User's Point Of View Research Articles

ICT Skills Among the LIS Professionals: an assessment from seventy-four college libraries in Delhi

The public library is a common institution that is constructed on the concept of democracy and it is an institution for the public, by the people and of the people. It is provided wholly or partly from public funds, and the use of which is open to all class of persons in the community and freely available to all. It always endeavours to meet the informational, educational and entertaining needs of the community by providing collection and services. Maximum utilization of library resources and services by the users is the main motive of a public library. The present study is to analyse the information-seeking behaviour of selected public library users’ and evaluate the services of public libraries from the user point of view. For this purpose, the researcher randomly selected seven public libraries in the Tirunelveli district.

Neural Network Modelling of Speech Emotion Detection

In making the Machines Intelligent, and enable them to work as human, Speech recognition is one of the most essential requirement. Human Language conveys various types of information such as the energy, pitch, loudness, rhythm etc., in the sound, the speech and its context such as gender, age and the emotion. Identifying the emotion from a speech pattern is a challenging task and the most useful solution especially in the era of widely developing speech recognition systems with digital assistants. Digital assistants like Bixby, Blackberry assistant are building products that consist of emotion identification and reply the user in step with user point of view. The objective of this work is to improve the accuracy of the speech emotion prediction using deep learning models. Our work experiments with the MLP and CNN classification models on three benchmark datasets with 5700 speech files of 7 emotion categories. The proposed model showed improved accuracy.

Public Libraries in Tirunelveli District with Special Reference to Information Seeking Behaviour of Users

The public library is a common institution that is constructed on the concept of democracy and it is an institution for the public, by the people and of the people. It is provided wholly or partly from public funds, and the use of which is open to all class of persons in the community and freely available to all. It always endeavours to meet the informational, educational and entertaining needs of the community by providing collection and services. Maximum utilization of library resources and services by the users is the main motive of a public library. The present study is to analyse the information-seeking behaviour of selected public library users’ and evaluate the services of public libraries from the user point of view. For this purpose, the researcher randomly selected seven public libraries in the Tirunelveli district.

Competency-based education: a multi-variable study of tourism vocational high school graduates

ABSTRACT Recent studies have revealed that competency-based education (CBE) does not facilitate authentic learning or encourage students to develop a career in the tourism business. This study aimed to propose a conceptual model implementing CBE for career development and job satisfaction. To this end, a questionnaire was administered to 217 graduates of a tourism vocational high school in Jakarta. A quantitative method was applied. The results showed that this successfully explained the implementation of CBE and competency-based assessment (CBA) as a proposed model of job opportunities and career development for graduates of tourism schools. The research identified the improvement measures and preemptive actions taken by the principal and teachers of the school. At the initial stage, discipline, hard work, and career development through continual learning should be emphasized to prevent any negative effects when students undertake internships or seek job placement in the workplace. It was also revealed that CBE as a single variable should be combined with CBA and career development to gain job satisfaction. The limitation of this study is the duration of the research. It did not use a longitudinal time frame to measure the real career development from the end user point of view in a broader area of population. Although this study focuses on competency and learning theories, it does not consider the latest competencies and other theories such as talent development of human resources. For future studies could be based on focus-group discussions with experts using a longitudinal analysis to consider tourism growth dynamics over time, using talent development theory is also recommended.

Eight action rules for the orientation of additive manufacturing parts in powder bed fusion: an industry practice

Additive Manufacturing (AM) requires an important preparation usually conducted in a digital environment. Among the various steps of the AM process, part orientation has a critical impact on the final part quality as many constraints have to be considered by an AM expert. This paper tackles the question of which criteria should be taken into consideration for orienting a part at best. This question is answered from two different sources: scientific literature review and industry practice elicitation As an introduction, AM challenges are presented from a user point of view and shows the need for assisting engineers in their AM activity. It is followed by an appraisal of the state of current research about part orientation and highlights objective criteria for its optimization. It is completed with a case study related to an industry practice in Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) captured by means of a specific knowledge elicitation technique. Thanks to iterations with experts, this knowledge capture has led to the formalization of manufacturing rules associated with orientation criteria. The application of these rules testifies to the quality of parts built and marketed day to day by the company. Finally the output from industry practice and scientific literature are discussed and compared and show significant differences.This outcome can be shared as a best practice between PBF operators and could then constitute a basis for computer-based assistance tool to AM practitioners.

