9552742
Designing a children's digital library with and for children
This paper describes preliminary work carried out to design a children's digital library of stories and poems with and for children aged 11-14 years old. We describe our experience in engaging children as design partners, and propose a digital library environment and design features to provide an engaging, successful learning experience for children using it for collaborative writing.
42586645
The music is the message
the music being played by her tiny mobile audio appliance. She's standing waiting for a train. Other commuters swarm nearby, headphones on, listening in more muted ways to the soundtracks they've chosen to accompany today's episode of their daily routine. Mobile music players—iPods, Walkmans and the like—are exciting for those of us involved in thinking about the future of mobile devices and services. Like the mobile phone—increasing numbers of which also sport a music player—these are gadgets that people actually desire, and aspire to own. They have vast storage capacities, increasingly sophisticated processors and pleasing, effective mechanisms for users to control their func-tionality. From click and jog wheels to high-resolution color displays, these players are far from being the impoverished devices that typified mobile platforms just a few years ago. And there are hundreds of millions of them in circulation—Apple sold five million in the first quarter of 2006 alone. But at the same time, these marvelous mobiles could be seen as an obstacle to the bright futures dreamt up in the research labs. How will people be able to make use of the ubiquitous computing infrastructure being envisaged, the anytime, everywhere access to information and services, when they are immersed in digital sound bubbles of their own choosing? Some mobile listeners, at first sight, certainly appear cut off. Another scene: A young man stares out of a train window, watching the long green fields flash by. His eyes are bright but still; his gaze betrays a mood of deep reflection. Listening to music on expensive , noise-reducing headphones, what is he thinking? Is he sadly contemplating a lover left or anticipating a longed-for meeting at his destination? How can we design mobile services that will fit this context? The conventional clumsy beeps, vibrations, and attention-seeking displays seem out of place. What opportunities are there to build more emphatic systems , systems to enhance the music and environmental experience or to provide ways for the listener to later reflect on the situations they've lived through in relation to the music they've heard? At other times, though, these sound bubbles seem more permeable, don't they? One of the photos of people listening to music available on a popular image-sharing site is entitled " Listening to Kim's iPod and talking to Joe! " A teenager holds a mobile phone to her left ear while wearing the distinctive white music-player headphones. Chatting and …
3300534
Improving mobile internet usability
Mobile internet technologies, such as WAP, are important for pervasive, anytime, anywhere computing. Although much progress has been made in terms of technological innovation, many of mobile internet systems are difficult to use, lack flexibility and robustness. They give a poor user experience. Evaluation and theoretical analysis of usability combined with innovative design can achieve significant improvements in user performance and satisfaction. Using such multidisciplinary methods explains the negative reactions to WAP, and — more constructively — suggest ways of developing more effective and efficient devices and services.
39264003
HyperAT: HCI and Web Authoring
We review HCI problems with hypertext, and for authoring World Wide Web documents in particular. We suggest that a framework is required to understand the usability issues, and that these issues cannot be seen as psychological or computing: they are multi-disciplinary. We discuss HyperAT, a protorype authoring tool, being implemented to test these ideas.
3268647
A digital library of conversational expressions: helping profoundly disabled users communicate
Digital libraries are for everyone. This paper describes the development of a digital library for a user who has a profound physical disability that means she cannot communicate verbally, and cannot use conventional communication tools.
22559047
Usability of digital libraries
18996618
The Production of Volume Data from Triangular Meshes Using Voxelisation
Voxelisation is the term given to the process of converting data from one source type into a three dimensional volume of data values. The techniques known collectively as volume visualisation can then be applied to the data in order to produce a graphical representation of the object. This paper gives a practical approach to the voxelisation of data in the form of triangular meshes, and demonstrates the use of the method on various datasets. Visualisation is achieved by a method also described in the paper.
1777796
A System for the Non-Linear Modelling of Deformable Procedural Shapes
This paper describes a fully interactive modelling system, which we have called ClayWorks, for defining the implicit geometry of 3D objects using parametric base primitives and deformations. The goal of this system is to provide a means for describing object data and its creation history by using a series of parametric steps that can be modified post-creation in a non-linearmanner. The advantages of this approach are that unlike other modelling approaches, it enables compact object descriptions, an intuitive modelling process, a simple approach to multiresolution objects, real-time feedback during the modelling process and a render independent object representation.
6541426
Wikifying your interface: facilitating community-based interface translation
We explore the application of a wiki-based technology and style of interaction to enabling the incremental translation of a collaborative application into a number of different languages, including variant English language interfaces better suited to the needs of particular user communities. The development work allows us to explore in more detail the design space of functionality and interfaces relating to tailoring, customization, personalization and localization, and the challenges of designing to support ongoing incremental contributions by members of different use communities.
23406227
Toward an understanding of similarity judgments for music digital library evaluation
This paper presents an analysis of 7,602 similarity judgments collected for the Symbolic Melodic Similarity (SMS) and Audio Music Similarity and Retrieval (AMS) evaluation tasks in the 2006 Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX). We discuss the influence of task definitions, as well as evaluation metrics on user perceptions of music similarity, and provide recommendations for future Music Digital Library/Music Information Retrieval research pertaining to music similarity.
1424753
Monad transformers and modular interpreters
We show how a set of building blocks can be used to construct programming language interpreters, and present implementations of such building blocks capable of supporting many commonly known features, including simple expressions, three different function call mechanisms (call-by-name, call-by-value and lazy evaluation), references and assignment, nondeterminism, first-class continuations, and program tracing.
The underlying mechanism of our system is monad transformers, a simple form of abstraction for introducing a wide range of computational behaviors, such as state, I/O, continuations, and exceptions.
Our work is significant in the following respects. First, we have succeeded in designing a fully modular interpreter based on monad transformers that incudes features missing from Steele's, Espinosa's, and Wadler's earlier efforts. Second, we have found new ways to lift monad operations through monad transformers, in particular difficult cases not achieved in Moggi's original work. Third, we have demonstrated that interactions between features are reflected in liftings and that semantics can be changed by reordering monad transformers. Finally, we have implemented our interpreter in Gofer, whose constructor classes provide just the added power over Haskell's type classes to allow precise and convenient expression of our ideas. This implementation includes a method for constructing extensible unions and a form of subtyping that is interesting in its own right.