Abstract: The ongoing revolution in people's behavior, involving emphasized personal experiences, means that a product plays a decreasing role in competition, and creating an experience is becoming more important. This leads to new kinds of value chains and new kinds of networking, which will create challenges for companies. Cognitive infocomminacations (CogInfoCom) provide fast infocommunications links to extend our cognitive capabilities. Virtual technologies, such as virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), will increase value creation by combining the strengths of humans and machines. The aim of this paper is to present an approach through which VR/AR with game programming tools can be utilized to boost business and enable new value creation in a world that is developing towards an experience economy. Our design methodology is based on agile innovation principles with fast experimentations that are carried out in co-creation with companies. The practical implementations are considered as multiple case studies. After introducing the current trends in VR/AR, we present our experiences of how these virtual technologies can be applied for CogInfoCom Aided Engineering tasks in various application fields. Despite the increasing popularity of virtual and augmented reality and game technologies, only a small amount of research has examined how they can be utilized professionally in the design processes of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). However, they provide effective tools for increasing user involvement in new product development and marketing. Based on the case studies, we present our experiences of how SMEs can benefit from virtual technologies by increasing their business agility and flexibility, reducing product design risk, shortening product development time, and enabling new business models. VR/AR technology with game programming proved to be effective tools for fast experimentation and co-creation with SMEs.

Keywords: virtual design, virtual reality; augmented reality; experience economy; CogInfoCom aided engineering

Abstract: It is widely known that virtual laboratories can improve and complete university lectures. This paper presents laboratories, that allow engineering students to design a pole placement based controller for typical control problems: inverted pendulum, Furuta pendulum, crane, ball and beam. The dynamics of the plants and instructions for controller design and test are provided on smartboards of the virtual laboratory. The controller can be designed by the help of Octave Online. Finally, the controller performance can be studied by the model of the real-life application. The mathematical models and controller design are presented as well as the experiences in the virtual laboratory of control engineering.

Keywords: virtual laboratory; control engineering; pole placement

Abstract: Desktop virtual realities are becoming increasingly widespread. Thus, it is important to measure if it can be really a next step in the evolution of computer science. This researched aimed to examine whether there is a relationship between the effectiveness of completing a task in MaxWhere VR and the users’ cognitive characteristics: namely the spatial memory (measured by the Corsi-task) and the mental rotation ability. Thirty-one participants took part in this research and their results showed no relationship between the examined spatial abilities and work effectiveness. For navigating in the virtual space, the built-in CogiNav technology of MaxWhere was used. The participants rated their navigational experience in the virtual environment. There was no statistically significant relationship with the other measured variables. These results suggest that this VR can be used by anyone, independently from their spatial memory or mental rotation skill.

Keywords: desktop VR; virtual environments; spatial memory; mental rotation; MaxWhere

Abstract: This paper presents an experiment comparing the number of user operations and effectiveness of digital workflow in different cases. The main goal of this study is to systematically compare the effectiveness of Trello collaborative project management software in Windows 2D operating system and on the MaxWhere 3D VR platform. All comparisons are made based on a novel framework that focuses on both quantitative and qualitative assessments of user interactions required for the completion of digital projects within different computational environments. The results of the experiment, evaluated in terms of the proposed framework, point to the conclusion that when using Trello in conjunction with MaxWhere’s 3D VR spaces, users are able to accomplish the same digital workflows with 72% less elementary user operations, and with 80% less time spent on overview-related tasks. In the 3D experiment, the value of the Monitoring Density metric introduced in this paper increased almost 300-fold, from 125 to 3125. Based on these results, the paper concludes that the MaxWhere 3D VR platform offers project managers a number of ways to accomplish tasks that would otherwise require extremely complicated digital workflows in more traditional 2D environments.

Abstract: Some years ago we started an experiment with teaching an algorithmic thinking method, in an old-new approach and with a newly developed ecosystem. We planned our method for the future, when students will use their own devices in schools, and computer programming should usually be integrated into various teaching environments, including teaching mathematical problem solving once again. Our method fits into analogy-based pedagogical research, which focuses on problem solving in computer science. We presented and examined our method at the 2017 CoginfoCom Conference, in the sense of Mathability. There, we also asked further questions concerning the efficiency of analogy-based computer programming teaching methods [2]. In this paper, we would like to answer these questions.

Keywords: problem solving; mathability; mathematical psychology; novice computer programming

Abstract: The mid-frequency component of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is utilized in many studies to measure the level of mental effort in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). However, the temporal resolution that can be achieved using this method is underestimated. For refining the specification of the exact temporal resolution of this method, we employed a visual search task that required elevated levels of mental effort. Participants had to find one difference between pairs of pictures. Each of the twelve pairs was followed by a congratulation screen causing a short period of relief (5-6 seconds). Using our method based on power spectra analysis and windowing functions, we were able to differentiate between the HPV mid-frequency values of the visual search and the relief periods. These results, along with previous findings, seem to suggest that the temporal resolution of 5-6 seconds can be achieved with our method, widening the range of applications.