Análise de parâmetros de humanização para espaços públicos

Com cada vez mais pessoas vivendo no perímetro urbano, a cidade de Coronel Vivida, Paraná, possui um centro público e administrativo que não atende à demanda devido às más condições de uso e dimensionamentos dos espaços. Portanto, este trabalho tem como objetivo identificar e avaliar parâmetros de humanização para espaços públicos e administrativos, abordando como estudo de caso a Praça, a Prefeitura e a Câmara Municipal da cidade. Para isso, é realizada uma revisão bibliográfica, identificando os parâmetros e organizando-os em cinco grupos de atributos: elementos naturais, estrutura, acessibilidade, identidade e legibilidade. Posteriormente, os parâmetros são avaliados por meio da aplicação de uma avaliação pós-ocupação, do ponto de vista técnico e dos usuários. Como resultado observou-se que grande parte dos usuários se sente insatisfeita com os espaços e percebem a necessidade de um novo projeto arquitetônico, urbanístico e paisagístico, que valorize a importância do centro urbano administrativo integrado à comunidade. As contribuições visam à importância da comunicação pública e política, por meio da relação ambiente/comportamento, como forma de inclusão e representatividade social.

Satisfaction, independent living skills and perceived change of patients undergoing community psychiatric treatment

To estimate quality parameters in the treatments offered, these criteria be evaluated in a continuous and integrated manner, considering patients' and family members' perspectives as well as that of professionals. Literature has highlighted the need to evaluate the results of treatment in psychosocial care facilities from the user point of view. From a quantitative perspective, some studies seek to identify a “degree” of social reinsertion, presenting some variables. Thus, the present study evaluated parameters considered as possible indicators of good results in the psychosocial rehabilitation process, constituting a tool for the planning of managers and mental health professionals. This is a observational study performed between January 2015 and August 2016 in Brazil. The study included 84 patients invited to a verbal interview. The sample consisted of 84 patients treated by Psychosocial Care Facility. The results obtained reveal the achievement of a satisfactory mean regarding the service, about which 85% of the users declare themselves satisfied. However, we found that patients need significant support to perform simple tasks. Independent living skills and perceived change have a lower score when related to satisfaction with the services provided, suggesting, then, that rehabilitation needs to focus on the acquisition of independent living skills, so that the patient can seek a life as close to normal as possible.

Using qualitative evaluation components to help understand context: case study of a family planning intervention with female community health volunteers (FCHVs) in Nepal

BackgroundEvaluations of health interventions are increasingly concerned with measuring or accounting for ‘context’. How to do this is still subject to debate and testing, and is particularly important in the case of family planning where outcomes will inevitably be influenced by contextual factors as well as any intervention effects. We conducted an evaluation of an intervention where female community health volunteers (FCHVs) in Nepal were trained to provide better interpersonal communication on family planning. We included a context-orientated qualitative component to the evaluation. Here, we discuss the evaluation findings, specifically focusing on what was added by attending to the context. We explore and illustrate important dimensions of context that may also be relevant in future evaluation work.MethodsThe evaluation used a mixed methods approach, with a qualitative component which included in-depth interviews with women of reproductive age, FCHVs, and family planning service providers. We conducted iterative, thematic analysis.ResultsThe life-history fertility and contraception narratives generated from the in-depth interviews contextualised the intervention, yielding nuanced data on contraceptive choices, needs, and areas for future action. For instance, it highlighted how women generally knew about effective contraceptive methods and were willing to use them: information was not a major barrier. Barriers instead included reports of providers refusing service when women were not in the fifth day of their menstrual cycle when this was unnecessary. Privacy and secrecy were important to some women, and risked being undermined by information sharing between FCHVs and health services. The qualitative component also revealed unanticipated positive effects of our own evaluation strategies: using referral slips seemed to make it easier for women to access contraception.ConclusionsLife history narratives collected via in-depth interviews helped us understand pathways from intervention to effect from the user point of view without narrowly focusing only on the intervention, highlighting possible areas for action that would otherwise have been missed. By attending to context in a nuanced way in evaluations, we can build a body of evidence that not only informs future interventions within that context, but also builds better knowledge of contextual factors likely to be important elsewhere.

