Search

This paper presents a novel application of a semantic annotation system, named Cerno, to analyze research publications in electronic format. Specifically, we address the problem of providing automatic support for authors who need to deal with large volumes of research documents. To this end, we have developed Biblio, a user-friendly tool based on Cerno. The tool directs the user's attention to the most important elements of the papers and provides assistance by generating automatically a list of references and an annotated bibliography given a collection of published research articles. The tool performance has been evaluated on a set of papers and preliminary evaluation results are promising. The backend of Biblio uses a standard relational database to store the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the most interesting developments within computer system design in recent years have emerged from an exploration of the ways everyday objects and artefacts can be augmented with computational resources. Often under the rubric of "ubiquitous computing", research programmes in Europe, North America and Japan have directed substantial funding towards these initiatives, and leading industrial and academic research laboratories have developed a diverse range of ubiquitous computing "solutions". These developments mark an important shift in system design, a shift that is having a corresponding impact on social science research. Surprisingly though, given the growing commitment to the ubiquitous and the tangible, there is a mundane, even humble artefact that pervades our ordinary lives that has received less attention than one might imagine. This artefact is paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore new metaphors for interaction design on tabletop system. Tabletop systems are shared horizontal surface for co-located collaboration, which leads to original problems when designing interactions. We propose two metaphors based on the paper: the peeling metaphor, and the slot metaphor, and then suggest a way of using them to design new interactions for solving some of the problems of tabletop systems: documents organization, documents transmission and documents duplication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many design activities depend on communicative activities around collaboratively produced prototypes. A common communication practice in producing text documents is to add annotation in the form of comments. Previous research indicates that electronic paper-prototyping can be used to rapidly create simple prototypes of interactive systems, such as websites. Little is known, however, about how to provide and maintain variety of communication channels around such electronic paper-prototypes to enable end-users and other stakeholders to contribute to design dialogues. This paper presents Gabbeh, an electronic paper-prototyping tool, and reports on an evaluation using the tool in a simulated design exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers from the same lab often spend a considerable amount of time searching for published articles relevant to their current project. Despite having similar interests, they conduct independent, time consuming searches. While they may share the results afterwards, they are unable to leverage previous search results during the search process. We propose a research paper recommender system that avoids such time consuming searches by augmenting existing search engines with recommendations based on previous searches performed by others in the lab. Most existing recommender systems were developed for commercial domains with millions of users. The research paper domain has relatively few users compared to the large number of online research papers. The two major challenges with this type of data are the large number of dimensions and the sparseness of the data. The novel contribution of the paper is a scalable subspace clustering algorithm (SCuBASCuBA: Subspace Clustering Based Analysis.) that tackles these problems. Both synthetic and benchmark datasets are used to evaluate the clustering algorithm and to demonstrate that it performs better than the traditional collaborative filtering approaches when recommending research papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Office workers tend to produce paper piles of documents to read or to process sometime later. The information contained in these piles is often lost if it is not transferred to electronic format and connected to knowledge structures. Information that is not part of the knowledge worker's electronic information space is frequently overlooked because it is not proactively provided during actual processes or tasks he is involved in. This paper presents a novel prototype for an intelligent office appliance, which results from an integration of three state-of-the-art office applications/appliances: a workflow system, a document classification system, and a multi-functional peripheral. The resulting system allows for leveraging an office worker's papers to her personal knowledge space in order to realize a pro-active and context-sensitive information support within knowledge-intensive tasks and processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To facilitate the transition from paper-based patient record (PPR) to computer-based patient record (CPR), engineers should try to improve the usability of CPR system. From the point of view of a physician, we reviewed PPRs written by 8 Japanese physicians. We revealed the characteristics of PPR to find out about the barrier to transition from PPR to CPR. Our findings may be helpful to the engineers who are aiming to develop a CPR system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe the design of a hybrid search that combines simple metadata search with a traditional keyword search over unstructured context data. This paradigm provides the inquirer additional options to narrow the search with some semantic aspects through the XML metadata query. We demonstrate a paper search for a case study of the hybrid search, and describe a data integration hub to integrate those data dispersed on the Net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple