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Association for Computing Machinery

Articles Tagged: Human Factors

Articles & Features

Don't change a thing

As a student of computer science, there's a significant chance you will end up working in software development after graduation. Despite whether your career path takes you into industry or academia, you're likely to have some kind of interaction with software development companies or organizations, if only in trying to get the most out of a project or collaboration.

By Michael DiBernardo, September 2009

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

Dynamic displays

While touchscreens allow extensive programmability and have become ubiquitous in today's gadgetry, such configurations lack the tactile sensations and feedback that physical buttons provide. As a result, these devices require more attention to use than their button-enabled counterparts. Still, the displays provide the ultimate interface flexibility and thus afford a much larger design space to application developers.

By Chris Harrison, Scott Hudson, September 2009

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

HCI and theology

By Steve Clough, March 2009

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

AmazonViz

This article describes a technique to visualize query results, representing purchase orders placed on Amazon.com, along a traditional 2-D scatter plot and a space-filling spiral. We integrate 3-D objects that vary their spatial placement, color, and texture properties into a visualization algorithm. This algorithm represents important aspects of a purchase order based on experimental results from human vision, computer graphics, and psychology. The resulting visual abstractions are used by viewers to rapidly and effectively explore and analyze the underlying purchase orders data.

By Amit Prakash Sawant, Christopher G. Healey, Dongfeng Chen, Rada Chirkova, March 2009

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Exploring global terrorism data

By Joonghoon Lee, December 2008

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Towards a user-friendly semantic formalism for natural language generation

Computational semantics has become an interesting and important branch of computational linguistics. Born from the fusion of formal semantics and computer science, it is concerned with the automated processing of meaning associated with natural language expressions [2]. Systems of semantic representation, hereafter referred to as semantic formalisms, exist to describe meaning underlying natural language expressions. To date, several formalisms have been defined by researchers from a number of diverse disciplines including philosophy, logic, psychology and linguistics. These formalisms have a number of different applications in the realm of computer science. For example, in machine translation a sentence could be parsed and translated into a series of semantic expressions, which could then be used to generate an utterance with the same meaning in a different language [14]. This paper presents two existing formalisms and examines their user-friendliness. Additionally, a new form of semantic representation is proposed with wide coverage and user-friendliness suitable for a computational linguist.

By Craig Thomas, December 2008

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Challenges in HCI

By Kibum Kim, December 2005

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HCI Applications for aiding children with mental disorders

By Hossein Mobahi, Karrie G. Karahalios, December 2005

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When news is more than what makes headlines

By Kayre Hylton, Mary Beth Rosson, John Carroll, Craig Ganoe, December 2005

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Introduction

By William Stevenson, August 2004

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Mixed nuts

By Sid Stamm, August 2004

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Requirements engineering

By Kristina Winbladh, August 2004

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Introduction

By Jeremy T. Lanman, April 2004

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Multilevel security

By Stephany Filimon, April 2004

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Cognitive science

By Ronald Laurids Boring, December 2003

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Literary freedom

By Bryan Stroube, September 2003

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Virtual communities and team formation

By Yanru Zhang, Michael Weiss, September 2003

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Using the web to enhance and transform education

By Michael Hulme, Michael Locasto, September 2003

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Networking

By Kostas Pentikousis, June 2003

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Game-state fidelity across distributed interactive games

By Aaron McCoy, Declan Delaney, Tomas Ward, June 2003

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Zero configuration networking

By David Stirling, Firas Al-Ali, June 2003

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Introduction

By Michael A. Grasso, March 2003

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Introduction

By William Stevenson, December 2002

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Maurice Elzas on simulation ethics

By Kostas Pentikousis, December 2002

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COLUMN: Columns & reviews

Introduction

By Olivier St-Cyr, September 2002

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FEATURE: Features

Map-based navigation in a graphical MOO

By Wendy A. Schafer, Doug A. Bowman, John M. Carroll, September 2002

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The grading system of the real world

By Lynellen D. S. Perry, June 2002

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An intellectual property course for CS majors

By John P. Kozma, Thomas Dion, September 2001

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Survive and thrive at a job fair

By Jessica Ledbetter, September 2001

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Unified communication systems

By Christopher Andrews, September 2001

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Ask Jack

By Jack Wilson, December 2000

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A day in the life of…

By Hal Berghel, December 2000

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Ask Jack

By Jack Wilson, September 2000

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How does your job fit?

By Lynellen D. S. Perry, September 2000

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Signing electronic contracts

Electronic commerce faces the problem of signing electronic contracts. Three approaches for handling electronic contracts include 1) no trusted third party protocols, 2) strongly-trusted third party protocols and 3) weakly-trusted third party protocols. A secondary problem facing electronic commerce is self-enforcing contract design.

