User Involvement

It has been argued that free software and open source projects benefit from a high level of user involvement. Users influence the direction of a project through feature requests, and their identification of bugs and defects in the software contributes to high levels of quality. In this chapter we present a number of statistical analyses based on over 7,000 defect reports that have been recorded about the free software project Debian. These analyses are used to make observations on the effectivity of the open source development process used by projects such as Debian and lead to recommendations on how to improve this process.

Although user involvement is frequently practiced in companies, the research findings regarding its benefits for innovation are contradictory. This article experimentally assesses the contributions made by users in comparison with professional service developers and examines how the implementation of user involvement affects the outcome. During periods of 12 days, three different groups were assigned the task of generating ideas for end user telecom services. One group consisted of professional de signers, whereas the other two consisted of ordinary users. The users in one of the groups coped with idea creation by themselves, whereas the other group consulted a service design expert at two controlled meetings who provided feedback regarding technical feasibility. Involving users makes the ideas more original, holding a higher perceived user value, but the users’ideas are less producible on aver-age. The outcome was also affected by how user involvement was implemented. Scholarly and...

Edition of natural images usually asks for considerable user involvement, being segmentation one of the main challenges. This paper describes an unified graph-based framework for fast, precise and accurate interactive image segmentation. The method divides segmentation into object recognition, enhancement and extraction. Recognition is done by the user when markers are selected inside and outside the object. Enhancement increases the dissimilarities between object and background and Extraction separates them. Enhancement is done by a fuzzy pixel classifier and it has a great impact in the number of markers required for extraction. In view of minimizing user involvement, we focus this paper on a comparative study among popular classifiers for enhancement, conducting experiments with several natural images and seven users.

This paper introduces a real-time tracking system of human arm motion, specifically intent to be used for homebased rehabilitation. Both vision and inertial sensors are employed in this system to track the arm movement in 3D and in real time. Different data modalities from two sensors are fused by using arm structure relationship and geometry information. The occlusion problem, which is one of the most difficult issues in most of vision only tracking systems, is well dealt with by combining the geometry information of the subject and multiple sensors in our proposed system. The experimental results show our system can track the 3D arm motion in real time and has acceptable accuracy, compared with the commercial markerbased system, CODA.

This paper is a Case Study of user involvement in the requirements speci cation for project ISLE: Interactive Spoken Language Education. Developers of Spoken Language Dialogue Systems should involve users from the outset, particularly if the aim is to develop novel solutions for a generic target application area or market. As well as target endusers, SLDS developers should identify and consult "meta-level" domain experts with expertise in human-to-human dialogue in the target domain. In our case, English language teachers and publishers provided generic knowledge of learners' dialogue preferences; other applications have analogous domain language experts. These domain language experts can help to pin down a domain-speci c sublanguage which ts the constraints of current speech recognition technology: linguistically-naive end-users may expect unconstrained conversational English, but in practice dialogue interactions have to be constrained in vocabulary and syntax. User consultation also highlighted a need to consider how to integrate speech input and output with other modes of interaction and processing; in our case the input speech signal is processed by speech recogniser, stress and mispronunciation detectors, and output responses are text and graphics as well as speech. This suggests a need to revisit the de nition of "dialogue": other SLDS developers should also consider the merits of multimodality as an adjunct to pure spoken language dialogue, particularly given that current systems are not capable of accurately handling unconstrained English.

This paper is a Case Study of user involvement in the requirements speci cation for project ISLE: Interactive Spoken Language Education. Developers of Spoken Language Dialogue Systems should involve users from the outset, particularly if the aim is to develop novel solutions for a generic target application area or market. As well as target endusers, SLDS developers should identify and consult "meta-level" domain experts with expertise in human-to-human dialogue in the target domain. In our case, English language teachers and publishers provided generic knowledge of learners' dialogue preferences; other applications have analogous domain language experts. These domain language experts can help to pin down a domain-speci c sublanguage which ts the constraints of current speech recognition technology: linguistically-naive end-users may expect unconstrained conversational English, but in practice dialogue interactions have to be constrained in vocabulary and syntax. User consultation also highlighted a need to consider how to integrate speech input and output with other modes of interaction and processing; in our case the input speech signal is processed by speech recogniser, stress and mispronunciation detectors, and output responses are text and graphics as well as speech. This suggests a need to revisit the de nition of "dialogue": other SLDS developers should also consider the merits of multimodality as an adjunct to pure spoken language dialogue, particularly given that current systems are not capable of accurately handling unconstrained English.