A Comparative Study of Design Evaluation with Virtual Prototypes Versus a Physical Product

Design evaluation is an important stage in the product development process. Virtual prototypes enable economic design evaluation with higher flexibility, but the evaluation effectiveness may be limited compared to that of the real product. Few studies have analyzed whether or not virtual prototypes are comparable with the real product on the evaluation of product attributes. In this study, we conducted two-stage experiments to compare the effectiveness of design evaluation by using virtual prototypes versus the product they aim to represent. Numerous design features were evaluated from a physical appearance and usability point of view with assessment measurements including performance accuracy and the emotional responses of the users. The experimental results revealed that the visual virtual prototypes were typically not as effective in estimating the physical and appearance features, while no significant difference was observed in the usability between the evaluation media. The visual virtual prototypes tended to invoke more negative and passive emotional states in comparison to the actual product. However, with the addition of instant sensory feedback, the emotional responses were raised to a more positive and active level, which was similar to the one observed with the physical product. The findings of this study indicate the shortcomings of using virtual prototypes in the design evaluation process. Our conclusions may assist future studies in improving the practicality of virtual prototyping by the addition of useful features.

Smart decimation method for fusion research data

New fusion research experiments will generate massive experimental data. In this context, fusion research appears in the scope of the big data where both search and access functions require new approaches and optimizations. One common data access functionality is decimation. It allows to retrieve a limited number of points of the total available. One classical mechanism of decimation is downsampling by an integer factor called step. It works by selecting a value every ‘step’ number of values. The main characteristic of classical decimation is that the selected values are uniformly distributed along the total. However, in case of time evolution experimental signals, the relevancy of data is not uniform. There are some intervals where the provided information is more complex and richer, and usually more interesting from the user point of view. This contribution presents a new data decimation technology for unidimensional time evolution signals where the limited number of accessed points are distributed following the criterion of data interest level. The new method implements, on one hand, a heuristic function which is able to determine the level of interest of an interval based on its data characteristics, and on the other hand, a selection algorithm where points are distributed based on weighted intervals.

Knowledge redundancy approach to reduce size in association rules

Association Rules Mining is one of the most studied and widely applied fields in Data Mining. However, the discovered models usually result in a very large set of rules; so the analysis capability, from the user point of view, is diminishing. Hence, it is difficult to use the found model in order to assist decision-making process. The previous handicap is heightened in presence of redundant rules in the final set. In this work a new definition of redundancy in association rules is proposed, based on user prior knowledge. A post-processing method is developed to eliminate this kind of redundancy, using association rules known by the user. Our proposal allows to find more compact models of association rules to ease its use in the decision-making process. The developed experiments have shown reduction levels that exceed 90 percent of all generated rules, using prior knowledge always below ten percent. So, our method improves the efficiency of association rules mining and the exploitation of discovered association rules.

The Minamata Knowledge Hub: from data to knowledge supporting Minamata Convention on Mercury

Atmospheric mercury (Hg) emissions are a significant component of the global Hg cycle. As the Minamata Convention on Mercury comes into effect, controlling atmospheric mercury emissions has become a compulsory goal. Decision-maker initiatives process the scientific data and information within a milieu encompassing many economic, political, social, and cultural concerns. A knowledge platform oriented to support decisors aims to answer questions on how will change the Hg deposition fluxes over one/some/all of the receptor regions following the alteration of Hg anthropogenic emissions, and which is the impact on the marine food. In this paper we present the knowledge platform in order to support Minamata Convention and stakeholders to take better decisions from data. The process to learn from data are discussed and presented from an user point of view, proposing features and tools to be included in a knowledge platform oriented to earth observation.

