Recently, many studies have applied gamification to software engineering education and software development to enhance work results. Gamification is defined as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts.” When applying gamification, we make various game rules, such as a time limit. However, it is not clear whether the rule affects working time or not. For example, if we apply a time limit to impatient developers, the working time may become shorter, but the rule may negatively affect because of pressure for time. In this study, we analyze with subjective experiments whether the rules affects work results such as working time. Our experimental results suggest that for the coding tasks, working time was shortened when we applied a rule that made developers aware of working time by showing elapsed time.

This study examines the robustness of image quality factors in various types of environment illumination using a parameter design in the field of quality engineering. Experimental results revealed that image quality factors are influenced by environment illuminations in the following order: minimum luminance, maximum luminance and gamma.

This paper proposes to use eye movements to characterize the performance of individuals in reviewing software documents. We design and implement a system called DRESREM, which measures and records eye movements of document reviewers. Based on the eye movements captured by eye tracking device, the system computes the line number of the document that the reviewer is currently looking at. The system can also record and play back how the eyes moved during the review process. To evaluate the effectiveness of the system we conducted an experiment to analyze 30 processes of source code review (6 programs, 5 subjects) using the system. As a result, we have identified a particular pattern, called scan, in the subject's eye movements. Quantitative analysis showed that reviewers who did not spend enough time on the scan took more time to find defects on average.

The paper indicates the importance of suitability assesment in speech synthesis applications. Human factors involved in the use of a synthetic speech are first discussed on the basis of an example of a newspaper company where synthetic speech is extensively used as an aid for proofreading a manuscript. Some findings obtained from perceptual experiments on the subjects' preference for paralinguistic properties of synthetic speech are then described, focusing primarily on the suitability of pitch characteristics, speaker's gender, and speaking rates in the task where subjects are asked to proofread a printed text while listening to the speech. The paper finally claims the need for a flexibile speech synthesis system which helps the users create their own synthetic speech.

Proposed here is an internal representation and mapping method for multimedia information in which retrieval is based on the impression documents desired to make. A user interface design for a system using this method is also proposed. The proposed internal representation and mapping method represents each desired document impression as an axis in a semantic space. Documents are represented as points in the space. Queries are represented as subspaces. The proposed user interface design employs a method of visual presentation of the semantic space. Pictorial examples are given to illustrate the range of impressions represented by the axes. The relations between the axes are represented by dispersion diagrams for the documents stored in the document base. With this method, the user can intuitively decide the appropriate subspace for his needs and can specify it directly. For evaluation purposes, a prototype system has been developed. An image retrieval experiment shows that the proposed internal representation and mapping method and the user interface design provide effective tools for information retrieval.