business factors have emerged to accelerate the necessity of event-driven functionality and make it part of the main-stream computing, instead of a niche technology. Consequently, there is now focus on using high-level software constructs to build these applications. This paper presents a vision for such high-level features and architecture. This paper explains why "event-driven applications" becomes an emerging area, explains the basic terminology of EDA, explains the relationship to business rules, and sets some directions for the future of this discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global paper industry needs systems that can be used in all locations. International user studies can be helpful when integrating systems. Not only due to the lack of common language but also the differences in culture and the usage of systems, information from different countries needs to be collected and analyzed so that the integration development is not be biased and unilateral. During the study some food for thought was gathered on what to consider when planning an international user study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increased use of Internet and information technology all over the world, there is an increased amount of criminal activities that involve computing and digital data. These digital crimes (e-crimes) impose new challenges on prevention, detection, investigation, and prosecution of the corresponding offences. Computer forensics (also known as cyberforensics) is an emerging research area that applies computer investigation and analysis techniques to help detection of these crimes and gathering of digital evidence suitable for presentation in courts. This new area combines the knowledge of information technology, forensics science, and law and gives rise to a number of interesting and challenging problems related to computer security and cryptography that are yet to be solved. In this paper, we present and discuss some of these problems together with two successful cases of computer forensics technology developed in Hong Kong that enable the law enforcement departments to detect and investigate digital crimes more efficiently and effectively. We believe that computer forensics research is an important area in applying security and computer knowledge to build a better society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privacy-preserving classification mining is one of the fast-growing sub-areas of data mining. How to perturb original data and then build a decision tree based on perturbed data is the key research challenge. By applying transition probability matrix this paper proposes a novel privacy-preserving classification mining algorithm which suits all data types, arbitrary probability distribution of original data, and perturbing all attributes (including label attribute). Experimental results demonstrate that decision tree built using this algorithm on perturbed data has comparable classifying accuracy to decision tree built using un-privacy-preserving algorithm on original data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information retrieval techniques have been used for a long time to identify links between textual items for the automatic construction of hypertexts and electronic books where sought information can be accessed by browsing. While research work in this area has been steadily decreasing in recent years, some of the techniques developed in that context are proving very valuable in a number of new application areas. In this paper we present an approach to automatic linking of textual items that is used to prioritise criminal suspects in a police investigation. A free-text description of an unsolved crime is compared to previous offence descriptions where the offender is known. By linking the descriptions, inferences about likely suspects can be made. Language Modeling is adapted to produce a Bayesian model which assigns a probability to each suspect. An empirical study showed that the linking of free text descriptions of burglaries enables prioritisation of offenders. The model presented in this paper could be easily extended to take account of additional crime and suspect linking data, such as geographical location of crimes or suspect social networks. This would enable large networks of investigative information automatically constructed from police archives to be browsed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents (SOMA) have been proposed as a paradigm for reasoning about cultural groups, terror groups, and other socioeconomic- political-military organizations worldwide. In this paper, we describe a case study that shows how SOMA was used to model the behavior of the terrorist organization, Hezbollah. Our team, consisting of a mix of computer scientists, policy experts, and political scientists, were able to understand new facts about Hezbollah of which even seasoned Hezbollah experts may not have been aware. This paper briefly overviews SOMA rules, explains how more than 14,000 SOMA rules for Hezbollah were automatically derived, and then describes a few key findings about Hezbollah, enabled by this framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents (SOMA) have been proposed as a paradigm for reasoning about cultural groups, terror groups, and other socioeconomic-political-military organizations worldwide. In this paper, we describe the SOMA Terror Organization Portal (STOP). STOP provides a single point of contact through which analysts may access data about terror groups world wide. In order to analyze this data, SOMA provides three major components: the SOMA Extraction Engine (SEE), the SOMA Adversarial Forecast Engine (SAFE), and the SOMA Analyst NEtwork (SANE) that allows analysts to find other analysts doing similar work, share findings with them, and let consensus findings emerge. This paper describes the STOP framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Signal Processing for Image Enhancement & Multimedia Processing is the property of Springer eBooks and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper presents a view of banking as undertaken by SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprise) in