283122
Electronic voting system usability issues
With recent troubles in U.S. elections, there has been a nationwide push to update voting systems. Municipalities are investing heavily in electronic voting systems, many of which use a touch screen. These systems offer the promise of faster and more accurate voting, but the current reality is that they are fraught with usability and systemic problems. This paper surveys issues relating to usability of electronic voting systems and reports on a series of studies, including one with 415 voters using new systems that the State of Maryland purchased. Our analysis shows these systems work well, but have several problems, and many voters have concerns about them.
1452553
Understanding research trends in conferences using paperLens
PaperLens is a novel visualization that reveals trends, connections, and activity throughout a conference community. It tightly couples views across papers, authors, and references. PaperLens was developed to visualize 8 years (1995-2002) of InfoVis conference proceedings and was then extended to visualize 23 years (1982-2004) of the CHI conference proceedings. This paper describes how we analyzed the data and designed PaperLens. We also describe a user study to focus our redesign efforts along with the design changes we made to address usability issues. We summarize lessons learned in the process of design and scaling up to the larger set of CHI conference papers.
2712263
How users interact with biodiversity information using TaxonTree
Biodiversity databases have recently become widely available to the public and to other researchers. To retrieve information from these resources, users must understand the underlying data schemas even though they often are not content experts. Many other domains share this problem.We developed an interface, TaxonTree, to visualize the taxonomic hierarchy of animal names. We applied integrated searching and browsing so that users need not have complete knowledge either of appropriate keywords or the organization of the data.Our qualitative user study of TaxonTree in an undergraduate course is the first to describe usage patterns in the biodiversity domain. We found that tree-based interaction and visualization aided users' understanding of the data. Most users approached biodiversity data by browsing, using common, general knowledge rather than the scientific keyword expertise necessary to search using traditional interfaces. Users with different levels of interest in the domain had different interaction preferences.
7685565
TWIMC: An Anonymous Recipient E-mail System
More and more people rely on e-mails rather than postal letters to communicate each other. Although e-mails are more convenient, letters still have many nice features. The ability to handle "anonymous recipient" is one of them. This research aims to develop a software agent that performs the routing task as human beings for the anonymous recipient e-mails. The software agent named "TWIMC (To Whom It May Concern)" receives anonymous recipient e-mails, analyze it, and then routes the e-mail to the mostly qualified person (i.e., e-mail account) inside the organization. The machine learning and automatic text categorization (ATC) techniques are applied for the task. We view each e-mail account as a category (or class) of ATC. Everyday e-mail collections for each e-mail account provide an excellent source of training data. The experiment shows the high possibility that TWIMC could be deployed in the real world.
7462465
Power Analysis and Optimization Techniques for Energy Efficient Computer Systems
Reducing power consumption has become a major challenge in the design and operation of today's computer systems. This chapter describes different techniques addressing this challenge at different levels of system hardware, such as CPU, memory, and internal interconnection network, as well as at different levels of software components, such as compiler, operating system and user applications. These techniques can be broadly categorized into two types: Design time power analysis versus run-time dynamic power management. Mechanisms in the first category use analytical energy models that are integrated into existing simulators to measure the system's power consumption and thus help engineers to test power-conscious hardware and software during design time. On the other hand, dynamic power management techniques are applied during run-time, and are used to monitor system workload and adapt the system's behavior dynamically to save energy.
20790783
An E-mail Monitoring System for Detecting Outflow of Confidential Documents
E-mails are widely used communication tool with their convenienceand efficiency. In spite of their usefulness, they are difficult to control in thate-mails are easily used as outflow path of confidential documents in an organization.In order to detect and prevent the outflow, the e-mail monitoring iswidely used. We propose a system that detects in real time the outflow of thedocuments to be protected. It is based on the automatic text categorization andmachine learning technique. The experimental result shows the high accuracyand efficiency of the method.
33958226
Performance evaluation of a communication optimization model in network-based parallel computing
Network based distributed computing has been gaining popularity over the past decade. Many parallel programming languages and related parallel programming modes are becoming widely accepted. However, the execution of parallel applications on distributed systems has been hampered by the high communication overhead. To reduce the communication overhead and the completion time of a parallel application, we propose a key message model for parallel computing on network of workstations (NOWs). In the key message model, all messages generated in a key message path are prioritized. A key message path in a task graph is defined as the path that is optimized by the key message algorithm. All messages generated in a key message path are prioritized. Besides, the key message algorithm automatically finds the key message paths. In this paper, we first describe the algorithm that identifies the key messages to be prioritized in a parallel application, then analyze the cost of the algorithm, and finally evaluate the performance of the algorithm in a simulation. Our preliminary analysis of the algorithm shows improvement over the system which does not use prioritization scheme.
529060
Issues in Dataflow Computing
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the basic principles of the dataflow model, along with its major attributes and the language support for dataflow. It provides a general description of the dataflow model of execution based on the pioneering works of research groups at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Manchester namely, the static dataflow machine, tagged-token dataflow architecture, and Manchester machine. Major problems encountered in the design of these machines are outlined. The chapter surveys current dataflow projects and provides a comparison of the architectural characteristics and evolutionary improvements in dataflow computing. It discusses the difficulties in handling data structures in a dataflow environment. An overview of the methods for representing data structures is provided. This is supplemented by various issues required to handle data structures in a dataflow environment. The chapter addresses the issue of program allocation. Several proposed methodologies are presented and the various issues involved in program allocation are discussed. The resource requirements for dataflow computations are examined.