▶ Addresses the accessibility, usability, and, ultimately, acceptability of Information Society Technologies by anyone, anywhere, at anytime, and through any media and device. ▶ Focuses on theoretical, methodological, and empirical research, of both technological and non-technological nature. ▶ Features papers that report on theories, methods, tools, empirical results, reviews, case studies, and best-practice examples.

Universal access in the information society

This paper provides a comprehensive review of explanations in recommender systems. We highlight seven possible advantages of an explanation facility, and describe how existing measures can be used to evaluate the quality of explanations. Since explanations are not independent of the recommendation process, we consider how the ways recommendations are presented may affect explanations. Next, we look at different ways of interacting with explanations. The paper is illustrated with examples of explanations throughout, where possible from existing applications.

A Survey of Explanations in Recommender Systems

Exploiting temporal context has been proved to be an effective approach to improve recommendation performance, as shown, e.g. in the Netflix Prize competition. Time-aware recommender systems (TARS) are indeed receiving increasing attention. A wide range of approaches dealing with the time dimension in user modeling and recommendation strategies have been proposed. In the literature, however, reported results and conclusions about how to incorporate and exploit time information within the recommendation processes seem to be contradictory in some cases. Aiming to clarify and address existing discrepancies, in this paper we present a comprehensive survey and analysis of the state of the art on TARS. The analysis show that meaningful divergences appear in the evaluation protocols used--metrics and methodologies. We identify a number of key conditions on offline evaluation of TARS, and based on these conditions, we provide a comprehensive classification of evaluation protocols for TARS. Moreover, we propose a methodological description framework aimed to make the evaluation process fair and reproducible. We also present an empirical study on the impact of different evaluation protocols on measuring relative performances of well-known TARS. The results obtained show that different uses of the above evaluation conditions yield to remarkably distinct performance and relative ranking values of the recommendation approaches. They reveal the need of clearly stating the evaluation conditions used to ensure comparability and reproducibility of reported results. From our analysis and experiments, we finally conclude with methodological issues a robust evaluation of TARS should take into consideration. Furthermore we provide a number of general guidelines to select proper conditions for evaluating particular TARS.

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Time-aware recommender systems: a comprehensive survey and analysis of existing evaluation protocols

A case study of Augmented Reality simulation system application in a chemistry course

The state of immersive technology research: A literature analysis

Motivation is an important factor in modern education and it is claimed that a high level of motivation is a prerequisite for success. Augmented reality (AR) technologies are creating a new kind of user experience (UX) able to increase students’ interest and engagement in the learning process. This study is one of the few attempts to investigate the role of perceived enjoyment in the students’ acceptance of an augmented reality teaching platform (ARTP). Our model captures both extrinsic (perceived usefulness and ease of use) and intrinsic (perceived enjoyment) motivators so that students’s intention to use a new learning environment may be explained.. The model was tested by employing structural equation modelling. The results showed that perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment have a significant impact on the behavioural intention to use ARTP, while perceived ease of use is not a significant direct antecedent. The perceived enjoyment has been proved to be the key influencing factor of intention to use the ARTP.

/pdf/the-role-of-perceived-enjoyment-in-the-students-acceptance-317ve25pyw.pdf

The Role of Perceived Enjoyment in the Students’ Acceptance of an Augmented Reality Teaching Platform: a Structural Equation Modelling Approach

interpretation Concrete interpretation General guidelines Specific guidelines Standards Compilations of guidelines Style guides Ergonomic algorithms Design rules Figure 7 Guideline interpretation according to guideline source 6 Conclusion In this chapter, we highlighted that a profusion of web usability guidelines exists that does not facilitate the designer’s task to select and apply appropriate guidelines. Usability guidelines dedicated to the web should be clearly differentiated from guidelines for traditional GUI applications. Some sources, as standards, pretend to be general, embracing enough to accommodate a wide variety of design issues. While this assumption is probably true for traditional applications, it is unlikely to be the case for Web usability. Differences discussed in UI design and development both for GUI and the Web, the emergence of new questions for the web that were unprecedented, the rapid evolution of guideline types suggest that web usability guidelines should be treated separately. For example, GUI mainly focuses on guidelines for controls, while the Web divides guidelines for the navigation (the privileged interaction mode) and for forms, although Java applications can be considered similarly to GUI applications. Many wholes in usability knowledge still exist for the Web. To identify them, Basden (2003) used Dooyeweerd’s notion of irreducible aspects: the philosopher introduced a series of 15 aspect, each having a set of laws that enable meaningful functioning in everyday living. Basden (2003) then compared the Yale Style Guide (Lynch & Horton, 1999) with other style guides for the web to discover (Fig. 8) that some aspects are largely represented (e.g., spatial and movement in a web site are well described), while others remain underrepresented (e.g., the juridical aspect that discusses legal issues for the Web is rarely found, as well as ethical issues). Fig. 8 shows potential areas where a need for guidelines exists that is not filled, thus providing an opportunity for researchers.

State of the Art of Web Usability Guidelines

This chapter presents the recommendation techniques applied in Personal Program Guide (PPG). This is a system generating personalized Electronic Program Guides for Digital TV. The PPGmanages a user model that stores the estimates of the individual user’s preferences for TV program categories. This model results from the integration of di¡erent preference acquisitionmodules that handle explicit user preferences, stereotypical information about TV viewers, and information about the user’s viewing behavior. The observation of the individual viewing behavior is particularly easy because the PPG runs on the set-top box and is deeply integrated with the TV playing and the video recording services o¡ered by that type of device.

Personalized Digital Television

With the explosion of devices, computing platforms, contextual conditions, user interfaces become more confronted to a need to be adapted to multiple configurations of the context of use In the past, many techniques were developed to perform a task analysis for obtaining a single user interface that is adapted for a single context of use As this user interface may become unusable for other contexts of use, there emerges a need for modelling tasks which can be supported in multiple contexts of use, considering multiple combinations of the contextual conditions For this purpose, the concept of unit task is exploited to identify a point where traditional task models can break into two parts: a contextinsensitive part and a context-sensitive part A widespread task model notation is then used to examine, discuss, and criticise possible configurations for modelling a context-sensitive task as a whole One particular form is selected that attempts to achieve a clear separation of concern between the context-insensitive part, the context-sensitive part, and a new decision tree which branches to context-sensitive tasks, depending on contextual conditions The questions of factoring out possible elements that are common across multiple contexts of use and representation of the resulting task model are discussed

Task Modelling for Context-Sensitive User Interfaces

Multiple versions and expressions of task models used in user interface design, specification, and verification of interactive systems have led to an ontological problem of identifying and understanding concepts which are similar or different across models This variety raises a particular problem in model-based approaches for designing user interfaces as different task models, possibly with different vocabularies, different formalisms, different concepts are exploited: no software tool is able today to accommodate any task models as input for a user-centred design process DOLPHIN is a software architecture that attempts to solve this problem by introducing uniform task models A series of representative task models was first selected The meta-models of these individual task models were then designed and merged into a uniformed task meta-model Semantic mapping rules between individual task meta-models and the uniformed task meta-model allow DOLPHIN to read and understand any potential task model towards its exploitation in a model-based approach

Costin Pribeanu

Papers

The Role of Perceived Enjoyment in the Students’ Acceptance of an Augmented Reality Teaching Platform: a Structural Equation Modelling Approach

State of the Art of Web Usability Guidelines

Personalized Digital Television

Task Modelling for Context-Sensitive User Interfaces

Towards Uniformed Task Models in a Model-Based Approach