The first step of most database design methodologies consists in eliciting part of the user requirements from various sources such as user interviews and corporate documents. These requirements formalize into a conceptual schema of the application domain, that has proved to be difficult to validate, especially since the visual representation of the ER model has shown understandability limitations from the end-users standpoint. In contrast, we claim that prototypical user interfaces can be used as a two-way channel to efficiently express, capture and validate data requirements. Considering these interfaces as a possibly populated physical view on the database to be developed, reverse engineering techniques can be applied to derive their underlying conceptual schema. We present an interactive tool-supported approach to derive data requirements from user interfaces. This approach, based on an intensive user involvement, addresses a significant subset of data requirements, especially when combined with other requirement elicitation techniques.

Setting the Research Agenda conference, the authors of this report would like to thank those responsible for organizing such an important event. First, thank you to Dr. Philippa Tomczak -without your extremely important work on the criminal justice voluntary sector and your drive to enhance research capacity and collaboration between academics, practitioners, and policymakers in this area, we would not have had this incredible opportunity. We all look forward to continuing our work with you and others in the research network, including Dr. David Thompson, who we would also like to thank for his assistance in planning the conference. Thank you to Professor Sir Anthony Bottoms and Professor Joanna Shapland for supporting the development of the research network and for your participation and insight at the conference. It was a pleasure to meet you both. A huge thank you to all the keynote speakers and presenters at the conference -it was truly a wonderful programme and a pleasure to hear about all the unique and important research/programmes/services that make up the voluntary sector in criminal justice. Your dedication -whether as academic, practitioner, policy maker, or some combination of the three -to improving the lives of those within the penal system is acknowledged and very much appreciated. A special thank you to Sarah Beedham (Research Support Officer for the School of Law, University of Sheffield) for being such an important and patient resource, both leading up to and throughout the conference. Those of us who came from out of town, and from out of country, are especially thankful for your patience in answering all our questions about travel and accommodation. Emily Jow (Finance Assistant, University of Sheffield) also deserves a thank you for all her assistance in helping with travel to and from the conference. Of course, thank you to those who provided financial support for the conference: the British Academy (Rising Star Engagement Award) and the Socio-Legal Studies Association (Seminar Competition) who enabled the attendance of ten Early Career Researchers and several international keynote speakers, and the Leverhulme Trust (Early Career Fellowship) and Sheffield Centre for Criminological Research for supporting the work of Dr. Tomczak. Last but not least, thank you to all of the early career researchers who kindly contributed their notes from the conference 1 for the purpose of putting together this final report. There was a lot of information to capture over the course of two days, and your observations and reflections on all the presentations and discussions were extremely helpful. We hope you enjoy this report!

Policy makers have a growing interest in integrated assessments of policies. The Integrated Assessment Modelling (IAM) community is reacting to this interest by extending the application of model development from pure scientific analysis towards application in decision making or policy context by giving tools a higher capability for analysis targeted at non-experts, but intelligent users. Many parties are involved in the construction of such tools including modellers, domain experts and tool users, resulting in as many views on the proposed tool. During tool development research continues which leads to advanced understanding of the system and may alter early specifications. Accumulation of changes to the initial design obscures the design, usually vastly increasing the number of defects in the software. The software engineering community uses concepts, methods and practices to deal with ambiguous specifications, changing requirements and incompletely conceived visions, and to design and develop maintainable/extensible quality software. The aim of this paper is to introduce modellers to software engineering concepts and methods which have the potential to improve model and tool development using experiences from the development of the Sustainability Impact Assessment Tool. These range from choosing a software development methodology for planning activities and coordinating people, technical design principles impacting maintainability, quality and reusability of the software to prototyping and user involvement. It is argued that adaptive development methods seem to best fit research projects, that typically have unclear upfront and changing requirements. The break-down of a system into elements that overlap as little as possible in features and behaviour helps to divide the work across teams and to achieve a modular and flexible system. However, this must be accompanied by proper automated testing methods and automated continuous integration of the elements. Prototypes, screen sketches and mockups are useful to align the different views, build a shared vision of required functionality and to match expectations.

ikke har spesielle interesser innenfor akademisk psykologi. Med økende antall psykologer innenfor det psykiske helsevern, kan den vaere verdt å anskaffe til institusjonsbiblioteket. Boken har myke permer, god innbinding og layout, inndelingen i underkapitler er gjennomtenkt, og trykkfeilene er få. Referanser, navnregister og stikkord er fyldige og gjennomarbeidet.

Mars 1973 i den italienske byen Trieste: Bak en stor, lyseblå hest laget av pappmasjé og treverk går ansa e og pasienter ved byens store psykiatriske sykehus i tog sammen med kunstnere og vanlige borgere. Hesten, laget på den første sykehusavdelingen som ble tømt for pasienter, symboliserer ønsket om frihet. Senere har den symbolisert store endringer innen italiensk psykiatri. På en blå hest inn i fremtidens psykiatri | Tidsskrift for Den norske legeforening