarily shape their analytical and methodological approaches to investigating cyberlanguage, underlying decisions to examine, for example, the details of online text, the social contexts of cyberlanguage, and/or the social and cultural implications of English as Internet lingua franca. Not surprisingly, investigations of Internet communications cut across a number of pre-existing scholarly debates: on the nature and study of “discourse,” on the relationships between language, technology and culture, on the meaning and significance of literacy, and on the liter
Obstacles for the Integration of HCI Practices into Software Engineering Development Processes
Authors: Ferre Xavier , Juristo Natalia , Moreno Ana M.
Published: May 2011

Usability has become a critical quality factor in software systems, and it has been receiving increasing attention over the last few years in the SE (software engineering) field. HCI techniques aim to increase the usability level of the final software product, but they are applied sparingly in mainstream software development, because there is very little knowledge about their existence and about how they can contribute to the activities already performed in the development process. There is a perception in the software development community that these usability-related techniques are to be applied only for the development of the visible part of the UI (user interface) after the most important part of the software system (the internals) has been designed and implemented. Nevertheless, the different paths taken by HCI and SE regarding software development have recently started to converge. First, we have noted that HCI methods are being described more formally in the direction of SE software process descriptions. Second, usability is becoming an important issue on the SE agenda, since the software products user base is ever increasing and the degree of user computer literacy is decreasing, leading to a greater demand for usability improvements in the software market. However, the convergence of HCI and SE has uncovered the need for an integration of the practices of both disciplines. This integration is a must for the development of highly usable systems. In the next two sections, we will look at how the SE field has viewed usability. Following upon this, we address the existing approaches to integration. We will then detail the pending issues that stand in the way of successful integration efforts, concluding with the presentation of an approach that might be successful in the integration endeavor.
An Overview of Multimodal Interaction Techniques and Applications
Authors: Bourguet Marie-Luce
Published: May 2011

Desktop multimedia (multimedia personal computers) dates from the early 1970s. At that time, the enabling force behind multimedia was the emergence of the new digital technologies in the form of digital text, sound, animation, photography, and, more recently, video. Nowadays, multimedia systems mostly are concerned with the compression and transmission of data over networks, large capacity and miniaturized storage devices, and quality of services; however, what fundamentally characterizes a multimedia application is that it does not understand the data (sound, graphics, video, etc.) that it manipulates. In contrast, intelligent multimedia systems at the crossing of the artificial intelligence and multimedia disciplines gradually have gained the ability to understand, interpret, and generate data with respect to content. Multimodal interfaces are a class of intelligent multimedia systems that make use of multiple and natural means of communication (modalities), such as speech, handwriting, gestures, and gaze, to support human-machine interaction. More specifically, the term modality describes human perception on one of the three following perception channels: visual, auditive, and tactile. Multimodality qualifies interactions that comprise more than one modality on either the input (from the human to the machine) or the output (from the machine to the human) and the use of more than one device on either side (e.g., microphone, camera, display, keyboard, mouse, pen, track ball, data glove). Some of the technologies used for implementing multimodal interaction come from speech processing and computer vision; for example, speech recognition, gaze tracking, recognition of facial expressions and gestures, perception of sounds for localization purposes, lip movement analysis (to improve speech recognition), and integration of speech and gesture information. In 1980, the put-that-there system (Bolt, 1980) was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was one of the first multimodal systems. In this system, users simultaneously could speak and point at a large-screen graphics display surface in order to manipulate simple shapes. In the 1990s, multimodal interfaces started to depart from the rather simple speech-and-point paradigm to integrate more powerful modalities such as pen gestures and handwriting input (Vo, 1996) or haptic output. Currently, multimodal interfaces have started to understand 3D hand gestures, body postures, and facial expressions (Ko, 2003), thanks to recent progress in computer vision techniques.
Replicating Human Interaction to Support E-Learning
Authors: Janvier William A. , Ghaoui Claude
Published: May 2011

