A survey in the selection and capability of personal computers for student use

In a larger perspective, this paper investigates architects' and contractors' attitude towards universal design in the competition phase of the largest school building projects. Three Design Build school competitions with negotiations and one limited architecture competition are examined in terms of to what degree the competitors are willing to invest in lifts. The Norwegian Building Code requires a lift in all public buildings with two or more storeys, and the lift should be easy to locate with its access close to the main entrance. However, a school building often has more main entrances, as the different age groups each tend to have their own entrances. This seems to put the competitors in a dilemma concerning the correct interpretation: Is it sufficient with simply the one lift at the official main entrance, or is it necessary with more lifts in connection with the entrances for the different age groups? The results show that despite the requirements in the Building Codes and the competition briefs, the competitors tend to prioritize lower bids in favor of optimal universally designed buildings. The results also show that any school design, with some reasonable effort, could reach a lift detour of maximum three minutes when using the calculation model applied in this research. However, from a lift user's point of view, any kind of detour may be experienced socially excluding and unacceptable.

Developers of museum service systems want to know what users think about their systems and they often design questionnaires to capture users' opinions. However, there are usually serious gaps between what developers want to know and what the users really think about the system. The present research aims to develop a questionnaire that takes into consideration the user's point of view, including opinions of people who do not want to use the system. We put the plan into practice by gathering opinions such as feelings, demands, and expectations about the systems from the general public.

This paper reports on a senior-level multidisciplinary course titled Innovative Product Design at Florida Atlantic University aimed at teaching and learning one aspect of innovative thinking: Design of products or services from the user viewpoint, i.e., focusing on benefits and ease of use, rather than on product features. Specific objectives of the course are: • To study well-known principles in design interaction, i.e., basic rules that allow design from the user point of view. • To enhance innovative problem solving skills. • To explore creative and innovative processes in product design. • To practice methodologies for design of products and services. • To engage student teams in the design of assistive technologies. This course introduces students from engineering, computer science and business majors to methodologies in design of products and services. Lectures, discussions, and problem solving exercises are used to explore the creative/innovative process in product design. Student teams design assistive technology products based on their knowledge and enhanced innovative skills. For a project to be approved, each team had to interview at least five potential users. The paper focuses mainly on engaging activities, some of which are new. It describes hands-on interactive class exercises, teaming activities, homework assignments, presentations, and projects, most of which relate to the user's point of view. The paper shares some available formal and informal preliminary feedback/evaluation of class topics, material and activities. In order to engage students in more real-life experiences, design experts and specialists in assistive technologies visited the class to teach and mentor students. Among the visitors were the chief product designer of Motorola, and the director of Stand Among Friends, a non-profit organization that helps people with disabilities. The paper shares students’ feedback. They liked the fact that the course teaches design from a totally different perspective, i.e., the user – an unfamiliar aspect to most of them. For some, the concept of design with the user in mind was an “eye opening” experience. They enjoyed prototyping activities (and asked for more) and hands-on experiences that led to prototyping. Open environment and openness to new, simple and absurd ideas were highly appreciated. They have asked for smaller scale projects and for more class time to work on them.

Leveraging a complex infrastructure such as the computing Grids requires an appropriate level of monitoring. Since it is a technology in development, the current computing Grid middleware offer very little monitoring capabilities from the users' point of view. Making the Grid closer to the users requires that the users have deeper insight of what is happening with the computational jobs they submit. In this paper we present a novel tool for monitoring the gLite based Grid infrastructure from the users' perspective.

In Virtual Reality, a number of studies have been conducted to assess the influence of avatar appearance, avatar control and user point of view on the Sense of Embodiment (SoE) towards a virtual avatar. However, such studies tend to explore each factor in isolation. This paper aims to better understand the inter-relations among these three factors by conducting a subjective matching experiment. In the presented experiment ( n=40), participants had to match a given "optimal" SoE avatar configuration (realistic avatar, full-body motion capture, first-person point of view), starting by a "minimal" SoE configuration (minimal avatar, no control, third-person point of view), by iteratively increasing the level of each factor. The choices of the participants provide insights about their preferences and perception over the three factors considered. Moreover, the subjective matching procedure was conducted in the context of four different interaction tasks with the goal of covering a wide range of actions an avatar can do in a VE. The paper also describes a baseline experiment ( n=20) which was used to define the number and order of the different levels for each factor, prior to the subjective matching experiment (e.g. different degrees of realism ranging from abstract to personalised avatars for the visual appearance). The results of the subjective matching experiment show that point of view and control levels were consistently increased by users before appearance levels when it comes to enhancing the SoE. Second, several configurations were identified with equivalent SoE as the one felt in the optimal configuration, but vary between the tasks. Taken together, our results provide valuable insights about which factors to prioritize in order to enhance the SoE towards an avatar in different tasks, and about configurations which lead to fulfilling SoE in VE.

User profiles are the main component of adaptive information retrieval systems. We are identifying in this paper main limits of the usage of user profiles. We are discussing about these limits in underlying some solutions and taking into account two points of view: the application point of view and the user point of view.

