Peripheral displays are an important application for enabling people to be constantly aware of information while doing other activities. How does one evaluate a peripheral awareness display to determine if it provides awareness without distracting the user inappropriately from other tasks? We explore evaluation metrics for peripheral displays and describe proposed support to be added to an exis...

In this paper, we give a brief introduction of the HTRDP Chinese Information Retrieval Evaluation, which is sponsored by HTRDP (High Technology Research and Development Program of China, namely 863 Program). The web data collection, query design, evaluation metrics, and the evaluation procedures will presents in detail. Like TREC, NTCIR and CLEF, its purpose is to provide the infrastructure nec...

General Game Playing (GGP) is concerned with the development of programs that are able to play previously unknown games well. The main problem such a player is faced with is to come up with a good heuristic evaluation function automatically. Part of these heuristics are distance measures used to estimate, e.g., the distance of a pawn towards the promotion rank. However, current distance heurist...

The cost of an optimal delete relaxed plan, known as h, is a powerful admissible heuristic but is in general intractable to compute. In this paper we examine the problem of computing h by encoding it as a MAXSAT problem. We develop a new encoding that utilizes constraint generation to supports the computation of a sequence of increasing lower bounds on h. We show a close connection between the ...

WC prcscnt a characterization of heuristic evaluation functions Hhich unities their trcatmcnt in single-agent problems and twoperson games. ‘l‘hc central result is that a useful heuristic function is one which dctcrmincs the outcome of a search and is invariant along a solution path. ‘I‘his local chnractcrization of heuristics can hc used to predict the cffcctivcncss of given heuristics and to ...

Given the perception that employing usability evaluation method is expensive and timeconsuming, industries are sceptical to integrate usability throughout the product development lifecycle. A Cost-Benefit Analysis is claimed to be the most feasible approach to calculate the cost incurred in any employed usability technique, and the estimated return on investment (ROI) and benefits gained in the...

Web site usability is a critical metric for assessing the quality of a firm’s Web presence. A measure of usability must not only provide a global rating for a specific Web site, ideally it should also illuminate specific strengths and weaknesses associated with site design. In this paper, we describe a heuristic evaluation procedure for examining the usability of Web sites. The procedure utiliz...

In contrast to classical planning, in adversarial planning, the planning agent has to face an adversary trying to prevent him from reaching his goals. In this report, we investigate a forward-chaining approach to adversarial planning based on the AO* algorithm. The exploration of the underlying AND/OR graph is guided by a heuristic evaluation function, inspired by the relaxed planning graph heu...