Australia. It presents a user perspective to give insight into how people talk about banking, how they are using traditional bank services, and what it means to them to bank with new technologies. This paper builds on previous analysis and interpretation of the perceptions of these issues in the banking project. In this paper we apply Burke's [5] dramatistic analysis. The paper analyses 15 SMEs to elaborate the mediation of money between banks and individual SMEs. We found that when talking about banking, individuals refer to location (scene) and processes using cheques, cash and the online interface (acts and agency) Thus an elaboration of the elements indicates that the scene-act-agency interaction is perhaps a significant nexus through which individuals negotiate this activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the planning and implementation of a cross-border usability test that was to be executed in five European countries. The usability evaluation was designed by the Usability Group at Helsinki University of Technology who also performed the testing for the Finnish partner. In the other countries the usability tests were to be implemented by teams of subject matter specialists with very heterogeneous disciplines ranging from software engineering to social sciences, gender equality and vocational counselling. This paper describes the level of materials and training prepared for the remote usability testing and discusses its adequacy both via test personnel satisfaction and comments, and by comparing the found usability problems and observed phenomena in the test sessions between the test executed by the usability experts and the subject matter specialists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Wide Web has become a ubiquitous information source and communication channel. With such an extensive user population, it is imperative to understand how users view Web pages. Studies of Web browsing behaviour aimed at different cultures have previously been carried out using methodologies such as questionnaires, observation and expensive eye-tracking. Mouse-tracking however, has not been previously widely applied to studies of Web browsing behaviour. This paper presents an exploratory study in which Web browsing behaviour was investigated with a help of a remote proxy mouse tracker. Furthermore, this paper compares the browsing behaviour of European users with Chinese users. This comparative study tries to explore whether or not there exists any differences in expected menu positions between Chinese and European users using mouse tracking methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of culture on the usability and design of global applications. Specifically, this paper will serve to address the theoretical implications of Hofstede's cultural dimensions and the impact of these cultural models on designing usable global products. The paper concludes with a discussion regarding best practices for designing international products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent researches reveal effort to observe user's experience from user's point of view in order to estimate usability of a web site. Eye-tracking and mouse-tracking to record and analysis what user sees and how user acts can be proper examples. However, although eye-tracking and mouse-tracking are used practically, not only difficult to find the case that uses both, but also the case is rare that considers what user is thinking. Hence, this paper introduced EMT System that tracks eye and mouse, and records user's thinking. And for applying EMT system, this paper developed EMT Tool, which helps a researcher to do usability test by recording the user's experience, and reproducing it visually. EMT Tool is consist of EMT Tracker which is responsible for observing and collecting user's experience and EMT Analyzer synthesizing and analyzing data from EMT Tracker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Field research methods (also known as Ethnography) are useful in gathering user requirements, informing product direction, and identifying user needs and barriers. This paper will focus on how we perform data analysis for the Horizontal Visits sub-area. Horizontal Visits help identify user patterns and behaviors that inform product strategies and inspire product innovations. This paper introduces how psychological principles and deep dive analysis are helping eBay build better products and more useful features for its customers. Specifically, this research tried to deeply understand how and why people buy products. The study investigates users' approach to buying, attitudes, mental models, and needs. We learned that after an initial analysis of the data is completed one should continue to drill down into the meaning of the data by applying Cognitive and Social Psychological Principles to help team members more deeply understand the overall behaviors and motivations behind users' actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes and discusses the ways tasks are described and perceived in a remote Think Aloud (TA) usability tests session. The paper includes reports from a study and the problems encountered during a session of remote TA tests. The sessions were performed as synchronous tests, where the facilitator and observers received data and managed the evaluation in real time with a remote participant. It was done using a system with audio conferencing and remote application sharing. The analysis and discussion include both a task description perspective and a cultural difference perspective and hereby adds to existing knowledge of usability testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to build a digital archive database for Taiwanese people to learn Taiwanese culture through the internet and e-learning environment. This study will be completed in three steps. Firstly, the paper is to explore the meaning of cultural objects and to extract the cultural features from Taiwanese culture; especially, Taiwan ordinary garment cultures. Then, a protocol of information-exchanging is used to analyze the cultural features, and to combine the images with the text using a standardization of digital