HCI-related subjects need to be considered to make e-learning more effective; examples of such subjects are: psychology, sociology, cognitive science, ergonomics, computer science, software engineering, users, design, usability evaluation, learning styles, teaching styles, communication preference, personality types, and neuro-linguistic programming language patterns. This article discusses the way some components of HI can be introduced to increase the effectiveness of e-learning by using an intuitive interactive e-learning tool that incorporates communication preference (CP), specific learning styles (LS), neurolinguistic programming (NLP) language patterns, and subliminal text messaging. The article starts by looking at the current state of distance learning tools (DLTs), intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) and “the way we learn”. It then discusses HI and shows how this was implemented to enhance the learning experience.
A Semantic Learning Objects Authoring Tool
Authors: García F. J. , Berlanga A. J. , García J.
Published: May 2011

The introduction of computers is recreating a new criterion of differentiation between those who become integrated as a matter of course in the technocratic trend deriving from the daily use of these machines and those who become isolated by not using them. This difference increases when computer science and communications merge to introduce virtual education areas, where the conjunction of teacher and student in the space-time dimension is no longer an essential requirement and where the written text becomes replaced (or rather complemented) by the digital text (García & García, 2005). In order to rescue those educators who have much to offer in an educational system, whether virtual or presential, as authors of teaching resources, suitable authoring tools should be designed, thinking more in the pedagogical process than in the technical aspects. Hypertext Composer, or simply HyCo, is one of these authoring tools, which presents a pedagogical interaction model that makes easier the creation of educational resources for every teacher/author, independently of his or her computer expertise level. At the same time, HyCo is an authoring tool and a retrieval tool, in that it encapsulates all the complexity in handling current tools within the facilities that the author needs and offers, as a result, a hypermedia teaching product that can be distributed in different formats for the user’s access. HyCo has an important semantic basis that nears this tool to the Semantic Web concept (Berners-Lee, Hendler & Lassila, 2001) and allows creating Semantic Learning Objects (SLO) that could be imported for more specialized Learning Management Systems (LMS). In order to achieve the semantic definition of the created educational resources, HyCo uses Learning Technology Standards or Specifications (LTS), looking for obtaining contents that are able to work in other systems (interoperability), follow-up information about learners and contents (manageability), usability in other contexts (reusability), and avoiding obsolescence (durability). This article is devoted to introducing HyCo as an authoring/retrieval tool of SLOs, which presents an interaction model that hides all the technical complexity to the authors but, at same time, offers all the power of semantic definitions in order to publish or use the contents in advanced e-learning environments. The rest of the article is organized as follows: the Background section establishes the background of the presented topic, making a comparison with related works; the HyCo Authoring Tool section presents the HyCo authoring tool; finally, the sections Future Trends and Conclusion provide the future trends and the remarks of the article, respectively.
Spam
Authors: Freitas Sarah , Levene Mark
Published: May 2011

With the advent of the electronic mail system in the 1970s, a new opportunity for direct marketing using unsolicited electronic mail became apparent. In 1978, Gary Thuerk compiled a list of those on the Arpanet and then sent out a huge mailing publicising Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC—now Compaq) systems. The reaction from the Defense Communications Agency (DCA), who ran Arpanet, was very negative, and it was this negative reaction that ensured that it was a long time before unsolicited e-mail was used again (Templeton, 2003). As long as the U.S. government controlled a major part of the backbone, most forms of commercial activity were forbidden (Hayes, 2003). However, in 1993, the Internet Network Information Center was privatized, and with no central government controls, spam, as it is now called, came into wider use. The term spam was taken from the Monty Python Flying Circus (a UK comedy group) and their comedy skit that featured the ironic spam song sung in praise of spam (luncheon meat)—“spam, spam, spam, lovely spam”—and it came to mean mail that was unsolicited. Conversely, the term ham came to mean e-mail that was wanted. Brad Templeton, a UseNet pioneer and chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has traced the first usage of the term spam back to MUDs (Multi User Dungeons), or real-time multi-person shared environment, and the MUD community. These groups introduced the term spam to the early chat rooms (Internet Relay Chats). The first major UseNet (the world’s largest online conferencing system) spam sent in January 1994 and was a religious posting: “Global alert for all: Jesus is coming soon.” The term spam was more broadly popularised in April 1994, when two lawyers, Canter and Siegel from Arizona, posted a message that advertized their information and legal services for immigrants applying for the U.S. Green Card scheme. The message was posted to every newsgroup on UseNet, and after this incident, the term spam became synonymous with junk or unsolicited e-mail. Spam spread quickly among the UseNet groups who were easy targets for spammers simply because the e-mail addresses of members were widely available (Templeton, 2003).
Toward an HCI Theory of Cultural Cognition
Authors: Faiola Anthony
Published: May 2011

