22808943
Exploring content-actor paired network data using iterative query refinement with NetLens
Networks have remained a challenge for information retrieval and visualization because of the rich set of tasks that users want to accomplish. This paper demonstrates a tool, NetLens, to explore a content-actor paired network data model. The NetLens interface was designed to allow users to pose a series of elementary queries and iteratively refine visual overviews and sorted lists. This enables the support of complex queries that are traditionally hard to specify in node-link visualizations. NetLens is general and scalable in that it applies to any dataset that can be represented with our abstract content-actor data model
7825415
Understanding Eight Years of InfoVis Conferences Using PaperLens
We present PaperLens, a visualization that reveals connections, trends, and activity throughout the InfoVis conference community for the last 8 years. It tightly couples views across papers, authors, and references. This paper describes how we analyzed the data, the strengths and weaknesses of PaperLens, and interesting patterns and relationships we have discovered using PaperLens.
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.
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.
2438079
Visualizations for taxonomic and phylogenetic trees
MOTIVATION
Despite substantial efforts to develop and populate the back-ends of biological databases, front-ends to these systems often rely on taxonomic expertise. This research applies techniques from human-computer interaction research to the biodiversity domain.


RESULTS
We developed an interactive node-link tool, TaxonTree, illustrating the value of a carefully designed interaction model, animation, and integrated searching and browsing towards retrieval of biological names and other information. Users tested the tool using a new, large integrated dataset of animal names with phylogenetic-based and classification-based tree structures. These techniques also translated well for a tool, DoubleTree, to allow comparison of trees using coupled interaction. Our approaches will be useful not only for biological data but as general portal interfaces.
26612484
Visualizing Graphs as Trees: Plant a Seed and Watch it Grow
TreePlus is a graph browsing technique based on a tree-style layout. It shows the missing graph structure using interaction techniques and enables users to start with a specific node and incrementally explore the local structure of graphs. We believe that it supports particularly well tasks that require rapid reading of labels.
25406406
Architectural support for accelerating congestion control applications in network processors
Complex network protocols and various network services require significant processing capability for modern intelligent network applications. One of the significant features in modern networks is differentiated service. Along with differentiated service, rapidly changing network environments result in congestion problems. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of representative congestion control applications - scheduling and queue management algorithms, and we propose application-specific acceleration technique using ILP (instruction level parallelism) and PLP (packet level parallelism). From the ILP perspective, new instruction set extensions for fast conditional operations are applied for congestion control applications. Based on our experiments, proposed architectural extensions show 10-12% improvement in performance for instruction set enhancements. For PLP, we propose a hardware acceleration model based on detailed analysis of congestion control applications. In order to get large throughputs, large number of processing elements and a parallel comparator are designed. Such hardware accelerators provide large parallelism proportional to the number of processing elements added. As the performance of general purpose processors rapidly increases, defining architectural extensions (e.g., MMX as in multimedia applications) for general purpose processors could be an alternative solution for wide range of network applications.
1712871
Quasi-interpolants Based Multilevel B-Spline Surface Reconstruction from Scattered Data
This paper presents a new fast and local method of 3D surface reconstruction for scattered data. The algorithm makes use of quasi-interpolants to compute the control points from a coarse to fine hierarchy to generate a sequence of bicubic B-spline functions whose sum approaches to the desired interpolation function. Quasi-interpolants gives a procedure for deriving local spline approximation methods where a B-spline coefficient only depends on data points taken from the neighborhood of the support corresponding B-spline. Experimental results demonstrate that high-fidelity reconstruction is possible from a selected set of irregular samples.
6217758
Implementation and Performance Evaluation of M-VIA on AceNIC Gigabit Ethernet Card
This paper describes the implementation and performance of M-VIA on the AceNIC Gigabit Ethernet card. The AceNIC adapter has several notable hardware features for high-speed communication, such as jumbo frames and interrupt coalescing. The M-VIA performance charac- teristics were measured and evaluated based on these hardware features. Our results show that latency and bandwidth improvement can be ob- tained when the M-VIA data segmentation size is properly adjusted to utilize the AceNIC's jumbo frame feature. The M-VIA data segmenta- tion size of 4,096 bytes with MTU size of 4,138 bytes showed the best performance. However, larger MTU sizes did not necessarily result in better performance due to extra segmentation and DMA setup over- head. In addition, the cost of M-VIA interrupt handling can be reduced with AceNIC's hardware interrupt coalescing. When the parameters for the hardware interrupt coalescing were properly adjusted, the latency of interrupt handling was reduced by up to 170 µs.
16215166
Visual Media Retrieval Framework Using Web Service
The need for content-based image retrieval from image databases is ever increasing rapidly in many applications, such as electronic art museums, internet shopping malls, internet search engines, and medical information systems. Many such image resources have been previously developed and widely spread over the internet. In this paper, we propose a Web Service-driven architecture, named the HERMES(tHE Retrieval framework for visual MEdia Service), to support effective retrieval on large volumes of visual media resources. We explain how semantic metadata and ontology can be utilized to realize more intelligent content-based retrieval on visual media data.
1642899
Isomorphic Strategy for Processor Allocation in k-Ary n-Cube Systems
Due to its topological generality and flexibility, the k-ary n-cube architecture has been actively researched for various applications. However, the processor allocation problem has not been adequately addressed for the k-ary n-cube architecture, even though it has been studied extensively for hypercubes and meshes. The earlier k-ary n-cube allocation schemes based on conventional slice partitioning suffer from internal fragmentation of processors. In contrast, algorithms based on job-based partitioning alleviate the fragmentation problem but require higher time complexity. This paper proposes a new allocation scheme based on isomorphic partitioning, where the processor space is partitioned into higher dimensional isomorphic subcubes. The proposed scheme minimizes the fragmentation problem and is general in the sense that any size request can be supported and the host architecture need not be isomorphic. Extensive simulation study reveals that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms earlier schemes in terms of mean response time for practical size k-ary and n-cube architectures. The simulation results also show that reduction of external fragmentation is more substantial than internal fragmentation with the proposed scheme.