images. Finally, a digital archive database is established and a friendly interface is designed for users. Results are presented here providing the users with a digital archive database to learn Taiwan local cultural features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concepts of ‘culture' are often invoked in analysis of humancomputer interaction, notably in attempts to refine or adapt systems to differing cultural contexts, such as in the process of internationalization or in creating systems and processes that can adapt to user's cultures. This paper takes ethnographic research in this area to the study of culture in HCI to address culture as a problematic unit of analysis. It does this via qualitative video-based analysis of user's interactions with information kiosks at international conferences. The paper argues that culture must be understood as contingent and nationality may not be the most important indicator in multi-national colocated settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the area of culture strain and how it affects the usage and hence the design of products and services. In this era of globalisation, it is increasingly important to create a tool kit of methods and techniques that will address cross cultural use of a product. This is particularly important in cases where the product is designed in and for a particular kind of culture and then it is ‘exported' for use in widely different cultures. Till date, it has been common to ‘localise' such a product by looking at the dominant cultural characteristics of the culture where the product is being exported for use. This paper takes the view that it is equally important to look at the culture (where the product is being exported for use) not just as it is supposed to be but also as it is. The difference between the ‘cultural ideal' and ‘cultural practice' [1] does indeed provide some rich opportunity areas for value added design solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving the quality of life of elderly people is an emerging issue within our information society for both research and development. This paper addresses some issues on the development of applications for mobile devices, which have been designed to enhance the quality of life of the growing number of elderly people, and how they can be made more acceptable to the target population. We summarize some relevant issues in order to devise a research methodology to cover more than just the technological and physical aspects of user interfacing but also psychological and sociological aspects. One aspect of achieving this aim is to confront designers and developers with those problems that the elderly face daily and which are not easily understood - especially by younger designers and developers. Finally, we present some issues on how to simulate certain physical constraints of elderly by using the AgeSim, which is a simulation suit. However, not only physical but also cognitive impairment cause problems amongst elderly and result in fear, anxiety and consequently in rejection. The main goal of this paper is to raise awareness amongst developers on which problems are to be taken into considerations during design and development of mobile applications for the elderly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many respects, cognitive difficulties and learning impairments are the poor relation of Universal Access (UA) research. Research into emotional impairments is even less common. A simple review of almost any general UA or Assistive Technology conference proceedings will typically show a strong bias towards sensory (vision and hearing) impairment, with a strong minority addressing motor impairment issues. This is an improvement on the situation a few years ago where the vast majority of the papers would be based solely on blindness, despite that particularly impairment constituting only 14% of people with a vision impairment and 2% of the overall prevalence of functional impairment in the general population [7]. This paper discusses the reasons why such a disparity exists and summarises the outcome of an International Symposium, hosted by the IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center, to establish the state-of-the-art in research and best practices for supporting access for users with cognitive difficulties and learning impairments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the variety of heuristics evaluation methods available, four paramount approaches have emerged: Nielsen's ten usability heuristics, Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design, Tognazzini's First Principles of Interaction Design, and a set of principles based on Edward Tufte's visual display work. To simplify access to a comprehensive set of heuristics, this paper describes an approach to integrate existing approaches (i.e., identify overlap, combine conceptually related heuristics) in a single table hereafter referred to as the Multiple Heuristics Evaluation Table (MHET). This approach also seeks to update these approaches by addressing existing gaps and providing concrete examples that illustrate the application of concepts. Furthermore, the authors identify three decision factors that support meaningful communication among stakeholders (e.g., product managers, engineers) and apply them to the MHET heuristics. Finally, this paper discusses the practical implications and limitations of the MHET. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we developed driver authentication system based on face recognition. Since 2D based face recognition has been shown its structural limitation, 3D model based approach for face recognition has been spotlighted as a robust solution under variant conditions of pose and illumination. Since a generative 3D face model consists of a large number of vertices, a 3D model based face recognition system is generally inefficient in computation time. