Equipping network service technicians with advanced tools that increase their effectiveness and reduce costs is the objective. Yet, the field network technician community has lagged behind other aspects of network operations in that they have not shared in the explosion of data and applications on their mobile devices, designed to achieve that objective. The exact requirements that must be fulfilled are elusive, as any initial needs specification, once fulfilled, can drastically alter the perception of what is really needed, due to shifting use cases and operational processes. This paper describes how the technology created by Alcatel-Lucent Services Delivery Tools (SDT) is being applied to that end. © 2013 Alcatel-Lucent.

This paper describes the “Periscope,” a probe tested in the Paris underground to better understand users' relation to space in mobility. Our research found that testers qualify their relation to the Metro in a way that is both depersonalized and efficient, as well as deeply personal and social. We also found that mobility is experienced not only as controlled circulation but also as a meaningful “journey” that can be articulated and shared. To account for this dual perception of physical space and motion, we propose to use the anthropological concepts of “non-place” and “place.” This theoretical framework offers useful guidelines for the design of what we propose to call “place-centered services” that, first combine the dynamic synchronization of the journey and users' dual relation to spaces, and second categorize the actors that contribute to the information system and services. © 2013 Alcatel-Lucent.

The market for mobile financial services in India is growing steadily. With 41 percent of India's adults financially excluded, however, promoting financial literacy requires serious attention. We present Banking 101—a contextually relevant, mobile storytelling tool that, if integrated with mobile financial offerings, can offer a holistic solution to financial exclusion. © 2013 Alcatel-Lucent.

Paradoxically, although question asking is a fundamental human activity, we frequently ask and answer questions without considering the processes we use. This paper describes two studies that ask “questions about questions,” in order to improve understanding of the often implicit processes involved in the asking and answering of questions, and to inform the design of social tools to aid knowledge workers in asking and answering questions. The first study, using a focus group methodology, led to the identification of thirteen dimensions that can be used to distinguish questions, and the development of an iterative model describing the often surprisingly complex question-asking behavior. The second study extended the findings of the first study by analyzing usage data from an enterprise social networking application to provide insight about how questions are asked and answered using that tool. These analyses revealed significant differences in conversation patterns between question and non-question discussions in the tool. Implications for the design of social question and answer (Q&A) applications arising from the findings of these studies are presented. © 2013 Alcatel-Lucent.

In today's world, mobile phone penetration has reached a saturation point. As a result, subscriber churn has become an important issue for mobile operators as subscribers switch operators for a variety of reasons. Mobile operators typically employ churn prediction algorithms based on service usage metrics, network performance indicators, and traditional demographic information. A newly emerging technique is the use of social network analysis (SNA) to identify potential churners. Intuitively, a subscriber who is churning will have an impact on the churn propensity of his social circle. Call detail records are useful to understand the social connectivity of subscribers through call graphs but do not directly provide the strength of their relationship or have enough information to determine the diffusion of churn influence. In this paper, we present a way to address these challenges by developing a new churn prediction algorithm based on a social network analysis of the call graph. We provide a formulation that quantifies the strength of social ties between users based on multiple attributes and then apply an influence diffusion model over the call graph to determine the net accumulated influence from churners. We combine this influence and other social factors with more traditional metrics and apply machine-learning methods to compute the propensity to churn for individual users. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm over a real data set and quantify the benefit of using SNA in churn prediction. © 2013 Alcatel-Lucent.

Social media platforms are taking a more central role in enterprises to enable employees to communicate, share knowledge, and self-organize outside the traditional organizational chart. As a result, new tools are needed to help users process, understand, and make decisions based on the complex relationships between the people, communities, and content in these new online social structures. To understand user needs and preferences, we developed fourteen social media data visualization concepts and conducted a user evaluation of these concepts. Both the usefulness of the underlying data relationships and the usability of each data visualization concept were evaluated. We found divergent, and in some cases, counter-intuitive preferences among users, such as the desire for “big picture” visualization but with filtering on key topics or people of interest. In addition, several “modes of operation” were identified to help explain the variety of responses and highlight the competing information processing issues users contend with to achieve their goals.© 2013 Alcatel-Lucent.

In the context of immersive communications that aim to enable natural experiences and interactions among people, objects, and the environment, we propose a method to enable natural video interactions through hand gesture recognition between users and a video meeting system. An end-to-end study was performed: we started with the development of specific gesture recognition algorithms and concluded with a user evaluation to validate our results. Gestures and their associated functionalities were identified via a user survey which focused on distinguishing two concepts which are often confused: hand posture and hand gesture (i.e., static versus dynamic). Our recognition process was composed of two main tasks: hand posture recognition (i.e., skin segmentation, background subtraction, region combination, feature extraction, and classification) and hand gesture recognition (tracking and recognition). Our approach combined a signal similarity study with a data-mining tool for dynamic gesture recognition. We focused on the experimentation and user evaluation to improve our approach, taking into account user feedback and analyzing performance in different environments and for different users. © 2013 Alcatel-Lucent.

The introduction of high-definition television (HDTV) offers important improvements for user experience in terms of the quality of the image (definition) as well as the sensation of reality (immersion in the scene). However, until broadcasts are transmitted in a single HD format, there is going to be a transition period of several years in which the three current digital TV formats (standard definition (SD), HD720, and HD1080) will coexist. Taking into account that each of these formats has its own optimal TV size (based on viewing distance), it is not a simple matter to determine which size TV will offer the best image quality across all three formats. This paper analyzes optimal viewing distances, and proposes an optimal as well as a practical solution to deal with this situation. © 2013 Alcatel-Lucent.

SlideWorld is a Bell Labs research project that aims to create a new immersive user experience in the situation of videoconferencing. It addresses two types of user experiences: the remote listener's immersion in the event and the speaker's augmented feedback channel from the remote listeners. Such innovation may leverage technical novelties (such as smile detection) or usage novelties (such as virtual neighbors selected in a crowd). SlideWorld is an example of a successful project that managed to innovate by smoothly integrating technical and usage novelties. To do so, a multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, ergonomists, and designers ran several rounds of design, development, and experimentation to define/refine the user experience and its actual implementation. This paper exemplifies this typical multidisciplinary work. © 2013 Alcatel-Lucent.

One of the challenges of designing technology-based services is devising an appropriate system of communication, capable of supporting end user goals in an engaging and sustainable way. An increase in the complexity of technology-based services and customer interaction has fueled the development of innovative services that improve the quality of service offerings. This research looks at the design of a technology-based service that may provide users of enterprise communication tools with a satisfying customer experience. A new conceptual model for the design of co-creative services that combines cybernetic concepts with interaction design methods is illustrated by way of example through the design of an email service called Scribee. In doing so, the proposed model presents a way of conceiving service systems that have the potential to move beyond the simple creation and sharing of knowledge to assist end user involvement and collaborative interaction. © 2013 Alcatel-Lucent.

In this paper, we present three scenarios driven by a set of interactions that we developed to empower non-technical end users to understand, create, and control their smart environment. We used a projected interface with tangible controls and a corresponding interactive system to experiment with ways to 1) teach basic programming constructs to non-technical users, 2) create smart behavior by instantiating a projected template, and 3) control the environment by interacting with a device manager template. We focused on the interaction bits, the affordances of the tangible controls, and the role fiducials—amoeba-like symbols which can be detected and tracked with a camera—may play as a technical starting point for the interactions. We report our preliminary result in the context of a meeting room usability study to validate the scenarios and their interactions. © 2013 Alcatel-Lucent.