Join Hands - Webpage to Find Trained Service Professionals

A web platform to make our urban lives easier to solve their daily needs at single instance. In our modernizing lives the need for workers for our basic needs like plumbing, carpentry etc. goes on increasing. In our website user can find any service professionals like teachers, yoga trainer, wedding photographers, plumbers, carpenters, physicians and so on. Those workers can be termed as a “maintenance worker” or “General Contractors”. A go to platform helping customers to complete the works that are important to their day to day lives. In today’s digital world a maintenance worker gets lower recognition than any other profession has, but their need is very high for each and every one of us. Either they get known by a known person’s recommendation or by self-advertising. But all their all needs satisfied? No. Thus their needs are full-filled by visiting our website. Here every maintenance worker could register themselves and they can be selected by the users who would like to get their service. Here every maintenance worker is given a rating based on which their value increases. So that they can be charged depending on their rating and also the rating helps the user to identify the best suited worker for them. In our web application the workers will be sorted on users rating and users current location from which the user is searching for service. In which user also will be rated by the professionals on how they treated them. The tracking facility will be available and features whether the professionals has accepted their request which was given by the user and tracking facility also shows whether the professional has started the way to user location. The professional has to enroll themselves in our website with types of service they’ll be doing and optional work which they aren’t much trained but with a minimum experience. User has the rights to blacklist the workers which will be then investigated by the admin team on both the side. The main concept of join hands is to create job opportunity for maintenance workers and to raise their quality equal to professional workers. In the users point of view it is to enhance the people’s standard of living without making them worry in search for a professional worker.

산업용 상지 웨어러블 로봇에 대한 정성적 사용성 평가 가이드라인 연구

Objective: This study is to identify the components and qualitative criteria for assessing the usability of wearable robots in industrial use. Background: Wearable robot technology is a state-of-the-art application of humanrobot interaction (HRI) but research on its usability from the users point of view is insufficient. It is necessary for the wearable robot industry to establish safety standards and usability assessment system for deploying the technology on a commercial scale. Method: Sets of user requirements were identified from previous researches regarding with analogous products including walking aids, assistive and wearable devices. Qualitative assessment criteria were developed on the basis of user requirements classified by usability components and the structure of wearable robots. Results: The usability of wearable robots needs to be evaluated by 6 components: wearability, effectiveness, learnability, efficiency, utility, and safety. Qualitative assessment criteria consisted of 38 questionnaires corresponding to the identified user requirements that belong to each component. Conclusion: The 6 components with 38 assessment criteria would be utilized as the basis for further development of the usability assessment standard. Application The assessment criteria provide ideas and checklists for designing wearable robots with good usability.

Avatar and Sense of Embodiment: Studying the Relative Preference Between Appearance, Control and Point of View.

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.

Submitting surveys via a conversational interface: An evaluation of user acceptance and approach effectiveness

Conversational interfaces are currently on the rise: more and more applications rely on a chat-like interaction pattern to increase their acceptability and to improve user experience. Also in the area of questionnaire design and administration, interaction design is increasingly looked at as an important ingredient of a digital solution. For those reasons, we designed and developed a conversational survey tool to administer questionnaires with a colloquial form through a chat-like Web interface. In this paper, we present the evaluation results of our approach, taking into account both the user point of view - by assessing user acceptance and preferences in terms of survey compilation experience - and the survey design perspective - by investigating the effectiveness of a conversational survey in comparison to a traditional questionnaire. We show that users clearly appreciate the conversational form and prefer it over a traditional approach and that, from a data collection point of view, the conversational method shows the same reliability and a higher response quality with respect to a traditional questionnaire.

Mode-choice Analysis in Long-distance, Parallel Public Transport

Optimizing Hungarian parallel public transport is an actual and returning question, which needs to be investigated from the customers, operators, and the users point of view. Previous works of authors are based on the analysis of supply, present topic concentrates on travelers mode choice in long distance public transport. This research is based on a novel survey method, called stated preference, which questionnaire method uses real data, puts the interviewed travelers in real traffic situations. The passengers have to make decisions according to their own preference in mode choice. Present research highlights the sensitivity of users – depending on motivation and travel distance – of travel time, travel costs, and comfort in different public transport modes. The analysis is the next chapter of the research in parallel transport.

