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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 | In the Digital Edition
Tags: Human Factors, Management, Programming teams, Project and People Management, Theory

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 | In the Digital Edition
Tags: Design, Human Factors, Image displays, Management, Theory, User Interfaces, User/Machine Systems

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

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library | In the Digital Edition
Tags: Commercial services, Design, Human Factors, Management, Theory, Web-based services, World Wide Web

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

PDF | HTML | In the Digital Library | In the Digital Edition
Tags: Design, Evaluation/methodology, Human Factors, Language generation, Language models, Management, Natural language, Performance, Semantic networks, User-centered design

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