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The intensity of negotiations, including war and Peace Talks, are driven by the threat of identity disintegration. Sri Lanka negotiates to preserve territorial integrity. Tamils argue for secession to preserve their identity. How is each to adapt their identity so that they can peacefully co-exist within the island? The current peace process began in 2002. The principles of Organizational Cybernetics show distinction is warranted between External Self-Determination (secession) and Internal Self-Determination (a single sovereignty recognised by the international community) as the negotiating systems occupy different recursive positions relative to each other. In each context, the systems gravitate differently towards cohesion and autonomy. Equally vital is to distinguish between systems, their embedments and their representatives. Diagnosis of the peace process seeking an internal self-determination solution does not display these distinctions. At the 2002 Peace Talks the only system permitted to negotiate with Sri Lanka (the encompassing system) was confined to one of the embedded systems (the Tamils as represented by the LTTE). Structurally this risked the encompassing system collapsing to represent its missing embedded systems. To rectify this Team Syntegrity is proposed, whose sequence of design in its multiple cascades enables representation issues to be resolved without it being confined to political parties. Content solutions are matters for Sri Lankans to design. However, they are considered in order to design and propose a ‘process’ solution. The journey this thesis takes is to arrive at designing the ‘how’ of negotiations so that it can accommodate the myriad of ‘what’ needs to be negotiated. A meta-level logic is required to resolve the undecidable proposition of preserving territorial integrity or secession. Working with the levels of recursion - the UN, the State and its embedded systems, this thesis proposes a way to absorb residual variety to gain agreement to negotiate internal self-determination based on interlocking negotiations involving those seeking cohesion and those seeking autonomy. This process also opens the way to address the solution design of the other interacting crises afflicting Sri Lanka. The uniqueness and contribution of this research is that it is the first time Organizational Cybernetics has been conceptually applied to diagnose and design a peace process involving a sovereign State.

Culture shapes most human behaviour, including interaction with computers. In much Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research, culture is assumed to impact design preferences. However, many cultural variables identified in the general literature have no clear link to design preferences. In this thesis, we develop a new model, the Diamond Model, to structure a wide range of cultural variables. This is used to organise a literature review of cultural variables and their impact in HCI, as well as to identify instances of Jordanian cultural variables, which is the focus of field studies in this thesis. The balance and range of cultural variables in the Diamond Model suggests that culture should have impact beyond design preferences, and should also influence how users react to, explain and evaluate difficulties when using computers. To investigate whether this was the case, a series of field studies was carried out to explore the balance between the impact of culture on design preferences and on reactions to usage difficulties. Each field study found Jordanian instances for cultural variables in the Diamond Model, but also added further cultural variables that had not been identified in either the general or the HCI literature. In the process, we identified more cultural variables that influenced reactions to usage difficulties in Jordan than influenced design preferences. This thesis presents the Diamond Model, applies it to existing literature on culture and HCI, and uses it to structure analysis of results from three field studies. The result is an extended Diamond Model with specific Jordanian instances of cultural variables. However, this alone may not help software developers to understand how culture impacts HCI in Jordan. To complement the Diamond Model, we developed a novel approach called “Dramatic Sketches” to communicate impact of cultural variables on HCI. We present example Dramatic sketches and conclude with guidance on developing software for Jordanian contexts.

An increasing number of people interact not only with computers, but through computers. Interaction between people through computers to complete work tasks is termed Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). The scope of activities supported by CSCW systems is described, and CSCW systems which support communication, meetings and writing are discussed. More specifically, the potential for improved computer support of the writing task is investigated. It is concluded that models of the writing task and writers are not yet sufficiently accurate to be embedded in normative computer programs or systems; individual writers and writing tasks are extremely varied. Leading on from the studies of both existing systems and writing theories, requirements for generic CSCW systems, single author support systems and multiple author support systems are presented. The design of CSCW systems which support asynchronous collaborative authoring of structured documents is investigated in this thesis. A novel approach to design and implementation of such systems is described and discussed. This thesis then describes MILO, a system that does not feature embedded models of writers or the writing task. In fact, MILO attempts to minimize constraints on the activities of collaborating authors and on the structure of documents. Hence with MILO, roles of participants are determined by social processes, and the presentational structure of documents is imposed at the end of the writing process. It is argued that this approach results in a workable, practical and useful design, substantiating the view that 'minimally-constrained' CSCW systems, of which MILO is an example, will be successful. It is shown that MILO successfully meets the stated requirements, and that it compares favourably with existing collaborative writing systems along several dimensions. The limitations of work presented in the thesis are discussed, leading to suggestions for future work which will remedy deficiencies and extend the work which has been undertaken. The nature of this thesis's contribution to CSCW in general, computer supported collaborative writing, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is discussed.

