%T  International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction - RoCHI 2019
%C  Buchares
%D  17-18 October 2019
%G  ISSN 2501-9422
%E  Alin Moldoveanu
%E  Alan Dix
%P  161
%W http://rochi2019.utcluj.ro

%T Human Centered Artificial Intelligence: Weaving UX into Algorithmic Decision Making
%A Raymond R. Bond
%A Maurice Mulvenna
%A Hui Wang
%A Dewar Finlay
%A Alexander Wong
%A Ansgar Koene
%A Rob Brisk
%A Jennifer Boger
%A Tameem Adel
%P 2-9
%X Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing many industries as intelligent systems assist humans with algorithmic decision making, machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, chatbots and robotics. Deep learning has been a key development that has helped propel the widespread interest in AI. Given AI is becoming more prevalent and maybe regarded as the new ‘electricity’, it is imperative that human needs, interests and values are centered around all future AI developments. Given Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers created user centered design principles and practices based on human factors psychology, they are best placed to work with AI engineers to establish Human-Centered AI (HAI) or Human-AI interaction solutions. This paper presents the challenges that would provide HAI solutions, including the need for explainable AI (XAI) in algorithmic decision making and the need to mitigate automation bias which is when humans over trust and accept computer-based advice. Other ethical HAI challenges are outlined including algorithmic bias and ethical chatbots as well as a discussion on the likely democratisation of AI with the aid of end-user machine learning. The challenges that are discussed herein need addressed in order to properly calibrate human- machine trust and to provide a responsible basis for the future of human-machine symbiosis.
%K Human centered artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence, explainable AI, automation bias, algorithmic bias, chatbots, democratization of AI, ethical AI
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Bond.pdf

%T Poem sonification: from words to notes
%A Caroline-Cristina Stere
%A Ștefan Trăușan-Matu
%P 11-14
%X Poetry and music are two art forms that complete each other, as is the case of songs, opera, and the Ancient Greek art of reciting poems with lyre accompaniment. Although it seems natural to extract one from the other, there has been little research to automate this process. The purpose of the research presented in this paper is to generate a pleasing and expressive melody that matches the rhythm and the emotions of a poem. The connection between verses and melody is vital to creating music that is evoking and consistent. For this reason, we extracted certain properties of the poem (the accent of the syllables and the sentiment of the verses) and mapped them to musical properties (rhythm, scale, and tempo). To mimic the natural pattern of human communication, that mainly consists in requests and replies, we applied the musical technique of call and response, where every musical phrase comes as an answer to the previous one.
%K Poem sonification; sentiment analysis; lexicon; poem rhythm; call and response.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Stere.pdf

%T MyBand - a software system for music performances assistance
%A Cosmin Beniamin Cristea
%A Dorin-Mircea Popovici
%P 15-21
%X In our paper we introduce MyBand, a software system dedicated to assisting a band during musical performances. After presenting our motivation related to current state of the art, we give short insights concerning software design process and technical aspects of our work. After a section dedicated to two research issues that lead us to the implementation of two algorithms for chords recognition and transposing, we conclude by discussing the MyBand’s usability and some future directions we focus on.
%K Software system; interaction; music performance.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Cristea.pdf

%T Image Style Transfer using Text Descriptions
%A Ionuț Gabriel Boboc
%A Mihai  Dascălu
%A Ștefan Trăușan-Matu
%P 22-29
%X Artistic images are becoming trendier and recent researches in computer vision have showcased specific use cases of style transfer in which two images are combined together. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new method for transferring style from one image to another based on deep neural networks. The main idea is to combine a specific image with user’s requirements expressed as input text. Our method relies on the ReaderBench framework to extract keywords from the given text, which are afterwards used to search for a representative image and to change accordingly the input image. We developed a desktop application which starts from an image and a text description as input data, and generates a new image with the same landscape and objects, but taking into account the requirements from the input text, for example shift to a night landscape or an artistic change.
%K Style transfer, deep neural network, ReaderBench framework, image processing.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Boboc.pdf

