Public transportation systems are among the most ubiquitous and complex large-scale systems found in modern society. For those unable to drive such as people with cognitive disabilities, these systems are essential gateways for participation in community activities, socialization, and independence. To understand the magnitude and scope of this national problem, we highlight deficiencies identified in an international study by the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council and present specific cognitive barriers identified in empirical studies of transportation systems in several U.S. cities.An interdisciplinary team of HCI researchers, urban transportation planners, commercial technologists, and assistive care specialists are now collaborating on the Mobility-for-All project to create architectures and prototypes that support those with cognitive disabilities and their caregivers. We have grounded our research and design efforts using a distributed cognition framework. We have derived requirements for our designs by analyzing “how things are” for individuals with cognitive disabilities who learn and use public transportation systems. We present a socio-technical architecture that has three components: a) a personal travel assistant that uses real-time Global Positioning Systems data from the bus fleet to deliver just-in-time prompts; b) a mobile prompting client and a prompting script configuration tool for caregivers; and c) a monitoring system that collects real-time task status from the mobile client and alerts the support community of potential problems. We then describe a phased community-centered assessment approach that begins at the design stage and continues to be integrated throughout the project.This research has broad implications for designing more human-centered transportation systems that are universally accessible for other disenfranchised communities such as the elderly or nonnative speaker. This project presents an “in-the-world” research opportunity that challenges our understanding about mobile human computer interactions with ubiquitous, context-aware computing architectures in noisy, uncontrolled environments; personalization and user modeling techniques; and the design of universally accessible interfaces for complex systems through participatory design processes.This article provides both a near-term vision and an architecture for transportation systems that are socially inclusive, technologically appealing, and easier for everyone to use.

Experiment 1 involved having undergraduates take or not take notes while listening to two passages with or without signals (structural cues). When notetaking on signaled text, recall was maximized; on nonsignaled text, recall was minimized. Because notetakers appeared to rely on signals in processing text, it seemed that notetaking produced a structure-search process. Regression analyses suggested that notetaking in the presence of signals enhanced recall of field-dependent (FDs) but not field-independent learners (FIs). Experiment 2 directly examined this issue in a reading context. Increased high-level recall across passages of the same overall structure (a transfer of structure effect) was found for FIs only in the non-notetaking conditions and for the FDs only in the notetaking conditions. Thus, FIs seemed to spontaneously use a tacit structure strategy when left to their own devices and FDs appeared to immediately display powerful structuring skills when induced to do so via notetaking.The standard view of text (Britton & Glaesser, 1996) is that it is organized in hierarchical fashion with varying degrees of interconnectedness among the basic elements of meaning in the text. At the most general level, expository text poses some form of argument. For example, a problem may be presented with specific issues and some explanation of points, then a solution offered involving, perhaps, a description of the attributes of the proposal, the manner of performing it, and so on. The form of the argument and the key content elements can be explicitly pointed out by means of signaling words, such as the solution is or therefore, contained in the text.Signals, then, serve to cue the learner to the important text content and its organizational structure (

Much more is possible in achieving brighter, more vibrant colors for a richer visual experience in emerging, wide-gamut display media. Yet, both digital cinema and broadcast TV content fall well short of this promise. In this paper, we provide the means for realizing this promise by identifying certain memory colors (e.g., green grass, red, and blue sky) and rendering each independently making use of the full gamut of the display media while identifying and maintaining flesh tones to their original intent. Further, a means is provided for extending the gamut of not just wide-gamut, but any display media by simply lowering the white point of the display.

This paper reports on the experience of using the EDURange framework, a cloud-based resource for hosting on-demand interactive cybersecurity scenarios. Our framework is designed especially for the needs of teaching faculty. The scenarios we have implemented each are designed specifically to nurture the development of analysis skills in students as a complement to both theoretical security concepts and specific software tools.Our infrastructure has two features that make it unique compared to other cybersecurity educational frameworks. First, EDURange is scalable because it is hosted on a commercial, large-scale cloud environment. Second, EDURange supplies instructors with the ability to dynamically change the parameters and characteristics of exercises so they can be replayed and adapted to multiple classes. Our framework has been used successfully in classes and workshops for students and faculty. We present our experiences building the system, testing it, and using feedback from surveys to improve the system and boost user interest.

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