Keywords: human-computer interaction; empirical usability evaluation methods; ECG; heart rate variability; heart period variability; mental effort

Abstract: 3D technology has made remarkable progress in the last decade, considering the commercial successes and the availability of the technology. In this study we put emphasis on physical 3D visualization, which opens up a series of new possibilities, through the continuous development of AMT. The aim of our research is to develop an AMT-based, two-way and real-time, inter-cognitive communication model, which can be an effective tool for managers in the physical visualization of business information and in the determination of target values using different (strategic, tactical, operational) time horizons.

Keywords: AMT; 3D printing; information visualization; real-time communication

Abstract: Multipath communication techniques can bring in a new era for Cognitive Info-communication, due to ensuring resilient and high-speed data transfer. In this paper, we evaluated the MPT network layer multipath communication library, which creates an UDP tunnel, based on the GRE in UDP tunnel protocol. We compared the aggregation capability of MPT to that of MPTCP, which stands for Multi-Path TCP and based on TCP sub-flows to aggregate the transmission capacities of different physical interfaces and their potentially disjoint paths to ensure high network throughput. In this article, we used 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps speed channels to compare the aggregation capabilities of these two different multipath communication solutions. We used several scenarios for the evaluation. We tested both IPv4 and IPv6 both as underlying and as encapsulation protocols. We used several channels up to 12 to evaluate the aggregation capabilities with the industry standard iperf tool, even with different numbers of iperf threads. Meanwhile we measured the CPU usage of the two examined multipath technologies to get further insight into their operation. On the basis of our measurement results, we also set up a mathematical model of their channel aggregation capabilities.

Keywords: MPT; MPTCP; channel aggregation; multipath communication; performance analysis

Abstract: In this paper what we discovered is presented, starting from gathering requirements to design and implementation in the European project called “Intelligent Serious Games for Social and Cognitive Competence”. Our main goal with the project is to make serious games with the aim to develop social and cognitive competence of children with learning difficulties and to educate them about social skills, basic skills, key cognitive competence skills and work skills. With the help of 3D simulations and these serious mobile applications which are interactive, the social integration and personal development of the young generation is assisted. Serious games and 3D simulations are utilised by this project so teaching and learning can turn into something interesting, playful, engaging and efficient.

Keywords: serious games; social competence; cognitive competence; intellectual disabilities

Abstract: The paper proposes a novel deep neural network (DNN) architecture aimed at improving the expressiveness of text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) by learning the properties of a particular speech style from a multi-speaker, multi-style speech corpus, and transplanting it into the speech of a new speaker, whose actual speech in the target style is missing from the training corpus. In most research on this topic speech styles are identified with corresponding emotional expressions, which was the approach accepted in this research as well, and the entire process is conventionally referred to as “emotion transplantation”. The proposed architecture builds on the concept of shared hidden layer DNN architecture, which was originally used for multi-speaker modelling, principally by introducing the style code as an auxiliary input. In this way, the mapping between linguistic and acoustic features performed by the DNN was made style dependent. The results of both subjective or objective evaluation of the quality of synthesized speech as well as the quality of style reproduction show that in case the emotional speech data available for training is limited, the performance of the proposed system represents a small but clear improvement to the state of the art. The system used as a baseline reference is based on the standard approach which uses both speaker code and style code as auxiliary inputs.

Keywords: deep neural networks; human-computer interaction; affective computing; text-to-speech; emotion transplantation

Abstract: There are many possibilities for open access publishing of location-based information, as a result of the development of technology in the webGIS field. Concurrently, geovisualization facilitates the interpretation and analysis of spatial data. The aim of this study is to demonstrate a GIS tool that is able to automatically express the anthropogenic influences on soils based on land use/cover data and geovisualize their results on the web. We used ArcGIS and QGIS software for geoprocessing, classifying spatial data, and publishing them on the web. Generally, decreasing anthropogenic influence on soils could be detected on Tokaj-Nagy Hill throughout five investigation periods (1784-1858, 1858-1884, 1884-1940, 1940-1989, 1989-2010), as well as a decreasing intensity of human impacts. The results showed that representation of data with the geographic information system on the web is feasible, but also complex information from the map elements can be extracted which helps users better understand the spatial information.

Keywords: anthropogenic influences; land use changes; web-based visualization; WRB; CogInfoCom

Abstract: The importance of human factors, in road design and traffic safety, has been increasing recently. As part of the human-centered design, schemata, as mental representations, induce road user expectations, as well as, trigger behavioral patterns. In road design this concept is called “self-explaining roads”, meaning that road users automatically drive according to an expected behavior and speed. This requires different categories of roads, each with homogenous characteristics and a notable difference between them. This paper investigates how many unique categories road users are able to recognize.

Keywords: road category; self-explaining roads; road scene; driving speed