Comparison search is an information seeking task where a user examines individual items or sets of items for similarities and differences. While this is a known information need among experts and knowledge workers, appropriate tools are not available. In this paper, we discuss comparison search in the cultural heritage domain, a domain characterized by large, rich and heterogeneous data sets, where different organizations deploy different schemata and terminologies to describe their artifacts. This diversity makes meaningful comparison difficult. We developed a thesaurus-based comparison search application called LISA, a tool that allows a user to search, select and compare sets of artifacts. Different visualizations allow users to use different comparison strategies to cope with the underlying heterogeneous data and the complexity of the search tasks. We conducted two user studies. A preliminary study identifies the problems experts face while performing comparison search tasks. A second user study examines the effectiveness of LISA in helping to solve comparison search tasks. The main contribution of this paper is to establish design guidelines for the data and interface of a comparison search application. Moreover, we offer insights into when thesauri and metadata are appropriate for use in such applications.

Despite robots' embodiment, the effect of physical contact or touch and its interaction with robots' autonomous behaviour has been a mostly overlooked aspect of human-robot interaction. This video-based, 2x2 between-subject survey experiment (N=119) found that touch and proactiveness interacted in their effects on perceived machine-likeness and dependability. Attitude towards robots in general also interacted with the effects of touch. Results show the value of further exploring the combination of physical aspects of human-robot interaction and proactiveness.

State of the art web search systems enable aggregation of information from many sources. Users are challenged to assess the reliability of information from different sources. We report on an empirical user study on the effect of displaying credibility ratings of multiple cultural heritage sources (e.g. museum websites, art blogs) on users' search performance and selection. The results of our online interactive study (N=122) show that when explicitly presenting these ratings, people become significantly more confident in their selection of information from aggregated results.

Abstract Embodied social agents are programmed to display human‐like social behaviour to increase intuitiveness of interacting with these agents. It is yet unclear what the differences in peoples' responses are to different types of agents' social behaviours. One example is touch. Despite robots' physical embodiment and increasing autonomy, the effect of communicative touch has been a mostly overlooked aspect of human‐robot interaction. This video‐based, 2 × 2 between‐subject survey experiment (N = 119) found that the combination of touch and proactivity influenced whether people saw the robot as machine‐like and dependable. Furthermore, participants' attitude toward robots in general was found to influence perceived closeness between a human and a robot. Results show that communicative touch could be considered a more appropriate behaviour for proactive agents rather than reactive agents. Also, people that are generally more positive towards robots find robots that interact by touch less machine‐like. These effects illustrate that careful consideration is necessary when incorporating social behaviours in agents' physical interaction design. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper reports the user study and design of a concept to improve mobile messaging for teens. A study of current mobile phone use by teens (16-18) showed that, while they prefer communicating by Short Message Service (SMS), they miss expressiveness in this application. An enhanced SMS application, SenseMS, is designed to support affective communication. An evaluation of a SenseMS prototype has shown that enhancing text messages with contextual information and human embodiment can result in a more pleasant experience for both the sender and receiver. Especially for negative emotions, contextual and emotional information are essential for interpreting the message. The study also showed different usage scenarios, in that SenseMS is preferred for emotion-rich messages, whereas SMS is more appropriate for fast and emotion-poor messages.