Our research explores multi-user virtual environments for teaching university-level courses. This paper focuses on undergraduate students’ reactions to five virtual worlds explored as part of a Computers and Ethics course. Written reports from twenty-five students were qualitatively analyzed with respect to perceived ease of use, user satisfaction, and user concerns. Our preliminary findings in...

We consider the problem of developing a recommender system for suggesting suitable matches in an online dating web site. The main problem to be solved is that matches must be highly personalized. Moreover, in contrast to typical product recommender systems, it is unhelpful to recommend popular items: matches must be extremely specific to the tastes and interests of the user, but it is difficult...

There are two sorts of constraint satisfaction problems. One is abstract, like solving mathematical equations, and the other is real, like designing an artifact satisfying requirements. We need to represents real constraints by abstract ones when we use CSP’s in the real problems. This is not a easy task, and user-interactions are inevitable in order to adjust the constraints and to solve the r...

Call control features (e.g., call-divert, voice-mail) are primitive options to which users can subscribe off-line to personalise their service. The configuration of a feature subscription involves choosing and sequencing features from a catalogue and is subject to constraints that prevent undesirable feature interactions at run-time. When the subscription requested by a user is inconsistent, on...

Occupational health and safety risk factors can have direct or indirect effects on levels of organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and the job productivity of workers in service companies as well as other types of industries. In this paper, the effects of physical, biological, chemical and socio-psychological risk factors, related to occupational safety and health, encountered in hotel e...

Nature-inspired devices and architectures are attracting considerable attention for various purposes, including the development of novel computing techniques based on spatiotemporal dynamics, exploiting stochastic processes for computing, and reducing energy dissipation. This paper demonstrates that networks of optical energy transfers between quantum nanostructures mediated by optical near-fie...

There is an increasing need for space missions to be able to collaboratively (and competitively) develop plans both within and across missions. In addition, interacting spacecraft that interleave onboard planning and execution must reach consensus on their commitments to each other prior to execution. In domains where missions have varying degrees of interaction and different constraints on com...

In this paper we present a logical language for representing and reasoning about drawings in the context of interactive computer graphics. We discuss the motivation for this kind of representation in graphics systems and its applications to geometric reasoning and constraint satisfaction. A formal deenition of the language and its interpretation process is presented and illustrated. The theoret...