The Influence of Cognitive Biases in Production Planning and Control: Considering the Human Factor for the Design of Decision Support Systems

Production planning and control (PPC) requires human decision-making in several process steps like production program planning, production data management, and performance measurement. Thereby, human decisions are often biased leading to an aggravation of logistic performance. Exemplary, the lead time syndrome (LTS) shows this connection. While production planners aim to improve due date reliability by updating planned lead times, the result is actually a decreasing due date reliability. In current research in the field of production logistics, the impact of cognitive biases on the decision-making process in production planning and control remains at a silent place. We aim to close this research gap by combining a systematic literature review on behavioral operation management and cognitive biases with a case study from the steel industry to show the influence of cognitive biases on human decision-making in production planning and the impact on logistic performance. The result is the definition of guidelines considering human behavior for the design of decision support systems to improve logistic performance.

Towards Agility and Speed in Enriched UX Evaluation Projects

Recent research has called for the use of enriched measures, that is, psychophysiological measures of emotional and cognitive states, in user experience (UX) testing. This chapter investigates how these enriched measures can inform user experience evaluation while maintaining agility and speed in managing UX projects. Using a multiple case approach, this chapter presents the analysis of 12 recent user experience projects in which enriched measures were used. Lessons learned with regard to challenges encountered are outlined. They emphasize on: (1) the nature of the research question impacts the completion time and the complexity of the project; (2) the need to communicate and coordinate between all parties; (3) the need to anticipate the collected measurements and enhanced results using a mosaic of hybrid collection methods; (4) the nature of the results adapted to underline the operational side without reducing the quality of the work performed; and (5) the time constrains influenced and influencing the pre-tests and project’s granularity. This chapter concludes with lessons learned from an agile/UX development approach in the realization of Sprint projects.

Speech Standards: Lessons Learnt

During the past decades, the landscape of speech and DTMF applications has changed from being based on proprietary platforms to being completely based on speech standards. The W3C Voice Browser Working Group played a primary goal in this change. This chapter describes that change, highlights the standards created by the W3C VBWG, and discusses the benefits that these standards have provided in many other application fields, including multi-modal interfaces.

Collaborative Production Model of Educational Resources for Human-Computer Interaction Community in Latino America

Today, human-computer interaction (HCI) shows great activity, dynamism, and academic presence throughout the world, having special relevance in the Latin American region. The region is not only vast for its geographical space but also diverse and multicultural, where researchers and academics from this area or community have proposed and made known the benefits of the HCI that they can bring to today’s society. However, some problems arise and need to be addressed in the HCI area in the Latin American region, such as the lack of training strategies and the availability of content and educational resources in Spanish. In order to mitigate this problem, the current work proposes a collaborative production model of educative resources for human-computer interaction developed in Latin America. The model preconizes a series of strategies and technological services to support the collaborative production and access of HCI educative resources such as videos, slides, handouts, textbooks, user experience analysis, and usability tests. The proposed model is tested throughout two real case studies conducted by teachers and researchers from different Latin American universities in order to produce and use the HCI educative resources for under- and postgraduate courses.

The Theory behind Controllable Expressive Speech Synthesis: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach

As part of the Human-Computer Interaction field, Expressive speech synthesis is a very rich domain as it requires knowledge in areas such as machine learning, signal processing, sociology, and psychology. In this chapter, we will focus mostly on the technical side. From the recording of expressive speech to its modeling, the reader will have an overview of the main paradigms used in this field, through some of the most prominent systems and methods. We explain how speech can be represented and encoded with audio features. We present a history of the main methods of Text-to-Speech synthesis: concatenative, parametric and statistical parametric speech synthesis. Finally, we focus on the last one, with the last techniques modeling Text-to-Speech synthesis as a sequence-to-sequence problem. This enables the use of Deep Learning blocks such as Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks as well as Attention Mechanism. The last part of the chapter intends to assemble the different aspects of the theory and summarize the concepts.

The Immersive Power of Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is one of the technologies that have received great attention and interest in recent years. In a world where the boundaries between the real and the virtual are blurring, this immersive technology enriches and complements the reality with digital content and allows people to gain a complete and real sense of the objects around them. Currently, the applications of augmented reality go beyond the domains of games and entertainment and are aimed at taking the full advantage of the technology in areas such as medicine, architecture, business, tourism, education and more. The current paper presents the essence of technology and types of augmented reality systems. The basic approaches for creating augmented reality applications are discussed. Specific examples of the application of the technology in the field of education are given-an augmented book and augmented reality educational projects, whose purpose is to make learning an interesting, immersive, engaging and motivating process.

Towards an Optimisation of Visual Aesthetics for User Interaction

Visual aesthetics is a crucial aspect of visual experience, and very few amount of knowledge is distributed to people on how some visual colors are more pronounced than others or why users prefer some colors to others. There are few articles that have written topics on the natural adaptations and how colour can affect people. In this chapter, we lay special emphasis on improving methods on visual aesthetics for user interaction by applying natural valence modelling where color preferences arise from user’s average affective response to visual aesthetics, that is mostly related to objects or things around us. A simple experiment conducted as provided support in respect to this phenomenon. Users like or prefer very strong and sharp colors that attract the eyes and dislike colors that are less sharp or clear to human vision. This natural valence modelling agrees more to the data collected and gives a more plausible or very comprehensive meaning to how users prefer the colors of objects they had viewed.