%T ArtworkVR: Novel Interaction Techniques for Virtual Painters
%A Bogdan Maxim
%A Dorian Gorgan
%P 30-36
%X Virtual Painting is a form of art which is yet to be explored. Although existent research has been conducted over the years, there is yet room for new innovations and interaction techniques in helping artists bring their art to the world. This paper presents two innovations: one novel new interaction technique designed specifically for aiding the artist create new art, and one novel visualization technique designed specifically for museums and personal use alike.
%K Painting, interaction techniques, primitives, Virtual Painting technologies, visualization techniques, Unity technology, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Maxim.pdf

%T User Experience Personalization within software applications: A Data Mining approach
%A Vlad-Mihai Dănilă
%A Teodor Ștefănuț
%P 38-45
%X Developing software products that provide meaningful, relevant and user-targeted experiences to users has lately become a trend. This paper proposes a centralized stand- alone system that yields personalized user experience to a target application under logs analysis context. We introduce a real-time Sequential Pattern Mining approach to gather knowledge about on-going user’s habits. The modules that comprise a personalization system are introduced, emphasizing the usage mining module. Solutions and limitations on integrating personalization aspects in a to-be- personalized environment will be presented as well. The applicability of the personalized gathered knowledge will be exemplified in the context of a Web application used to manage and configure products in a company.
%K User Experience Personalization; Top-K Sequential Pattern Mining; Logs analysis; Web application.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Danila.pdf

%T Classification of eyewitness tweets in emergency situations
%A Ioana Stefan
%A Traian Eugen Rebedea
%A Doina Caragea
%P 46-52
%X Social platforms such as Twitter offer important information about disasters in emergency situations. Unique information found on these platforms is provided by people directly involved. Presenting these data to rescue teams can make a significant difference in how the situation is managed and how resources are distributed. Identification of relevant tweets can be done with Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing techniques. V arious supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms have been previously used for this problem, including diverse heuristics. The purpose of this project is to explore and compare several approaches, test variations of parameters, and filter input data in order to improve performance. Challenges posed by the class imbalance present in emergency situations and the language diversity on social media platforms are also discussed.
%K Eyewitness tweets, Machine learning, Supervised learning, Classification.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Stefan.pdf

%T Designing an Intelligent Platform for Drugs Administration
%A Ionut Cristian Paraschiv
%A Maria-Dorinela Sirbu
%A Bogdan Nicula
%A Mihai  Dascălu
%A Ștefan Trăușan-Matu
%A Alexandru Costin Nuta
%P 53-59
%X Health is essential and can be ensured only with proper nutrition, sports, and regular visits to the physician. The correct administration of drugs has an important role in the process of healing and cannot be treated superficially. Most often, people do not read the instructions from the leaflets because these are difficult to understand or contain too much information. This paper is centered on showcasing the user interface of an intelligent platform that combines patients’ clinical health data with information from drug leaflets in order to facilitate the administration of drug manufactured in Romania. First, clinical health data is extracted from wearable IoT devices and aggregated to create the patient’s profile. Second, the platform aggregates leaflets from various online sources and full-text search functionalities are obtained using Elasticsearch combined with a knowledge base. Third, patients are capable to undergo extensive search through the drug database, create their own calendar, receive reminders or alerts when certain drugs contain interacting substances. The platform’s goal is to increase the patients’ awareness over their health data and improve their lifestyle. This is the first application of its kind available for Romanian language.
%K User interface; Analysis of drugs’ leaflets; clinical health data; full-text search; semantic search.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Paraschiv.pdf

%T Fake and Hyper-partisan News Identification
%A Vlad Cristian Dumitru
%A Traian Eugen Rebedea
%P 60-67
%X Fake news represent a phenomenon that has widened over the last period of time. Their spreading is facilitated by social media platforms, which have a major influence on people’s lives. In this context, automated solutions are sought to detect the fake news circulating online. In this paper, we developed models designed to detect fake and hyper-partisan news using various machine learning algorithms. The paper contains a description of the attributes used and their importance in identifying fake news, and also different trained classifiers using more dataset distributions in order to see the differences between their results. In addition to the results analyzed on existing datasets in the field, we tested the ability of models to work in a real environment. Thus, we collected URLs from Twitter, tested the models on these data and made statistics on the number of fake news articles found by each classifier. We also gave some examples detected by models on articles from Twitter which we considered fake news or hyper-partisan news by manual analyzing their content.
%K Fake news, Hyper-partisan news, Linguistic features, Natural language processing, Machine learning.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Dumitru.pdf

