1,721,115 research outputs found
Sensitivity of the spatial distribution of fixations to variations in the type of task demand and its effectiveness as a trigger for adaptive automation
Full text linkHigh-risk environments such as healthcare, transport and air traffic control are characterised by highly dynamic, unpredictable, and uncertain events. A human operator's presence is necessary to monitor and control the system when critical events occur in these contexts. At the same time, the system should monitor the operators' functional status and support him when necessary. The proposed research activity investigates the spatial distribution of eye fixations as a real-time measure of mental workload. Ocular activity is known to be sensitive to variations in mental workload. Many attempts have been made to derive a stable measure of the cognitive resources allocated to a task using eye-trackers' information.
Recent studies have successfully related the distribution of eye fixations to the mental load. The scope of this research project is to devise a set of experiments for separating the contribution of three types of tasks demands (i.e., temporal, mental, and physical) and, to determine which of these (and when) should be considered for using an index of spatial distribution as a trigger in ocular-based adaptive systems.
The project has three different objectives: 1) assessing the sensitivity of the proposed measure to different types of tasks demands with a large sample and a within-subject design; 2) evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed measure as a trigger for adaptive automation and 3) using more complex algorithms to provide a more stable measurement over time and investigate variations in the frequency domain.
The first chapter provides a review of the theoretical models proposed in the literature about automation, highlighting the relationship between machine and operator, and the cognitive processes involved. The second chapter describes the physiological indicators of mental workload present in the literature, focuses on measures derived from ocular parameters such as pupillary diameter, saccades, fixations and scanpath analysis. In the last two chapters, four experimental studies are described and discussed. The aim was to evaluate how the visual exploration strategy changes with different mental workload levels and task demands. The index used to analyse the visual strategy, the nearest neighbour index, was then investigated as a trigger in an adaptive automation system. The results indicated the high diagnostic power of the measure and provided the background for future applications
Conversational Practices and Presence: How the Communication Structure Exploits the Affordances of the Medium
No full textCommunication practices are strictly interdependent on
the resources afforded by the medium, and on the combination of functionalities offered. In this contribution we frame this great variation of resources in terms of presence affordances, since they anchor the communication practices to the specificities of a certain environment. A corpus of mediated conversations recorded in different settings and collected within the PASION project will be examined to this purpose. It will be shown how the structure of the actions sequence, starting from turns and actions constituting it, varies across environments and how nature of the medium is reflected in these variations. On the one hand, this shows that similarities and differences across communication environments can be captured by using the presence concept. On the other hand, this shows how communication practices encapsulate presence cues, and offers a concrete example of they way in which they can be qualitatively investigated
Going Beyond Google Translate?
Full text linkCiclo 2012 di seminari interni CRS4, Number 20120229.We motivate and describe the design and implementation of a web-based system for the alignment of parallel texts. It builds on the interactive color-highlight interface now deployed at Google Translate. By a series of simple point and click operations translators can mark up equivalent text-ranges in their own translation and in the original. When successful, the visual cues created by this activity should benefit the understanding of readers of limited degrees of bilingualism -- and may also capture aspects of semantic context not readily available to algorithmic statistical machine translation. We provide a working demonstration that treats poetic texts.Statistical machine translation (SMT) delivers texts unacceptable for literary or academic purposes since generally, it cannot assimilate adequate context: Yet how might one ever articulate such context? Here rather than taking a theoretical perspective we adopt an spatio-visual approach made possible by recent advances in the electronic presentation of multilingual texts:– we allow the translator supply the colour higlights... But how? Semantic units don't respect lexical boundaries and they occur at different scales. Any translator, committed to provide a definitive version of a text, eventually arrives at irreversible order of words – and may actually wish to justify their choices by documenting the correspondence between their version and the original. We focus on verse – an extreme challenge for SMT – with the eventual aim of expressing elusive aspects of semantic communication in order to differentiate those that can be articulated via spatio-visual cues. In verse a deviation from a literal correspondence is essential to reestablish in the translation a "decorum" appropriate to the original so that readers are encouraged to achieve an equivalent respect for its author also from the translated works. We use jQuery to provide an interface that lets the human translator mark up what they consider a correct alignment between words, or groups of words, in the original and their own translation – with a view to articulating context that may not be readily available to SMT. We detail below how the interface runs off a web-page and allows the alignment of equivalent ranges in parallel texts via a simple point-and-click action. Alignments created by the user are instantaneously made visible using a variant of the interactive color-highlight system mentioned above. Key to reducing the complexity of the implementation of the interface is our systematic deployment of open-standard, non-proprietary, web technologies.2011-09-15AlgheroCHItaly2011, 13-16 settembre 2011, Algher
An enriched visit to the Botanical Garden: Co-designing tools and contents
No full textThe exploitation of Virtual and Augmented Reality in the context of cultural heritage and tourism is increasing. These new technologies enable to integrate the traditional cultural contents and innovative experience modalities. Several cultural sites provide visitors with such systems to create an immersive visiting experience. However, limited attention has been paid so far to the exploitation of such technologies in naturalistic cultural sites. This paper describes the project "This is (not) just a tree", an applied research project aiming to develop an advanced system exploiting Virtual and Augmented Reality technology, which will enable visitors to enjoy closer experiences with plants and their interactions with animals. Special attention will be devoted to involving both stakeholders and target users in the development, thereby applying a co-design approach. Here we report on the participatory design method deployed to gather and organize requirements from stakeholders, the strategies implemented to inquire target users on their preferences, and the resulting implications for the application design
A behavioural experiment in virtual reality to verify the role of action function in space coding
No full textNeurophysiological data indicate that the reachable peripersonal space and the unreachable extrapersonal space are represented in segregated parietofrontal circuits and that when the unreachable space becomes reachable because of tool use, it is automatically coded by the network selective for peripersonal space. Here we directly tested the role of action's consequences in space coding. Thirty-eight participants bisected lines at either a reachable distance (60 cm) or unreachable distance (120 cm) using either a laser pointer or laser cutter. The laser cutter but not the laser pointer had an action consequence; the line broke into two pieces. The results showed that distance moderated the effect of action. At an unreachable distance, the mean bisection point was closer to the centre when participants used the laser cutter compared to when they used the laser pointer. There were no differences at a reachable distance (60 cm). This result suggests that the space in which the individual may determine a physical consequence is categorized as peripersonal space, independently from its actual distance from the individual's body
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