With the increasing demand for global communication between countries, it is imperative that we understand the importance of national culture in human communication on the World Wide Web (WWW). As we consider the vast array of differences in the way we think, behave, assign value, and interact with others, culture becomes a focal point in research of online communication. More than ever, culture has become an important human-computer interaction (HCI) issue, because it impacts both the substance and the vehicle of communication via communication technologies. Global economics and information delivery is leading to even greater diversification among individuals and groups of users who employ the WWW as a key resource for accessing information and purchasing products. Companies will depend more on the Internet as an integral component of their communication infrastructure. With a shift toward online services for information, business professionals have identified international Web usability as an increasingly relevant area of HCI research. What must be addressed are the cultural factors surrounding Web site design. Specifically argued is that culture is a discernible variable in international Web site design, and as such, should better accommodate global users who seek to access online information or products. There are still many unresolved questions regarding cross-cultural HCI and communication and the delivery of information via the Web. To date, there has been no significant connection made between culture context and cognition, cross-cultural Web design, and related issues of HCI. This correlation is relevant for identifying new knowledge in cross-cultural Web design theory and practice.
Tracking Attention through Browser Mouse Tracking
Authors: Owen Robert S.
Published: May 2011

There are different ways in which we have used the concept of attention with regard to human information processing and behavior (cf Kahneman, 1973). Attention could be taken to mean whatever one is thinking about, as when a student is lost in the thoughts of daydreaming rather than paying attention to the teacher’s lesson. Attention can also be associated with where we are looking or that for which we are looking (cf Moray, 1969), as when a flashing Web advertisement takes your attention or when one is mentally focused on searching through a Web page to find information. This attention switching or attention movement perspective on attention (cf Broadbent, 1957) is of most interest in this article. A flashing Web banner advertisement could, by design, take our attention from where we had intended to focus, or a Web page could be designed such that it draws our interest and leads us to seek further information. If a person is looking in the wrong place to find what he or she wants, then it would be good for us to know about this. This article will review some theories of attention that are relevant to understanding how human attention processing mechanisms work with regard to these issues, and will review the basics of a method that can be used to track attention movement by tracking mouse movements in a browser. This method has grounding in well-established theory, and it can be used in a laboratory or can be used remotely with data saved to a server for replay.
Ubiquitous Computing and the Concept of Context
Authors: Oulasvirta Antti , Salovaara Antti
Published: May 2011

Mark Weiser (1991) envisioned in the beginning of the 1990s that ubiquitous computing, intelligent small-scale technology embedded in the physical environment, would provide useful services in the everyday context of people without disturbing the natural flow of their activities. From the technological point of view, this vision is based on recent advances in hardware and software technologies. Processors, memories, wireless networking, sensors, actuators, power, packing and integration, optoelectronics, and biomaterials have seen rapid increases in efficiency with simultaneous decreases in size. Moore’s law on capacity of microchips doubling every 18 months and growing an order of magnitude every five years has been more or less accurate for the last three decades. Similarly, fixed network transfer capacity grows an order of magnitude every three years, wireless network transfer capacity every 5 to 10 years, and mass storage every 3 years. Significant progress in power consumption is less likely, however. Innovations and breakthroughs in distributed operating environments, ad hoc networking, middleware, and platform technologies recently have begun to add to the ubiquitous computing vision on the software side. Altogether, these technological advances have a potential to make technology fade into the background, into the woodwork and fabric of everyday life, and incorporate what Weiser (1991) called natural user interfaces. Awareness of situational factors (henceforth, the context) consequently was deemed necessary for this enterprise. This article looks at the history of the concept of context in ubiquitous computing and relates the conceptual advances to advances in envisioning human-computer interaction with ubiquitous computing.
Usability Barriers
Authors: Danielson David R.
Published: May 2011