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D face representation algorithm to reduce the number of vertices and optimize its computation time. Finally, we evaluate the performance of proposed algorithm with the Korean face database collected using a stereo-camera based 3D face capturing device. In addition, various decision making similarity measures were explored for final results. Our experimental results indicated that the algorithm is robust for driver authentication inside the vehicle and is also reasonably fast for real-time processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents guidelines for the design of self-administered surveys for visually impaired and blind people within a mixed mode approach. The different needs of the target group are fulfilled by offering different modes of participation (paper-based, braille-based, Web-based). Reading aids have in common that they enhance the focus of a specific piece of text or single word. This advantage turns into a disadvantage in terms of a clear overview and arrangement of the text elements on a page. Therefore text needs to be designed with cognitive processes and accessibility standards in mind. This is especially true for a survey questionnaire where each question and answer item has to convey its own special meaning independent from context. Design problems and their solutions are described and illustrated with experiences from pretesting and a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally assistive technology or environmental intervention introduced to help with independence in the home has tended to look ‘medical' or ‘institutional', focussing on function rather than aesthetic considerations and overlooking the aspirations of the householder. This paper describes a recent social housing project where the interior design of two newly built houses in Bradford, UK, for Habinteg Housing Association, were used to demonstrate that it is possible to balance form and function when designing to enhance independence in the home. The Bradford project builds on previous research in this area by the author and refers to the paper ‘Home Improvement for Independent Living' (Pearce 2003). The initial research was in turn inspired by the construction of the first Lifetime Homes in Hull in 1994 by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, in collaboration with Habinteg Housing Association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several evaluations of team awareness systems showed, that interruptions and privacy violations during usage often lead to the rejection of the system by users. Most authors argue that this rejection is due to a fundamental dual trade-off between sending awareness information and privacy, and between receiving awareness information and disruption or resource consumption. While the assumption of a fundamental trade-off is widely accepted in state-of-the-art research, this paper disputes the predominant hypothesis. Instead, it is argued, that the trade-off is not of fundamental nature, but caused by neglecting elementary aspects in the design process. In order to verify this line of argument, a novel interface concept for mediating socio-emotional awareness information is presented. To verify the validity of the conceptual approach, several evaluations were conducted. The evaluations verified the approach of this paper and showed, that a cautious interface design can enhance user privacy in multi-user awareness systems and minimize disruptive effects on primary tasks, without reducing awareness mediation and usability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After observing children playing games, two design-engineering students designed a new concept for an interactive playground, the dot °. Its basic idea is to shift the computer screen onto the floor. In order to design optimal interfaces (hardware) and game scenarios (software) for everyone to enjoy, the dot °team decided to adopt an inclusive design process. This paper starts with a discussion of popularism in design, which critiques the conventional welfare designers' approach to treat 'users' as study subjects. From the design of the design workshops to the final design solution, this paper presents how a group of young design students worked with a design researcher to formulate their first user-involvement design experience in such a way that all participants in the process could engage in the inclusive experience of exchanging knowledge between designers and users. Finally, the paper documents the user-involvement process from the perspectives of different collaborators, including design students, design researcher, high school students and their school education consultant. Hence, this paper aims to advocate the relevance of designing with people rather for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The product development in service science will become important for manufacturing industry. Therefore, the introduction of the "service science" concept is necessary in product development. This paper proposes a design improvement method based on HCD (Human Centered Design) concept, which can be introduced to middle/small enterprises, with the structured product concept. A case study of the operation panel design of home security system is discussed in this paper. This method is effective not only in making new products but also in improving developed products. Making a structured product concept is also effective to get consensus among the developers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the concerns of inclusivity with respect to technology are with the fragmenting effects upon our interaction and social practices of transferring and transforming knowledge when we use technology as part of our communication and decision-making processes. Through identifying and analysing these effects and the issues they raise for design and use of technology, the paper develops some basic principles of human-centred systems deemed essential for designing for inclusivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the challenges of running large scale international usability tests and attempts to provide useful information on how to effectively and efficiently design and administer these types of projects. The information in this paper is based on the experience of the three authors, who have all been involved in a number of large-scale international usability tests as managers of the projects, designers of the tests and