Projects

This page contains a selection of projects I have been involved in.

Trust in Wikipedia: How Users Trust Information from an Unknown Source

The use of Wikipedia as an information source is becoming increasingly popular. Several studies have shown that its information quality is high. Normally, when considering information trust, the source of information is an important factor. However, because of the open-source nature of Wikipedia articles, their sources remain mostly unknown. This means that other features need to be used to assess the trustworthiness of the articles. We describe article features - such as images and references - which lay Wikipedia readers use to estimate trustworthiness. The quality and the topics of the articles are manipulated in an experiment to reproduce the varying quality on Wikipedia and the familiarity of the readers with the topics. We show that the three most important features are textual features, references and images.

Trust in Collaborative Repositories

This research is based on earlier findings that trust in machines is based on a propensity to trust and on prior system failure. Recent experiments indicate that people who had a higher propensity to trust but who were paired with an ill-functioning machine suffered the largest negative effects on perceptions of machine characteristics and on post-task trust. However, these experiments were based on closed and fully-automated systems. Further research on trust will be carried out, but the focus is on open information repositories, like Wikipedia. The research focuses on the question whether experience with such repositories and individual differences in dispositional trust have an effect on trust in collaborative repositories.

Color Organs

The color organ is a musical instrument which produces visual stimuli such that it corresponds to the sound in a certain manner. Numerous attempts are known to have listeners experience synaesthetic effects. In these effects stimuli in one organ of sense are experienced in another. Several great names in history, such as Plato, Pythagoras and Aristotle have already been working on music-color correspondence. Since the 17th century, a number of attempts have been taken to design and build devices which could simultaneously produce color and music. This paper gives an overview of the various creations of the past and describes a personal exercise to create a new color organ using modern techniques and color-music principles of the past.

Support of Human Attention Allocation Using Cognitive Model-Based Adaptive Systems

Design and implement an adaptation model for supporting users in the allocation of attention. The input of this model is data based on discrepancies between a prescriptive and descriptive model of attention. The output of the model is a sequence of actions in a test environment that is aimed at changing the allocation of attention of the user from the current descriptive state to a desired prescriptive state.

Cognitive Models of Attention

Recently, TNO Human Factors has developed three cognitive models of attention. These models can predict where the attention of the user is. This research addresses an experiment on the validation of the models. Several manipulations in the test environment had to be done in order to create various conditions. One of those conditions was related to task complexity, which was the focus of the present research. Several manipulation checks have been performed. The results have shown that they were successful.

Emotions in Musical Instruments (Published)

This paper describes a research regarding emotions of musical instruments. The goal is to find out whether it is possible to alter a communicated emotion to a listener by using various musical instruments. These instruments are the piano, marimba, alt sax and cello. After performing an experiment clear differences are visible, especially on the emotions joy and sadness.

Ricochet Compositions (Published)

This short paper describes the basic principles of an implementation of an algorithmic art generator. It is based on the principle of ricocheting lines drawn on a two dimensional canvas. The user of the generator is able to make some adjustments in terms of for instance coloring and the level of detail. An aim for the future is to reduce the human influence by inserting knowledge about aesthetics into the system.

Interactive Ricochet Art

Interactive Ricochet Art is a project which focuses on the design and development of an interactive art generation system. Based on an algorithm abstract art principle (see Ricochet Compositions) we give users the opportunity to adjust artworks to their preferences.

The system is designed for usage in public areas. People at for instance train stations have some spare minutes to spend while waiting for their train. They might be entertained by such a system. Another application might be public libraries or shopping malls, where this system can offer a nice addition to the conventional activities at these places. The artworks can be nice dynamic pictures projected on a wall.

Embodied Conversational Agents: Evaluating Evaluation

This review evaluates three researches on embodied conversational agents. Two methodologies for this evaluation are proposed in current literature. We combine these into one framework. This evaluation gives a clear insight into the methodological shortcomings we encountered. We evaluate both the evaluations and the proposed methodologies and give suggestions for improvement.

Analyzing Listener Gestures for ECAs

One of the most awkward parts of communicating with an embodied conversational agent (ECA) is still the part when the ECA listens to the user. We analyze multi party meetings from the AMI corpus to find out how gestures can contribute to the natural behavior of a listening agent. Head gestures are the main focus. Hand gestures do not seem to occur enough to use in this analyses. We perform a statistical analyses of annotated meetings. Most of the results turn out to be less representative for head to head conversations with an ECA, because the observations are based on multi party meetings.

Using sectors in a Multi Agent Approach to a Taxi Planning Problem

Various multi agent and heuristic approaches were proposed to the pickup and delivery problem (PDP). A variant of this problem is the taxi planning problem. We try to improve the performance of a multi agent approach to this problem by introducing sectors. The idea is to equally distribute the taxi’s over the environment to ensure quick response to new pickup request. We evaluate the system by running a simulation to compare it to a variant without sectors.