%T DAR: Implementation of a Drone Augmented Reality Video Game
%A Bianca-Cerasela-Zelia Blaga
%A Dorian Gorgan
%P 69-76
%X Augmented reality video games combine the elements of a virtual application with those of the real world. With the recent advances in technology, this type of digital content is easily available to users. The player experience is enhanced by bringing the virtual experience to the world around us, and new interaction techniques emerge. We propose a video game in which the user controls a virtual drone which interacts with objects situated in a real environment. We present the development methodology that we followed in order to bring this project to life, from the early stages of topic selection to implementation details, and finally to the evaluation step.
%K Augmented reality, heuristic evaluation, video game design and implementation.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Blaga.pdf

%T Evaluating the conformance with WCAG2 of Romanian municipal websites
%A Costin Pribeanu
%P 77-80
%X Web accessibility in the public sector is precondition towards the establishment of a barrier-free Europe. The Digital Agenda for Europe has clear objectives as regards the enhancement of digital literacy, skills, and inclusion. Recently, a new European directive has been issued that requires the web accessibility of public sector bodies by September 2020, the latest. This paper reports on the accessibility of municipal websites in Romania. The evaluation has been carried on in March-April 2019 and targeted the first 60 towns ranked on the population. The results show that web accessibility is low, none of the websites passing the requirements of WCAG 2.0. The comparison with similar evaluation results in 2014 shows very little progress and could be explained by a weak accessibility policy at country and local level as well as bad practices in web development.
%K Web accessibility, accessibility checking tools, WCAG 2.0, conformance, municipal websites.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Pribeanu.pdf

%T How humans perceive multi-input controls in 3D scenes, a case comparison study
%A Nicolae-Adrian Țocu
%A Valentin-Cătălin Govoreanu
%A Marco Leon Olescu
%A Teodor Marian Nițescu
%P 81-86
%X This paper presents an input device comparison for a race car simulator in Virtual Reality (VR). The study focuses on the usability of the following devices: Leap Motion , Manus VR, smartphone, keyboard, Xbox Controller and Vive Controllers. Each device is evaluated individually in order to see how the user interacts with them and to see if one of these is more prefered. The presented development details are followed by an experimental feedback session received from the testing group. The application uses Unity 3D to generate the Virtual Environment as it was the best suited choice based on its multiple functionalities.
%K Virtual Reality; Manus VR; Leap Motion; HTC Vive; Xbox One Controller; Smartphone.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Tocu.pdf

%T Exploring the differences between five accessibility evaluation tools
%A Marian Pădure
%A Costin Pribeanu
%P 87-90
%X Web accessibility in the public sector is an important objective of the Digital Agenda for Europe and requires a systematic evaluation and monitoring strategy. Given the low accessibility of public websites as well as a large number of websites in the public sector, a tool-based approach is needed. The goal of this paper is to compare five accessibility checking tools as regards the coverage of accessibility-related issues, identification, and reporting of accessibility errors. The comparison is then illustrated with three case studies of municipal websites from Romania. The results show large differences as regards the number of errors which suggest that only one tool is not enough.
%K Accessibility checking tools, Web accessibility, WCAG 2.0, municipal websites.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Padure.pdf

%T Co-Design of Edutainment Applications with Preschoolers. Is it feasible?
%A Adriana-Mihaela Guran
%A Grigoreta-Sofia Cojocar
%A Anamaria Moldovan
%P 92-97
%X Children of nowadays are exposed to technology from their early childhood, thus becoming technology consumers. Creating the appropriate content and interaction for children will determine a better quality of the time they spend with technology. When designing for adults, the participation of the end users guarantees the success of the final product. But is it possible to reproduce the process with small children (3-6/7 ages)? In this paper, we present our approach in involving preschoolers in the design of educational software. The design teams are formed by Computer Science students attending the Human-Computer Interaction optional course.
%K Participatory design, user centered design, preschoolers.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Guran.pdf