Numerous technical, cognitive, social, and organizational constraints and biases can reduce the quality of usability data, preventing optimal responses to a system’s usability deficiencies. Detecting and appropriately responding to a system’s usability deficiencies requires powerful collection methods and tools, skilled analysts, and successful interaction amongst usability specialists, developers, and other stakeholders in applying available resources to producing an improved system design. The detection of usability deficiencies is largely a matter of analyzing a system’s characteristics and observing its performance in use. Appropriate response involves the translation of collected data into usability problem descriptions, the production of potential design solutions, and the prioritization of these solutions to account for pressures orthogonal to usability improvements. These activities are constrained by the effectiveness and availability of methods, tools, and organizational support for user-centered design processes. The quality of data used to inform system design can, for example, be limited by a collection tool’s ability to record user and system performance, an end user’s ability to accurately recall past interactions with a system, an analyst’s ability to persuade developers to implement changes, and an organization’s commitment to devoting resources to user-centered design processes. The remainder of this article (a) briefly reviews basic usability concepts, (b) discusses common barriers to successfully collecting, analyzing, and reacting to usability data, and (c) suggests future trends in usability research.
The Use and Evolution of Affordance in HCI
Authors: Christou Georgios S.
Published: May 2011

The term affordance was coined by Gibson (1977, 1979) to define properties of objects that allow an actor to act upon them. Norman (1988) expanded on this concept and presented the concepts of real and perceptual affordances in his book The Psychology of Everyday Things. Norman was essentially the first to present the concept of affordance to the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). Since then, affordance as a term has been used by many designers and researchers. But as Norman (1999) explained, many of the uses of the term are vague or unclear, which prompted the writing of his 1999 article in the Interactions periodical. In fact, there have been many publications that try to elucidate the term (see Hartson, 2003; McGrenere & Ho, 2000). This article will try to provide a brief overview of the term and its many subclasses. It will try to give the reader a clear idea about what affordance is and how the concept can be used to allow designers and researchers to create better user interfaces and better interaction devices. The article however, does not try to clear up any ambiguities in the usage of the term in the literature or present a new way of viewing affordance. Rather, it tries to provide a short overview of the literature around affordance and guide the reader to a correct understanding of how to use affordance in HCI.
Cultural Presence
Authors: Champion Erik M.
Published: May 2011

In many text-based virtual communities, confusion exists between the notion of social presence and cultural presence. While social presence may be evident in these communities, cultural presence may require more than dialogue or persistent world data (that is, backed up by off-line databases and retrievable after by online sessions). It is also not clear how much cultural presence is available in three-dimensional online games and role-playing environments. While they may have a great deal of social presence, these environments typically provide for instrumental learning that develops understanding of the design rules of the virtual environment, not the embedded and embodied social rules and individual beliefs of the participants as a community. In the case of virtual history and heritage environments, it appears that we do not understand cultural information and how to provide for it or communicate it digitally. Virtual heritage environments are a good example of this lack of meaningful interaction (Mosaker, 2000; Schroeder, 1996, p. 115). Apart from such isolated examples as Blaxxun’s The Renaissance project or VRoma (“A virtual community for teaching and learning classics”), one may well wonder whether these environments are communities at all. People intending to travel to a heritage site may have different requirements to people just exploring a virtual world. People may want to use virtual technology in different ways: to use the information as a travel guide; to imagine, explore, or understand the past; or to meet and socially participate with other people. Virtual environments that would be helped by a sense of cultural presence could be virtual communities, language and social exchange sites, virtual travel and tourism sites, or virtual heritage sites.