Project course instructors routinely perform their formal assessments based on impressions formed from their mostly indirect experience with the groups they oversee. Nevertheless, even with their limited vantage point, instructors trust their ability to make assessments and regulate group work. In this paper we present a 5 dimensional assessment framework based on data from an interview study i...

This paper presents an approach for the qualitative analysis of data obtained from past communicative interactions in an open multiagent system. Such qualitative analysis focuses on the use of high-level agent communication languages to infer theories about agents with mental states which are normally not accessible for the outside observer. The inference of these theories, or context models, i...

If we histogram the normal ow vectors in images of a scene viewed by a moving observer, we can use the time-varying histogram to derive qualitative information about the observer's motion|for example, whether it is (primarily) translational or rotational, and whether the direction of translation or axis of rotation is (roughly) parallel or perpendicular to the camera axis. This is illustrated u...

This article presents an analysis of age differences in virtual reality (VR) use. One hundred forty-eight users, grouped by age and balanced by gender, answered questionnaires about their driving, educational, and medical histories, as well as their experience with computers. Participants then completed a driving assessment in a low-cost, PC-based virtual environment known as DriVR. Dependent m...

This paper tackles the problem of finding a suitable qualitative representation for robots to reason about activity spaces where they carry out tasks interacting with a group of people. The Qualitative Spatial model for Group Robot Interaction (QS-GRI) defines Kendon-formations depending on: (i) the relative location of the robot with respect to other individuals involved in that interaction; (...

The Observer Video-Pro is a system for collecting, managing, analyzing, and presenting observational data. It integrates The Observer software with time code and multimedia hardware components. It extends the functionality of a conventional real-time event recording program in various ways. Observational data can be collected, reviewed, and edited with synchronized display of the corresponding ...

This paper presents a methodology for the detection of objects that move independently of the observer in a 3D dynamic environment. Independent 3D motion detection is formulated as a problem of robust regression applied to visual input acquired by a binocular, rigidly moving observer. The qualitative analysis of images acquired by a parallel stereo configuration yields a segmentation of a scene...

In 1967, Yarbus presented qualitative data from one observer showing that the patterns of eye movements were dramatically affected by an observer's task, suggesting that complex mental states could be inferred from scan paths. The strong claim of this very influential finding has never been rigorously tested. Our observers viewed photographs for 10s each. They performed one of four image-based ...