as practitioners responsible for the collection, reduction, and analysis of user data. Practical advice is provided on how to best approach the many challenges of running these types of projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will look at the Challenge Workshop, a knowledge transfer model on the inclusive design process based on the seven DBA Inclusive Design Challenges organised at the Royal College of Art (RCA) since 2000 by the author in collaboration with the Design Business Association, the leading trade association for designers in the UK. This mentored annual competition sees leading UK design firms work with consumers with severe disabilities to develop innovative, inclusive and aspirational product and service prototypes for the mainstream market. It will focus on how this collaborative model has been further developed into creative workshops of varying lengths and iterations in different contexts in the UK, Japan, Israel and Singapore to inspire and inform designers, engineers and others of the innovative possibili-ties of inclusive design and in the process change their perceptions. The paper will also describe how the workshop has been adapted to and addressed the different knowledge transfer challenges of each cultural context and will show examples of some of the outstanding design proposals that have emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper authors review several fundamental issues necessary for the design of inclusive human-computer interaction systems. The main objective is to vindicate the adoption of the Universal Accessibility paradigm in the design of main stream applications. Given that the authors think that current technology and design methods and tools are mature enough for inclusive design, they studied the conditions for its full deployment and propose the elimination of the found obstacles. In this paper, after justifying the importance of the Design for All, the main restrictions to inclusive design are reviewed and the need for a user oriented approach is showed. Other crucial matters to ensure inclusive design, such as user full participation and ethical and social impact avoidance, are analyzed. To finish, the role of the Assistive technology, in relation to Design for All is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even with the introduction of computer technology, paper-based artifacts remain ubiquitous in hospital settings. The need to manually transfer and update information from the physical to the digital realm is a common practice among hospital staff, which, although usually well managed, at times becomes a source for errors and inconsistencies. This paper presents an augmented patient chart system that preserves the use of paper and allows capturing information directly to the system through the use of a digital pen. An evaluation of the system with 22 volunteers indicates a significant reduction in the number of errors while reading information, a significant increment on the accuracy while annotating data, as well as a trend towards less time spent while annotating data on the digital paper. Based on our results, we argue that the design preserves the advantages associated with paper while increasing the availability of information and its trustworthiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to e-Government services, such as welfare, housing and financial assistance is typically achieved through accessing, completing and submitting paper-based forms. Current UK e-Government strategies indicate that such service access forms will be made available online. With the aging population considered as a primary user of these services this paper promotes the need to establish older adults' online form design requirements. Building on previous research [see 8], the current investigation validates and extends previous online form design requirements for an aging user group. The paper opens with an overview of current UK e-Government initiatives and promotes the investigation of older adults' online form design requirements, not only to assist this vulnerable user group with independent living but also to support social inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there have been growing interest and activities of introducing wireless technologies into healthcare industry. Successful development and deployment of wireless e-Health (WEHealth) systems is geographically dependent in respect of national regulations, regional economic development, and available medial infrastructures and resources, etc. In this paper, the applications of wireless technologies into healthcare industry are investigated in China and UK respectively. Based on the case study of wireless healthcare in China and UK, this paper will analyze the impact of above mentioned factors on the integration of wireless technologies and healthcare applications, and propose possible solutions based on the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper we present the first evaluation results obtained in the framework of ALPE (Accessible Learning Platform for Europe - EC-029328) a market validation project partially funded by the European Commission through the European Community Programme "eTEN". During the first three months of the project, ALPE service is being customised to the needs of end-users in Spain, the U.K. and Greece. In addition, a small scale test of the service has already been performed by a group of visually and hearing impaired and adult learners coordinated by SIDAR Foundation. In this paper we describe i) ALPE service, including the platform and the courses offered, ii) the validation process and iii) the results from the initial end-user evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews several techniques we have discovered while trying to extend the Firefox browser to support people with visual, motor, reading, and cognitive disabilities. Our goal throughout has been to find ways to make on-the-fly transformations of Web content including adjustments of text and image size, text style, line and letter spacing, text foreground color, text background color, page background removal, content linearization, and reading text aloud. In this paper, we