Visual approach

Abstract: The Aviation Safety Reporting System includes over a million confidential reports describing aviation safety incidents. Natural language processing techniques allow for relatively rapid and largely automated analysis of large collections of text data. Interpretation of the results and further investigations by subject matter experts can produce meaningful results. This explains the many commercial and academic applications of natural language processing to aviation safety reports. Relatively few published articles have, however, employed topic modeling, an approach that can identify latent structure within a corpus of documents. Topic modeling is more flexible and relies less on subject matter experts than alternative document categorization and clustering methods. It can, for example, uncover any number of topics hidden in a set of incident reports that have been, or would be, assigned to the same category when using labels and methods applied in earlier research. This article describes the application of structural topic modeling to Aviation Safety Reporting System data. The application identifies known issues. The method also reveals previously unreported connections. Sample results reported here highlight fuel pump, tank, and landing gear issues and the relative insignificance of smoke and fire issues for private aircraft. The results also reveal the prominence of the Quiet Bridge Visual and Tip Toe Visual approach paths at San Francisco International Airport in safety incident reports. These results would, ideally, be verified by subject matter experts before being used to set priorities when planning future safety studies.

Abstract: Research on how to take advantage of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality applications and technologies in the domain of manufacturing has brought forward a great number of concepts, prototypes, and working systems. Although comprehensive surveys have taken account of the state of the art, the design space of industrial augmented and virtual reality keeps diversifying. We propose a visual approach towards assessing this space and present an interactive, community-driven tool which supports interested researchers and practitioners in gaining an overview of the aforementioned design space. Using such a framework we collected and classified relevant publications in terms of application areas and technology platforms. This tool shall facilitate initial research activities as well as the identification of research opportunities. Thus, we lay the groundwork, forthcoming workshops and discussions shall address the refinement.

Abstract: We present a visual approach to layout static components of user interfaces as hand-drawn compositions of simple geometric shapes, based on sketch recognition. We have defined a visual grammar using drawing data from target users, where we tried to figure out how people sketch interfaces and what combinations of shapes are more commonly used to define widgets. From these we built our grammar and implemented a prototype, JavaSketchIt, that allows creating user interfaces through hand-drawn geometric shapes, identified by a gesture recognizer. This prototype generates a Java interface, whose layout can be beautified using an a posteriori set of grammar rules (e.g. to align and group objects). To validate our approach, we conducted usability studies to compare our approach with a commercial system (JBuilder). Besides a measurable speed advantage in drawing interfaces, users found our system more comfortable, natural and intuitive to use, than the competing product, as demonstrated by post‐experiment inquiries.