This study examines early warning from the users’ perspective as a special category of information seeking. Specifically, we look at the 2009 Victorian bushfires in Australia as an instructive case of early warning information seeking. The bushfires, the worst in Australia’s recorded history, were unique in its ferocity and damage caused, but also in the amount of data and research that was gen...

This introductory paper explores how the use of information affects the effectiveness of early warning systems. By effectiveness, we refer to the capacity of the system to detect and decide on the existence of a threat. There are two aspects to effectiveness: being able to see the evidence that is indicative of a threat; and making the decision, based on the weight of the evidence, to warn that...

For the evaluation of the usability of interaction devices it is important to take the cognitive resources into account that a user needs to perform particular tasks. These aspects are dealt with mainly by usability testing and heuristics in a rather late stage in the design process. Although these approaches are important, they have also serious drawbacks. They do not support rigorous reasonin...

Plan recognition, cognitive workload estimation and human assistance have been extensively studied in the AI and human factors communities, but have seldom been integrated and evaluated as complete systems. In this paper, we develop an assistant agent architecture integrating plan recognition, current and future user information needs, workload estimation and adaptive information presentation t...

In the last decade, the usage of portable communication devices has continued to increase. Autonomic Communications (AC) represents a new frontier for mobile communications because they will allow autonomous and self-regulated network and communication protocols procedures. Dynamic observation of the spectrum and adaptive reactions of the autonomic terminal to wireless channel conditions are he...

English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) uses the results of needs analysis for curriculum development and materials production. ESAP courses should be based on students’ academic needs. Consequently, the present study investigated the English language needs of Iranian undergraduate students of Law. Participants included 218 undergraduate students, 33 graduate students, and 10 content teac...

BACKGROUND Negligible information is available regarding the Social and Emotional Wellbeing (SEWB) needs of Aboriginal Australian individuals in custody with cognitive impairment. This is problematic given that Aboriginal people with cognitive impairment often experience dual disadvantage in the context of the justice system. This study sought to ascertain the relationship between cognitive imp...