focus primarily on the changes we make to the browser's Document Object Model (DOM) to transform Web content. We review the kinds of approaches we have used to make DOM modifications sufficiently fast and error free. We highlight the problems posed by Web pages with a mix of static and dynamic content generated by client-side scripts and by Web pages that use both fixed and relative placement of page elements, pages of the sort we expect to see in increasingly in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper discusses research on using multimodal interaction to improve usability of mobile data entry. This can benefit users of mobile technologies such as mobile workers, construction crews, and students collecting data during field trips. The evaluation of a mobile multimodal application for construction field work was conducted in the laboratory. Designing this laboratory experiment required a detailed definition of the type of device to be used, user requirements, including interaction techniques and usage context. During this work we discovered a need to develop a generic evaluation framework to assist in the selection of mobile technology and interaction techniques for further testing. The development of such a framework for municipal inspections with a focus on field inspections is discussed. This paper presents examples of using our framework to gain a better understanding of the contextual aspects influencing the feasibility of using mobile technology in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One very important aspect of computer programming is reading source code. Whilst this is a relatively simple process for sighted programmers, for blind computer programmers this presents a significant problem. Navigating through and comprehending often thousands of lines of code can be time consuming and difficult. Current development environments have many features that aid the reading of source code for sighted users, however, most of these features are visual in nature and are not translated well into audio by general screen-reader applications. Research has suggested that the use of fisheye views could aid navigation and enhance performance in program comprehension activities for blind programmers. This paper reports the results of a study into creating a better fisheye view of Java source code, by improving the method used to determine each line's 'global importance' or 'Level of Detail' (LOD). The traditional LOD determination method uses only the indentation level of a line to calculate its overall importance. This paper describes the results of the study, and suggests some of the issues which may need to be considered in developing an improved LOD calculation for programming source code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper described a system which could measure cursor movement and control site motion simultaneously. In addition to evaluate a client's pointing and selecting proficiency, CAT Motor system, developed on the basis of the previous CAT system, was also used to detect the motion of his control site. This feature could provide clinical professionals more detailed information when comparing the difference of performance among devices. The CAT Motor system consisted of four basic types of mouse operating skills, including clicking, cursor moving, cursor moving and clicking, and dragging. The CAT Motor recorded the location and the response of the pointing device and captured the picture of the control site synchronally. Then, the system visualized the results of cursor moving and control site motion on the screen. The CAT Motor system not only provided the professionals with an objective mean of evaluating specific difficulties of mouse operating difficulties, but also allowed them to evaluate the effort of the motor control training. Besides, this paper had some suggestions for the research in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the evaluation of an intuitive mobile environment controller. Through its 3D-based user interface, the PDA based controller provides the user with mobile access to her/his physical environment and ambient media. The goal of this usability evaluation is to test the performance and analyse the user acceptance of 3D-based interaction systems compared with traditional WIMP-based controllers. At first this paper describes the interaction model which has been evaluated. Then it explains the experiment and the approach of the evaluation. Finally we present and discuss our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a preliminary research conducted in 2005 into the current level of web accessibility in China. We evaluated a few websites which are meant to be information portals for the visually impaired. Results of the evaluations show none of them is compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1) [1] Level A checkpoints and most of them are inaccessible at all. Causes behind this situation may include lack of legislation from the government and lack of accessibility awareness of web designers. However, we found Chinese Web accessibility also faces more of a challenge as a result of the complications of Chinese language itself. We hope this paper could bring the attention of both Chinese government and Chinese web designers on web accessibility and also help international stakeholders to understand the facts in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of an exploratory study, which aimed to devise a means of improving web accessibility for users with impairments. It looks at how web pages can be rated for accessibility using specific algorithms. These algorithms analyse and select web pages according to user preferences. The study gathered user defined ratings of web page elements, for different categories of special needs' users that affect accessibility. The algorithms were then created using the results of these ratings. The paper also demonstrates the work in progress in relation to the extension of the Computer Aided Internet Navigation (CAIN) system, which aims to improve accessibility to web based information by re-ordering search results according to user needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]