This paper examines a new approach to making the evaluation of personal search systems more feasible. Comparability and diverse coverage of personal search tasks are two main issues in evaluating these systems. To address these issues, the proposed approach relies on identifying the differences between search tasks. An experiment was conducted to measure user perceptions of such differences acr...

Groupware Task Analysis is a task analysis method that deals with the context of use of a system in the broadest sense. The task world is seen from three viewpoints that deal with different aspects of the world. The processes of GTA and their background are described in detail. In addition a task analysis tool EUTERPE is described. EUTERPE is based on GTA and allows capturing of the task models...

We present a model of absolute autonomy and power in agent systems. This absolute sense of autonomy captures the agent’s liberty over an agent’s preferences. Our model characterizes an affinity between autonomy and power. We argue that agents with similar individual autonomy and power experience an adjusted level of autonomy and power due to being in a group of like agents. We then illustrate o...

A study of a group of e lementary school students learning to control a computerimplemented Newtonian object reveals a surprisingly uniform and detai led collection of strategies, at the core of which is a robust "Aristotel ian" expectation that things should move in the direction they are last pushed. A protocol of an undergraduate dealing with the same situation shows a large overlap with the...

Theorists have often emphasized the role of analogy in creativity, particular in scientific or intellectual contexts. But in Boden’s model, creative processes are assumed to be mediated by acts of exploration and transformation. There is a need to understand how these two perspectives fit together and to clarify whether analogy is mediated by transformation, exploration, or both of those proces...

Eduardo Rojas is a Senior Urb an Planner with the Inter-American Development Bank, supervising the bank's urban deve lopment portfolio. H e is currently desig ning several urban h eritag e preservation and revitalization loans and technical coop erations. He is task manager f or the Quito Historic Center Rehabilitation Loan granted to Ecuador. His degrees are in architecture, urban planning, an...

This study examines concept mapping as a follow-up study strategy for learning from text. Based on a task analysis of the sub-tasks learners must accomplish during mapping, we developed the following support measures: Participants (N = 102) either generated a map (1) from scratch (map-generation), (2) from a list of concepts (concepts-provided), (3) from spatially arranged concepts (concepts-ar...

Impaired response inhibition plays a major role in many addictive behaviors. However, in studies using go/no-go tasks, findings regarding the presence of response inhibition deficits in nicotine-dependent individuals are mixed. This might be due to differences between studies on a number of task parameters. Here we aimed to identify task conditions under which go/no-go task performance deficits...