Research has shown that incorporating eye tracking in usability research can provide certain benefits compared with traditional usability testing. There are various methodologies available when conducting research using eye trackers. This paper presents the results of a study aimed to compare the outcomes from four different retrospective think aloud (RTA) methods in a webusability study: an un...

[Note: These pages were my rough private notes that I made in preparation for the talk I gave. Needless to say, I didn’t cover all this material in my talk. I am willing, but hesitant, to put it on the web because of three reasons, the primary one being that I haven’t yet put in proper references for any of the results cited. The second reason is that in its next draft I will be separating much...

The development of algebraic topology in the twentieth century is one of the most important advances of its time. However, how did this development get under way? What forces worked to advance the subject, and perhaps more interestingly, to retard the development in its early days? In this talk I will present some historical approaches to these questions and the answers they produce. Toutes les...

In this paper, we investigate the effect of context on usability evaluation. The focus is on how children behave and perform when they are tested in different settings. Two most commonly applied usability evaluation methods: the think-aloud and constructive interactions are applied to the children in different physical contexts. We present an experimental design involving 54 children participat...

It is widely believed that chiral symmetry is restored not only at high temperatures, but also at high nuclear densities. The drop of the order parameter of the chiral phase transition, the chiral condensate, with density has indeed been calculated in various models and is as such a rather robust result. In this talk I point out that the connection of this property with actual observables is fa...

Program comprehension research can be characterized by both the theories that provide rich explanations about how programmers comprehend software, as well as the tools that are used to assist in comprehension tasks. During this talk I will review some of the key cognitive theories of program comprehension that have emerged over the past thirty years. Using these theories as a canvas, I will the...

Chinese characters can be compared to a molecular structure: a character is analogous to a molecule, radicals are like atoms, calligraphic strokes correspond to elementary particles, and when characters form compounds, they are like molecular structures. In chemistry the conjunction of all of these structural levels produces what we perceive as matter. In language, the conjunction of strokes, r...

There has been a lot of excitement in the last few decades over the interaction between algebraic geometry and theoretical physics. Much of it can be bewildering to students and researchers alike as they try to navigate physics jargon and what often seems like strangely motivated constructions and questions. In this talk I will give a users guide to understanding some of the questions, objects,...

Room-scale virtual reality (VR) holds great potential as a medium for communication and collaboration in remote and same-time, same-place settings. Related work has established that movement realism can create a strong sense of social presence, even in the absence of photorealism. Here, we explore the noteworthy attributes of communicative interaction using embodied minimal avatars in room-scal...

The main purpose of this study was to compare the strategies used by Chinesespeaking students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in a multiplechoice format reading comprehension test. The focus was on describing what students do when they are taking reading comprehension tests by asking students to verbalize their thoughts. The strategies were further compared with participa...