The language education company KEEWORDS provides games for language learning using physical decks of cards. The words in the language are shown on one side of the card, and the translation in another language on the other side of the card. Research has shown that this type of repetitive learning is effective for practicing vocabulary. We had an idea that KEEWORDS could expand their product line also to the app market. The goal of this project is to design a proposal to the Keewords company how their training method could be turned into a mobile app service. The goal of the designed app is to help educators teach students in a new and interesting way by providing them with a tool to create content, services, and training tools using new mobile technology. This project shows the process of designing this type of card training for smartphones. The design is not just for the language learning; rather it is a general design for learning different education material. The end result of this project is a proposal of a graphical user interface.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2009. / Adviser: Denise Nicholson. Includes bibliographical references.

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Our increasing ability to construct large and complex computer and information systems suggests that the classical manner in which such systems are understood and architected is inappropriate for the open and unstructured manner in which they are often used. With the appearance of mathematically complex and, more importantly, high scale, non-deterministic systems, such as the World Wide Web, there is a need to understand, construct and maintain systems in a world where their assembly and use may not be precisely predicted. In Addition, few have thus far attempted to study such Web-scale systems holistically so as to understand the implications of non-programmable characteristics, like emergence and evolution – a matter of particular relevance in the new field of Web Science. This collection of prior published works and their associated commentary hence brings together a number of themes focused on Web Science and its broader application in systems and software engineering. It primarily rests on materials presented in the book The Web’s Awake, first published in April 2007.

Recent studies of queries submitted to Internet Search Engines have shown that non-English queries and unclassifiable queries have nearly tripled during the last decade. Most search engines were originally engineered for English. They do not take full account of inflectional semantics nor, for example, diacritics or the use of capitals which is a common feature in languages other than English. The literature concludes that searching using non-English and non-Latin based queries results in lower success and requires additional user effort to achieve acceptable precision. The primary aim of this research study is to develop an evaluation methodology for identifying the shortcomings and measuring the effectiveness of search engines with non-English queries. It also proposes a number of solutions for the existing situation. A Greek query log is analyzed considering the morphological features of the Greek language. Also a text extraction experiment revealed some problems related to the encoding and the morphological and grammatical differences among semantically equivalent Greek terms. A first stopword list for Greek based on a domain independent collection has been produced and its application in Web searching has been studied. The effect of lemmatization of query terms and the factors influencing text based image retrieval in Greek are also studied. Finally, an instructional strategy is presented for teaching non-English students how to effectively utilize search engines. The evaluation of the capabilities of the search engines showed that international and nationwide search engines ignore most of the linguistic idiosyncrasies of Greek and other complex European languages. There is a lack of freely available non-English resources to work with (test corpus, linguistic resources, etc). The research showed that the application of standard IR techniques, such as stopword removal, stemming, lemmatization and query expansion, in Greek Web searching increases precision. ii

The increasingly ubiquitous nature of software development has presented new challenges to usability research, thereby introducing a need for investigation of the use of field evaluation methods. This thesis explores the application of field methods to usability evaluation, in order to understand the challenges involved in applying such methods and the contextual issues surrounding their implementation. More specifically, the research aims to investigate the relationship between context and design when using field evaluation studies. This work is especially important because it represents a first step towards systemising HCI field evaluation methodologies. A case study approach was taken in order to provide real-world examples of field method usage, and in addition two exploratory studies were conducted in order to explore methodological challenges. This process resulted in the development of a systematic field evaluation method named Rapid Contextual Evaluation. In providing a rapid approach to field evaluation, this thesis addresses the recent gaps in the literature regarding the recent lack of publication of systematic evaluation methods and the lack of detailed methodological case studies to inform practice. The work reported here is the first to present such case studies, and the first to describe in detail the application of a systematic field evaluation method in a real world context. The research identified the major challenges experienced in implementing field evaluation studies, and proposed methodological changes to address these. The relationship between context and design was discovered to be iterative, and field evaluation approaches were found to identify a broad range of contextual issues which went beyond system interaction. In conclusion, the thesis identifies areas where future research efforts should focus in order to deliver the most valuable improvements to field evaluation methods.