Long-term Implant Usage and Quality-of-Life in Sequential Bilateral Pediatric Cochlear Implantation.

Our primary objective was to investigate the long-term usage of cochlear implants (CIs) in children who underwent sequential bilateral CI (SeqBCI), and to study factors that impact usage. Our secondary objective was to understand the difference in subjective benefit and educational/employment status, between users and non-users of the second CI (CI2). Prospective case series. Tertiary academic centers. Sixty-eight young adults who underwent SeqBCI as children. Pediatric SeqBCI. The main outcome measures were the current usage of the first CI (CI1) and CI2, factors that determine usage, current perceptions of their CIs, educational/employment status, and Speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing scale (SSQ12) scores. Sixty five (95.6%) participants were using CI1 for over 8 h/d and the rest were using CI1 for 4 to 8 h/d. Fourty four (64.7%) participants used CI2 for at least 4 h/d, 10 (15%) indicated that they rarely used CI2 (<4 h/d) and 14 (21%) were not using CI2 at all. On multivariate analysis, the only independent predictor of long-term usage of CI2 was the inter-implant interval (odds ratio [OR] 0.78, standard deviation [SD] 0.65-0.91, p = 0.002). There was no significant difference in the SSQ12 scores of users and non-users of CI2. The finding of increasing rates of non-usage of CI2 with lengthening inter-implant interval is clinically relevant and critical to health-economic assessment. From a usage point of view, the evidence is sufficiently robust to recommend that in children with bilateral deafness, bilateral CI should be done simultaneously, and if not, soon after the first CI. In the context of a longer inter-implant interval, clinicians should weigh the marginal benefits of CI2 against the surgical risks vis-a-vis non-usage and bilateral vestibular hypofunction.

A Light Weight Cryptographic Technique for Secure Outsourcing and Retrieval of Data in Cloud Computing

Outsourcing large volumes of data to public cloud has the potential benefits to consumers. It also brings security issues as the cloud is treated as untrusted from the user point of view. Security issues may arise due to many reasons such as virtualization, resource pooling, elasticity, hidden hardware problems besides internal and external attacks launched by adversaries. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and cloud consumer are to be honoured for better social welfare. Therefore, it is indispensable to have mechanisms to ensure security to outsourced data when it is at rest and when it is in transit as well. Towards this end, many solutions came as found in the literature. However, most of the cryptographic methods employed were expensive. It is still an open challenge to develop light weight cryptographic methods for secure storage and retrieval or search for outsourced encrypted data. In this paper we proposed a methodology for light weight encryption which proved to be effective and suitable for cloud computing environments. An algorithm named Hybrid Lightweight Data Encryption (HLDE) is proposed and implemented. Empirical study is made on the same to validate our approach. The experimental results revealed that the proposed method is better than the state of the art in terms of high performance and strong security to outsourced data in cloud computing.

Automatic local resolution-based sharpening of cryo-EM maps.

Recent technological advances and computational developments have allowed the reconstruction of Cryo-Electron Microscopy (cryo-EM) maps at near-atomic resolution. On a typical workflow and once the cryo-EM map has been calculated, a sharpening process is usually performed to enhance map visualization, a step that has proven very important in the key task of structural modeling. However, sharpening approaches, in general, neglects the local quality of the map, which is clearly suboptimal. Here, a new method for local sharpening of cryo-EM density maps is proposed. The algorithm, named LocalDeblur, is based on a local resolution-guided Wiener restoration approach of the original map. The method is fully automatic and, from the user point of view, virtually parameter-free, without requiring either a starting model or introducing any additional structure factor correction or boosting. Results clearly show a significant impact on map interpretability, greatly helping modeling. In particular, this local sharpening approach is especially suitable for maps that present a broad resolution range, as is often the case for membrane proteins or macromolecules with high flexibility, all of them otherwise very suitable and interesting specimens for cryo-EM. To our knowledge, and leaving out the use of local filters, it represents the first application of local resolution in cryo-EM sharpening. The source code (LocalDeblur) can be found at https://github.com/I2PC/xmipp and can be run using Scipion (http://scipion.cnb.csic.es) (release numbers greater than or equal 1.2.1). Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.