By David Molnar, September 2000

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Cookies

By Michael Nelte, Elton Saul, September 2000

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Designing an e-commerce site for users

By Norbert J. Kubilus, September 2000

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ACM awards banquet 2000, vicariously

By Lynellen D. S. Perry, July 2000

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Introduction: WYSIWYG—more or less

By Fernando Berzal Galiano, June 2000

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Design of an interactive tutorial for logic and logical circuits

By Jeremy Kindy, John Shuping, Patricia Yali Underhill, David John, March 2000

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Ask Jack

By Jack Wilson, March 2000

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Women writers project

By Benjamin Fan, November 1999

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Ask Jack: career Q & A

By Jack Wilson, November 1999

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What's new at crossroads?

By Lynellen D. S. Perry, November 1999

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Ask Jack

By Jack Wilson, September 1999

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The Texas Tech tornado cluster

By Per Andersen, September 1999

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Books reviews

By Lynellen D. S. Perry, Erika Orrick, June 1999

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Protecting the integrity of agents

By Michael J. Grimley, Brian D. Monroe, June 1999

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The Damocles Sword of Academic Publishing

Doctoral students often find it hard to understand at what level of productivity they should be. Through an analysis of resums of doctoral students in the Management Information Systems (MIS) field, a better understanding of what is expected of current students as compared to former students is achieved. Both conference presentations and publications in journals are examined. Finally, there is an examination of whether the quantity of publications can be related to the ranking of the school that a student attends.

By Kai Larsen, November 1998

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

Web site review: the Ada project

By Lynellen D. S. Perry, September 1998

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Ask Jack: careerline Q & A

By Jack Wilson, September 1998

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A formative evaluation of scenario-based tools for learning object-oriented design

Advances in computing have awakened a century old teaching philosophy: learner-centered education. This philosophy is founded on the premise that people learn best when engrossed in the topic, participating in activities that motivate learning and help them to synthesize their own understanding. We consider how the object-oriented design (OOD) learning tools developed by Rosson and Carroll [5] facilitate active learning of this sort. We observed sixteen students as they worked through a set of user interaction scenarios about a blackjack game. We discuss how the features of these learning tools influenced the students' efforts to learn the basic constructs of OOD.

By Hope D. Harley, Cheryl D. Seals, Mary Beth Rosson, September 1998

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

Road crew

By Lynellen D. S. Perry, September 1998

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Multimedia systems: introduction

By Erika Dawn Gernand, May 1998

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

RoboCup

By Hiroaki Kitano, Minoru Asada, Itsuki Noda, Hitoshi Matsubara, April 1998

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

CMUnited

Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain involving multiple agents that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment to achieve specific objectives. This article describes CMUnited, the team of small robotic agents that we developed to enter the RoboCup-97 competition. We designed and built the robotic agents, devised the appropriate vision algorithm, and developed and implemented algorithms for strategic collaboration between the robots in an uncertain and dynamic environment. The robots can organize themselves in formations, hold specific roles, and pursue their goals. In game situations, they have demonstrated their collaborative behaviors on multiple occasions. The robots can also switch roles to maximize the overall performance of the team. We present an overview of the vision processing algorithm which successfully tracks multiple moving objects and predicts trajectories. The paper then focuses on the agents' behaviors ranging from low-level individual behaviors to coordinated, strategic team behaviors. CMUnited won the RoboCup-97 small-robot competition at IJCAI-97 in Nagoya, Japan.

By Manuela Veloso, Peter Stone, Kwun Han, Sorin Achim, April 1998

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

Ask Jack: Internet career

By Jack Wilson, April 1998

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Road crew

By John Cavazos, April 1998

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Road crew

By John Cavazos, November 1997

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Everything's coming up virtual

By Susan E. Yager, October 1997

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

Ask Jack: skill development

By Jack Wilson, October 1997

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Road crew

By John Cavazos, October 1997

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Faster 3D game graphics by not drawing what is not seen

The increasing demands of 3D game realism - in terms of both scene complexity and speed of animation - are placing excessive strain on the current low-level, computationally expensive graphics drawing operations. Despite these routines being highly optimized, specialized, and often being implemented in assembly language or even in hardware, the ever-increasing number of drawing requests for a single frame of animation causes even these systems to become overloaded, degrading the overall performance. To offset these demands and dramatically reduce the load on the graphics subsystem, we present a system that quickly and efficiently finds a large portion of the game world that is not visible to the viewer for each frame of animation, and simply prevents it from being sent to the graphics system. We build this searching mechanism for unseen parts from common and easily implemented graphics algorithms.

