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As voice search has progressively become a new way of information acquisition and human–computer interaction, this paper aims to explore the users' voice search behavior in human–vehicle interaction.

This study employed mixed research methods, including questionnaires and interviews. A total of 151 Amazon MTurk volunteers were recruited to complete a questionnaire based on their most recent and impressive voice search experience. After the questionnaire, this paper conducted an online interview with the participants.

This paper studied users' voice search behavior characteristics in the context of the human–vehicle interaction and analyzed the voice search content, search need, search motivation and user satisfaction. In addition, this paper studied the barriers and suggestions for voice search in human–vehicle interaction through a content analysis of the interviews.

This paper's analysis of users' barriers and suggestions has a specific reference value for optimizing the voice search interaction system and improving the service.

This study is exploratory research that seeks to identify users' voice search needs and tasks and investigate voice search satisfaction in human–vehicle interaction context.

In this paper, we present a proposed information environment (PROPIE) for enhanced interaction and value‐adding of electronic documents (e‐documents). The design of PROPIE was based on a thorough user needs and requirements assessment in interacting with information through well‐documented findings, and a focus group with twelve participants to elicit features that were deemed desirable in future interactions. The design was also based on an earlier work which reviewed the advancements in various user interface (UI) technologies, visualisation and interactive techniques, and a consideration of novel information structuring and organisation techniques that pose important implications for the design of more advanced UIs. Providing a suite of novel features and interactive tools that can be flexibly combined, PROPIE allows users to apply multiple novel ways to query intuitively and navigate information in an e‐document. The querying and browsing processes in PROPIE are supported by various interactive and visualisation techniques. Users work within a visually sovereign, integrated environment for information gathering and organising, based on navigable, fractional information objects that are also affiliated with rich metadata and additional layers of value‐adding information. A set of interface mock‐ups was developed to demonstrate the potential of the environment in supporting the design of a new generation of electronic journals (e‐journals). We report here empirical results from a study conducted to obtain representative users‘ feedback with regard to using PROPIE for interacting with e‐journals. Twenty‐two participants from a variety of academic backgrounds participated in the evaluation. Overall, PROPIE was found to have the potential both for enhancing the user’s interaction with information captured within e‐journals and for adding value to e‐documents in various ways.

Clincians spend much of their time manipulating information. Their diagnoses are made through a comparison between their knowledge of the body's behaviour in health and disease and fresh data from each patient they see. But the knowledge base in medicine is expanding at an overwhelming rate, while doctors' capacity to acquire, evaluate, store, and recall new knowledge is inevitably limited. Present information technology allows rapid reference to the world's medical literature — through established library services or, more recently, through direct user access to major international bibliographies. But further developments, in intelligent user interfaces, in portable reference sources for selected data, and in systems for ready access to comprehensive reviews could improve the doctor's lot. Accumulated medical experience held on a user‐accessible electronic index may also enhance the data on which the doctor is able to draw to optimise patient management. The value of any medical information, however, will still depend finally on the quality of scientific observation and on the competence of the medical reviewer. The medical librarian, too, will continue to play a key role, as a source of expertise in accessing specialist information, and as an adviser to users who wish to play a more active part themselves in electronic information technology.

Electronic mail (e‐mail) and messaging systems are a powerful means of communication which are fast become a primary means of communication. This paper aims to describe the need for expression in e‐mail.

This paper describes the need for expression in e‐mail and the development of a personalised e‐mail system. A survey is carried out to comprehend the derived meanings from visuals; as a result the prototype is formed.

This paper presents a prototype which utilises the idea of reading pictures as sentences and the semiotic and linguistic meaning derived from those sentences. The system aims to interpret the sender's thoughts and convey their emotion and personality through a combination of graphical components, image, and expressive typography. In contrast with the new developing successful language that is rapidly spreading in the use of mobile devices, this personalized e‐mail introduces a visual language that people will acquire in using their e‐mails. Initial findings are presented from exercises of visual literacy, where the viewer has to play a series of matching games with words and images in order to derive each user's meanings and interpretations.

This interactive piece is attempting to transform the static nature of e‐mail into a more dynamic form that can offer new ways to interpret verbal information visually. The device will instill the user's message with more authentic personalities and expressions.

Cognitive semiotics is something designers explore over time with intuition and experience. Introducing and equipping young designers in college, with regard to semiotics would speed up this essential and unavoidable mental process.

This research will accelerate the coming of emotion to computer systems. Graphic design should be viewed from a structuralism perspective as a language system, to extend the understanding of language from a spoken and written system of signs to a manner of visual signals. Designers play a part in reinventing and redefining signs and symbols.

This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse about the nature of privacy and its role in ubiquitous environments and provide insights for future research.

The paper analyses the privacy implications of particular characteristics of ubiquitous applications and discusses the fundamental principles and information practices used in digital environments for protecting individuals' private data.

A significant trend towards shifting privacy protection responsibility from government to the individuals is identified. Also, specific directions for future research are provided with a focus on interdisciplinary research.

This paper identifies key research issues and provides directions for future research.

This study contributes by identifying major challenges that should be addressed, so that a set of “fair information principles” can be applied in the context of ubiquitous environments. It also discusses the limitations of these principles and provides recommendations for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an intelligent system for fashion style selection for non-standard female body shapes.