%T Introducing Edutainment Applications into the Formal Kindergarten System. An Experience Report
%A Anamaria Moldovan
%A Adriana-Mihaela Guran
%A Grigoreta-Sofia Cojocar
%P 98-101
%X Edutainment is a worldwide known concept, adopted by many countries for its educational uses and studied in various forms, unfortunately less explored in the Romanian teaching- learning space due to other priorities regarding education. The lack of case studies related to this concept in the Romanian educational space brings the opportunity to adapt the concept to the needs of preschoolers and teachers. Technology became a part of everyday life and its usage should be oriented to the benefit of the next generations. This paper is a report of introducing edutainment applications into the formal kindergarten system, as introducing was seen as a process consisting in: understanding users’ needs (a.), co- design, (b.) and actually introducing them into a class in kindergarten (c.). All the applications were built by students during the HCI optional course for undergraduate Computer Science students.
%K Education; Entertainment; Interaction; Human; Preschoolers; Edutainment.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Moldovan.pdf

%T Mobile Application for UAIC Home
%A Cosmin Irimia
%A Adrian Iftene
%P 102-109
%X “UAIC Home” is an Android app which brings students of the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University closer to its faculties, teachers and courses. From now on, every student of our University will know the exact location of each classroom they learn in, where they can find a teacher for consultations or the schedule of the administrative office. Also, they can identify the schedule of a room just by pointing the phone at it. This solution can be adapted easily to other Universities or to other buildings with a similar structure.
%K Android; Mobile app; Orientation and movement inside buildings.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Irimia.pdf

%T Quizrific: an Android-based app for examinations
%A Cristina-Ioana Drăghici
%A Elena Băutu
%P 110-113
%X In this fast-growing era of technology, where more than 2,5 billion people of the world population own a smartphone, there is a lot of potential for software applications to solve more or less trivial problems, literally by just one “touch”. This paper focuses on taking this technological advantage and using it in the education sector, by presenting the development of an Android-based school preparation and examination system, designed for both students and professors.
%K Quiz-taking application; Learning management system; Game-based learning; Mobile educational platform.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Draghici.pdf

%T Leap Motion-based Interaction in Augmented Reality Mobile Applications
%A Dan-Laurențiu Haranguș
%P 115-118
%X This paper describes a new interaction method for Web Augmented Reality applications on a mobile phone. The system uses a Web Server for hosting the application and the demanded plugins and utilities files. The designed solution proposes a representation of the human hands in the space of the application based on the Leap Motion device sensors. A set of hands-based gestures is provided in order to interact with the augmented models in the application. An important aspect regarding gestures is that the Leap Motion API supports both fingers and palm gestures, which allows the definition of a large set of gestures in the interaction engine. This type of user interaction can be used in a large variety of mobile applications, for instance applications for home design. The goal of this application is to prove that mobile applications using augmented reality can be extended beside classic capabilities of a smartphone. To demonstrate this, we chose the domain of the application to be home design.
%K Human-computer interaction; Gesture recognition; Augmented Reality; Web Applications.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Harangus.pdf

%T FluentMotion - Gesture-based Interaction in Virtual Reality using LeapMotion and Reactive Programming
%A Radu Petrisel
%A Adrian Sabou
%P 119-125
%X This paper presents an approach to creating a human readable, flexible and extendable API for gesture-based interaction in Virtual Reality using the LeapMotion controller. The Fluent- Motion API integrates a variety of modern technologies, such as C# LINQ (Language Integrated Query), Reactive Exten- sions and SteamVR. FluentMotion comes as an extension of the basic LeapMotion API, meant to facilitate the integration of gesture-based interaction in Virtual Reality projects. The API integrates with the Unity Game Engine, which provides the means of creating cross-platform Virtual Reality applica- tions, allowing the definition of new, custom gestures using a human readable description (based on already existing ones) and creating interaction callbacks. FluentMotion works on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift for VR-enabled application and can also be used in desktop mode. This work improves the rudimentary API offered by LeapMotion and offers a more natural, powerful and flexible way of detecting and composing hand and finger gestures.
%K Gesture detection; Leap Motion; Virtual Reality; Unity; Reactive Extensions.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Petrisel.pdf