By Kenneth E. Hoff, May 1997

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

Road crew

By John Cavazos, May 1997

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

Techniques & tools for using color in computer interface design

Contemporary computers predominantly employ graphical user interfaces (GUIS) and colour is a major componenet of the GUI. Every man-machine interface is composed of two major parts:the man and the machine [4]. Color interfaces are no different in that they are also based on two parts, the Human visual system (HVS) and a color display system. A theoretical examination of these two components establishes a foundation for developing practical guidelines for color interfaces. This paper will briefly examine theoretical aspects of both components and established techniques and tools for the effective use of color for software interface design.

By Peggy Wright, Diane Mosser-Wooley, Bruce Wooley, April 1997

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

User interface correctness

By Ian MacColl, David Carrington, April 1997

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

Human factors in haptic interfaces

By Christopher M. Smith, April 1997

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

An investigation of current virtual reality interfaces

Virtual Reality hype is becoming a large part of everyday life. This paper explores the components of actual virtual reality systems, critiquing each in terms of human factors. The hardware and software of visual, aural, and haptic input and feedback are considered. Technical and human factor difficulties are discussed and some potential solutions are offered.

By Lynellen D. S. Perry, Christopher M. Smith, Steven Yang, April 1997

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

Ask Jack: negotiating

By Jack Wilson, April 1997

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Computer games: introduction

By John Cavazos, November 1996

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The story of XPilot

By Bjorn Stabell, Ken Ronny Schouten, November 1996

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The video game [R]evolution

By Sarah Elizabeth Burcham, November 1996

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Computer game marketing bias

By Melissa Chaika, November 1996

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Research posters 101

By Lorrie Faith Cranor, November 1996

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Programming contest strategies

By Fabian Ernst, Jeroen Moelands, Seppo Pieterse, November 1996

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Book Reviews: game programming

By Lynellen D. S. Perry, November 1996

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Road crew

By John Cavazos, November 1996

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An interview with Drew McDermott

By Kentaro Toyama, Drew McDermott, September 1996

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Emotionware

By Lynellen D. S. Perry, September 1996

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Applications of AI in education

By Joseph Beck, Mia Stern, Erik Haugsjaa, September 1996

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Ask Jack: finding a job

By Jack Wilson, September 1996

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Road crew

By Lorrie Faith Cranor, September 1996

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Electronic voting

By Lorrie Faith Cranor, April 1996

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

Mutual authenticating protocol with key distribution in client/server environment

The explosive growth of networked and internetworked computer systems during the past decade has brought about a need for increased protection mechanisms. This paper discusses three authentication protocols that incorporate the use of methods that present effective user authentication. The first two protocols have been previously discussed in the literature; the third protocol draws from the first two and others to produce an authentication scheme that provides both mutual authentication and secure key distribution which is easy to use, is compatible with present operating systems, is transparent across systems, and provides password file protection.

By Charles Cavaiani, Jim Alves-Foss, April 1996

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

An interview with Brad Templeton

By George E. Hatoun, Brad Templeton, February 1996

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Computer-based decision-making

By Jeff Robbins, November 1995

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Review:Minerva's Machine

By Sara M. Carlstead, November 1995

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“So how are your hands?”

By Rob Jackson, November 1995

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Opinion: why are people afraid of computers?

By Scott Ramsey MacDonald, November 1995

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email

By Lorrie Faith Cranor, November 1995

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Road crew

By Lorrie Faith Cranor, November 1995

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Digital liberties

By Lorrie Faith Cranor, May 1995

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Direct democracy

By Adam Lake, May 1995

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net.love

By Sara M. Carlstead, May 1995

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How to succeed in graduate school

By Marie desJardins, February 1995

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Opinion: operating system wars

By Bradley M. Kuhn, February 1995

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Road crew

By Lorrie Faith Cranor, February 1995

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

How to succeed in graduate school

This paper attempts to raise some issues that are important for graduate students to be successful and to get as much out of the process as possible, and for advisors who wish to help their students be successful. The intent is not to provide prescriptive advice -- no formulas for finishing a thesis or twelve-step programs for becoming a better advisor are given -- but to raise awareness on both sides of the advisor-student relationship as to what the expectations are and should be for this relationship, what a graduate student should expect to accomplish, common problems, and where to go if the advisor is not forthcoming.

By Marie desJardins, December 1994

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library

Interview! Stephen R. Schach

By Saveen Reddy, Stephen R. Schach, December 1994

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Software review: Doom 2

By Terry White, December 1994

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Information superwhichway?

By Craig Pfeifer, September 1994

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Software review: tie fighter

By Terry White, September 1994

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Road crew

By Saveen Reddy, September 1994

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library