Much has been said about optical storage disk and mass storage systems by various suppliers. However, very little has been said about these systems from the user’s point of view. This paper discusses what one user thinks the “super system” should look like: what the required inputs, the operation, and the actual retrieval mechanisms are. It discusses integrating the system to current operating procedures and the impact on manufacturing, engineering, and marketing. The risks and concerns from the user standpoint are also discussed. This paper deals with an engineering drawing data base but it can easily be applied to any mass document storage system.

Electronic Health Records: Privacy and Security Issues in a Comparative Perspective

This research considers innovation from the user point of view in order to enhance the design and commercialization of technology-based products. Previous studies predominantly analyse innovation as a function of technology advantage; that is how new competitors who have advanced research and development (R&D) can challenge the incumbents’ position. However little is understood about the potentially ambiguous position that technology-based products may have on the market due to the diverse perception that different market segments may hold of such products. Consequently innovations studies are limited in overlooking innovation as a function of users’/consumers’ perception. The findings of this research reveal that innovation may be disruptive and evolutionary at the same time for different consumer groups. Consumers’ perception of technology products can influence their decisionmaking pre-purchase as well as their level of adoption. Analogical learning, or the inability to apply it, is in part responsible for the choices that consumers make when considering whether to purchase, use and discard technological products. Exposure and familiarity with the product category are also factors that influence consumers’ perception, especially among the ageing segment of the population. The ambiguity of products’ perception represents an unusual puzzle for businesses that are now required to alter design features and marketing communication strategies to appeal to different consumers despite the fact that the product is inherently the same from a business point of view.

For the two last decades, people have tried to provide practical electronic cash schemes, with more or less success. Indeed, the most secure ones generally suffer from inefficiency, largely due to the use of restrictive blind signatures, on the other hand efficient schemes often suffer from serious security drawbacks. In this paper, we propose both a new tool providing scalable anonymity at a low cost, and a new Internet business: Anonymity Providers.Those Anonymity Providers certify re-encrypted data after having been convinced of the validity of the content, but without knowing anything about this latter. It is a very useful third party in many applications (e.g. for revocable anonymous electronic cash, where a coin would be a certified encryption of the user's identity, such that a Revocation Center, and only it, can recover this identity, if needed).With this new tool, each user can get the required anonymity level. depending on the available time, computation and/or money amounts. Furthermore, the Anonymity Provider may be a new type of business over the Internet, profitable for everybody: - from the provider point of view as he can charge the service; - from the user point of view as he can obtain a high level of anonymity at low computational cost. Moreover, a user who does not require anonymity has no extra computation to perform.This technique is quite efficient because of its optimistic orientation: in case of honest use, everything is very efficient. Some slightly more heavy processes have to be performed in case of fraud detection, but with overwhelming tracing success.

BB-Pascapanen website is an official website of Balai Besar Pascapanen Bogor whose mission is to be able to integrate information as a research institute producing technology and innovation of agricultural post-harvest that supports the realization of food sovereignty and farmers' welfare. Based on the regulation and to accommodate those missions the website has been developed. The purpose of this study is to analyze the quality of the BB-Pascapanen website through a 2QCV3Q model. This model was chosen because it has a multi-party approach involving three actors in the development of a website, website owner, web developer and user which will make an analysis of website quality management implemented more detail. The results of the analysis show from institution and web developer point of view that the feasibility dimension needs performance improvement. While the other dimensions from user point of view that need to be improved are the dimension of identity (attributes of website uniqueness, Impressum distinctness), content (attribute of information detail and accuracy), services (attribute of correspondence feature), locations (attribute of availability of Link, URL easy to remember, easy searching in website, addresses written in website exists in google map, hotline), and usability (attribute of layout structure, orientation navigation and response, download time).

This paper summarizes the results from a PhD thesis concerned with the comparison between traditional and new three-dimensional (3D) surveying techniques from a user point of view. Three types of 3D surveying methods were tested. The three methods are manual survey combined with photographic texturing, 3D touch probe and 3D laser scanner. A heritage-related object was picked according to a given method For a user point of view, e.g. an architect or a 3D photographer, the knowledge of these different methods is fundamental in order to match a given object to be surveyed with the optimal survey procedure that will take full advantage of the data that the survey supplies to that user. Obviously the knowledge of the different methods is essential but so is the purpose of the project itself and the planning phase.

The goal of the paper is to discuss which mobility services need to be offered to FPLMTS/UMTS users. In fact, personal mobility needs depend on user types and mobility patterns. To define mobility services for FPLMTS/UMTS users, two approaches are possible: the first one is the personal communicator, a small terminal combining a multitude of applications and services that allows you to make and receive calls everywhere; the second one concerns the Universal Personal Telecommunication service which enables users to access telecommunication services on the basis of a unique personal network transparent UPT number across multiple networks at any terminal. These two approaches are discussed from the user point of view.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

On the necessity of improving the environmental impacts of furniture and appliances in net-zero energy buildings

We introduce a measure to compute similarity between two sequences containing accesses to Web pages, to be exploited in a clustering approach for grouping sessions of accesses to a Web site. The notion of sequence similarity is parametric to the sequence topology, and the similarity among Web pages within the sequences. In our formalization, two Web pages are similar if they can be considered synonymies not only from a content point of view, but also from a usage point of view, i.e., if users exhibit the same behavior on both pages. The refined notion of page similarity, as well as the related notion of sequence siilarity, are envisaged to be effective in the application of a centroid-based clustering technique to the personalization of Web experience.