%T An exploratory object manipulation experiment using the core features of Hololens: A virtual library of augmented reality objects
%A Dragoș Circa
%A Alexandru Matei
%A Alexandru Butean
%P 126-131
%X In this paper we present a Hololens application that allows the user to interact with virtual objects in a natural way, focusing on using only the built-in hand gestures and voice commands. The user can select what object to spawn and can change position, rotation and scale of the object. The objects are replicas to their real-world counterparts to increase immersion. They behave naturally when it comes to gravity and interaction with each other or the environment.
%K Human-Computer Interaction, Hololens, Augmented Reality, Head mounted device.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Circa.pdf

%T Smart Home Automation through Voice Interaction
%A Andrei Mădălin Matei
%A Adrian Iftene
%P 132-137
%X “Smart home automation through voice interaction” is a custom skill for well-known voice assistant Amazon Alexa. With its help, the user should simplify the way he is interacting with home devices, for example, TV, air conditioner or even lights. The application itself is based on the clouding programming paradigm along with devices like Arduino and Raspberry Pi. The main idea of this research is to build a smart house system where devices can be controlled with voice commands. The presented research tends to automate day-by-day tasks which may be trivial and helps the user to increase his quality of life by letting the system doing the work for him.
%K Amazon; IoT; Smart House; Arduino; Raspberry Pi.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Matei.pdf

%T Iasi City Explorer - Alexa, what can we do today?
%A Camelia Miluț
%A Adrian Iftene
%A Daniela Gîfu
%P 139-144
%X In everyday life, the voice communication always plays an essential role, being probably the most obvious feature that differentiates human being from other living entities. Due to its importance, speech recognition has become one of the most important applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI), highlighting how humans and machines interact. This paper describes a new voice application, developed as an Amazon Alexa skill, dedicated to the tourism area. More specifically, this system can contribute to improve the popularity of one of the most important cities from Romania, Iasi.
%K Amazon Alexa; Amazon Echo; Speech recognition.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Milut.pdf

%T In-Vehicle System for Adaptive Filtering of Notifications
%A Elena Bautu
%A Carmen I. Tudose
%A Crenguta M. Puchianu
%P 145-151
%X Nowadays, there is a growing interest for drivers and car passengers to have adaptive smartphone applications to the driving context of the car. In this paper we present a software system that filters notifications launched by mobile phone depending on the driver’s or co-driver’s interests, needs or preferences. The filtering is adaptive in the sense that it changes according to the driving conditions determined by the system using data received from the GPS system and accelerometer of smartphone. The system has been developed using “separation of concerns” principle that guarantees an iterative and incremental development of system. Also, it has been tested until now by 28 users who appreciated the system’s quality considering their answers on the usability test.
%K In-vehicle system, mobile interaction, software engineering, design patterns.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Bautu.pdf

%T Mobile building evacuation application
%A Alexandru Marius Obretin
%P 152-155
%X Modern VR/AR technologies are more and more appropriate for civil engineering and facility management purposes, but most of the existing solutions are proprietary. The current paper introduces a mobile application built only with free and open-source technologies and services for indoor positioning and building evacuation using elements of augmented reality.
%K Indoor positioning systems; building evacuation; BIM; augmented reality; open-source.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Obretin.pdf

%T Cultural Heritage Interactive Dissemination through Natural Interaction
%A  Emanuela Bran
%A Elena Băutu
%A Dorin-Mircea Popovici
%A Vasili Braga
%A Irina Cojuhari
%P 156-161
%X Virtual Heritage is widely used in education, enhancing the learning process by motivation and by providing a natural experience. New ways for the user to explore cultural heritage virtual environments represent dynamic research areas, being based on the latest technologies, such as mobile, wearable or ubiquitous interfaces. We have designed SNAIP, a distributed system based on natural interaction, for exploring a virtual heritage environment populated with interactive agents.
%K Natural interaction; virtual heritage; interactive virtual environment; cultural heritage dissemination; virtual reality; human computer interaction; distributed systems; interactive experience; cultural immersion.
%W http://rochi.utcluj.ro/articole/7/RoCHI2019-Bran.pdf