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Benjamin R. Cowan

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Publication statistics

Pub. period:2009-2012
Pub. count:4
Number of co-authors:7

Co-authors

Number of publications with 3 favourite co-authors:

Russell Beale:2
Holly P. Branigan:2
Nathalie Henry Riche:1

Productive colleagues

Benjamin R. Cowan's 3 most productive colleagues in number of publications:

Russell Beale:50
Audrey Girouard:17
Christophe HURTER:10

Calendar

May 22

Knowing (by) Designing 2013

May 27

13th Intl. Conf. on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

May 28

Graphics Interface 2013

May 21

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Benjamin R. Cowan

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Publications by Benjamin R. Cowan (bibliography)

2012

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Cowan, Benjamin R., Branigan, Holly P. and Beale, Russell (2012): Investigating the impact of interlocutor voice on syntactic alignment in human-computer dialogue. In: Proceedings of the HCI12 Conference on People and Computers XXVI 2012. pp. 39-48.

“Language is at the core of most social activity. Psycholinguistic research has shown that our conversational partners influence our linguistic choices be it syntactic or lexical, a concept termed alignment. As our interaction with computer interlocutors become more frequent recent efforts have been made to understand how and what impacts alignment with computers, showing that our perceptions of computer systems impact on alignment with computer interlocutors. This work looks to identify the impact of how spoken dialogue system design characteristics, specifically system voice type, impact user linguistic behaviour in terms of syntactic alignment in human-computer dialogue. Additionally we wished to identify whether syntactic alignment levels can be used as a behavioural indicator of interaction satisfaction. The research used a wizard of oz experiment design paired with a confederate-scripting paradigm commonly used in psycholinguistics research. We found that there was no significant effect of voice type on syntactic alignment, although there was a significant effect of voice type on interaction satisfaction. Participants rated their experiences with a basic computer voice significantly lower in satisfaction compared to human based and advanced voice computer conditions. The results are discussed in terms of the conceptual nature of syntactic alignment and the impact of item stimuli on alignment levels. Future plans for research are also discussed.”

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HURTER, Christophe, Cowan, Benjamin R., Girouard, Audrey and Riche, Nathalie Henry (2012): Active progress bar: aiding the switch to temporary activities. In: Proceedings of the HCI12 Conference on People and Computers XXVI 2012. pp. 99-108.

“Can we design an interface to help people make use of the idle time spent looking at progress bars? We propose to augment progress bars with user-controlled functionalities facilitating the switch to temporary activities. We propose a taxonomy of waiting period contexts and possible temporary tasks, then report on participatory design sessions, and a follow-up survey. Finally we describe an early prototype of active progress bar and report a small controlled experiment used to identify the impact of the tool on primary task satisfaction. The findings suggest that Active Progress Bars lead to significantly higher satisfaction when compared to a control condition.”

2011

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Cowan, Benjamin R., Beale, Russell and Branigan, Holly P. (2011): Investigating syntactic alignment in spoken natural language human-computer communication. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2011. pp. 2113-2118.

“This paper describes planned experiment-based research observing the existence of syntactic alignment in natural language computer interactions. This research will achieve this through using a computer-human version of the confederate communication task commonly used in psycholinguistic research observing syntactic alignment in human-human dialogue. The motivations of the work lie in observing the existence of syntactic alignment in human-computer dyads and how the naturalness of interaction affects the appearance of such a linguistic phenomenon. The work will also aim to identify how such a linguistic effect links to users' satisfaction and quality judgments of interaction.”

2009

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Cowan, Benjamin R., Vigentini, Lorenzo and Jack, Mervyn A. (2009): Exploring the effects of experience on wiki anxiety and wiki usability: an online study. In: Proceedings of the HCI09 Conference on People and Computers XXIII 2009. pp. 175-183.

“Information Technology is now pervasive in Higher Education institutions and developments in IT are changing the technological landscape at Universities. A recent phenomenon shaping such changes is the use of Web 2.0 tools in a pedagogical context. These tools are often included into a University's IT mix without full appreciation of the possible negative emotions student users may have towards these tools. It is generally assumed that experience with the IT system will be enough to reduce any anxious feelings which may manifest in users about such systems. This study firstly aims to observe the relationship that such emotion may have on usability evaluation of a wiki system. It also aims to investigate the effect of experience on students' negative affective reactions towards a wiki tool. Second year undergraduate psychology students (N=92) who were using a wiki to collaborate on course projects completed questionnaires measuring usability evaluation and anxiety towards the wiki both 2 weeks (Time 1) and 12 weeks (Time 2) into their usage of the system. The research found that wiki anxiety was negatively correlated to participants' usability evaluations of the wiki at both time 1 and time 2. Further experience with the system had little effect on users' negative emotions towards the wiki. Users also showed little change in their usability rating of the system with more exposure to the wiki. However any change in wiki anxiety over the study was negatively correlated with a change in usability evaluation. Possible interpretations of the relationship between wiki anxiety, wiki usability and possible effects of the type and quality of user experience on wiki anxiety are discussed.”

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