With the goal of creating natural aesthetic relationship between the body shape and the shape of clothing, garments designed for the upper and lower body are combined to fit different female body shapes, which are classified as V, A, H and O-shapes. The proposed intelligent system combines genetic algorithm (GA) with a neural network classifier, which is trained using the particle swarm optimization (PSO). The former, called genetic search, is used to find the optimal design parameters corresponding to a best fit for the desired target, while the task of the latter, called neural classification, is to evaluate fitness (goodness) of each evolved new fashion style.

The experimental results are fashion styling recommendations for the four female body shapes, drawn from 260 possible combinations, based on variations from 15 attributes. These results are considered to be a strong indication of the potential benefits of the application of intelligent systems to fashion styling.

The proposed intelligent system combines the effective searching capabilities of two approaches. The first approach uses the GA for identifying best fits to the target shape of the body in the solution space. The second is the PSO for finding optimal (with respect to training mean-squared error) weight and threshold parameters of the neural classifier, which is able to evaluate the fitness of successively evolved fashion styles.

The paper shows how access to knowledge can be enhanced by using a set of innovative approaches and technologies based on the semantic web.

Emerging trends in knowledge access are considered followed by a description of how ontologies and semantics can contribute. A set of tools is then presented which is based on semantic web technology. For each of these tools a detailed description of the approach is given together with an analysis of related and future work as appropriate.

The tools presented are at the prototype stage but can already show how knowledge access can be improved by allowing users to more precisely express what they are looking for and by presenting to them in a form that is appropriate to their current context.

The tools show promising results in improving access to knowledge which will be further evaluated within a practical setting. The tools will be integrated and trialled as part of case studies within the SEKT project. This will allow their usability and practical applicability to be measured.

Ontologies as a form of knowledge representation are increasing in importance. Knowledge management, and in particular knowledge access, will benefit from their widespread acceptance. The use of open standards and compatible tools in this area will be important to support interoperability and widespread access to disparate knowledge repositories.

The paper presents research in an emerging but increasingly important field, i.e. semantic web‐based knowledge technology. It describes how this technology can satisfy the demand for improved knowledge access, including providing knowledge delivery to users at the right time and in the correct form.

There is still little support for the consumer decision‐making process on the web, especially when prices are not the primary property of a product. Reasons for that are complex product specifications as well as often volitional weak interoperability between e‐commerce sites. This paper aims to address this issue.

The semantic web is supposed to make product information more interoperable between different sites. Additionally, some products with limited time frames of availability, like real estates or second‐hand cars, require periodical searches over several days, weeks, or even months. For those kinds of products existing systems cannot be applied. Instant information about new offers on the market is therefore crucial. Wireless access to the web enables services to become instantaneous and to provide up‐to‐date information to users.

This paper presents a framework which is based on multivariate product comparison allowing users to delegate search requests to an agent. The success of the agent depends heavily on the matching algorithm. Fuzzy utility functions and the analytical hierarchy process are a very feasible combination for the scoring of offers.

The proposed system supports users finding products on the web matching specific user preferences and instantly informs them when new items become available on the virtual market. As a specific use case the framework is being applied to the real estate sector, because especially for this sector several shortcomings of the current support have been identified.

Interest is currently growing in open social learner modeling (OSLM), which means making peer models and a learner's own model visible to encourage users in e-learning. The purpose of this study is to examine students' views about the OSLM in an e-learning system.

This case study was conducted with 40 undergraduate students enrolled in advanced programming and database management system courses. A Likert-type questionnaire and open-ended questions were used to obtain the students' views. System usage data were also analyzed to ensure the richness and diversity of the overall data set.

The quantitative data of the students' views were analyzed with descriptive statistics; the results are presented as graphics. The qualitative data of the students' views were examined by content analysis to derive themes. These themes are organized into four subtopics: the students' positive views, their negative views, their improvement suggestions and their preferences about using similar OSLM visualizations in other e-learning systems. The students' subjective views are discussed in the context of their recorded interactions with the system.

Competition due to seeing peer models was considered by participants both as positive and negative features of the learning system. So, this study revealed that, the ways to combine peer learner models to e-learning systems that promote positive competition without resulting social pressure, still need to be explored.

By combining open learner models with open peer models, OSLM enhances the learning process in three different ways: it supports self-regulation, encourages competition and empowers self-evaluation. To take advantage of these positive contributions, practitioners should consider enhancing e-learning systems with both own learner and peer model features.

Despite increasing interest in OSLM studies, several limitations and problems must be addressed such as sparsity of data and lack of study of different contexts and cultures. To date, no published study in this area exists in Turkey. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap by examining OSLM features in an e-learning system from the perspectives of Turkish students by using both their system interaction data and their subjective views.

Many physically challenged users cannot interact with a computer through a conventional keyboard and mouse. They may interact with a computer through one or two switches with the help of a scanning mechanism. In this paper we present a new scanning technique based on clustering screen objects and then compare it with two other scanning systems by using a simulator. The analysis shows that the best scanning system is a type of block scanning that divides the screen in four equal sized partitions for four iterations and then switches to eight‐directional scanning. However, with a more accurate target acquisition process, the cluster scanning technique is found to outperform other scanning systems.