15742096
A Context/Communication Information Agent

Abstract: We are developing a Context/Communication Information Agent (CIA), an autonomous software agent that proactively searches for the right information at the right time. Our goal is to design and evaluate a system that leverages what people naturally do, using this knowledge to retrieve information, and presenting it with a minimal cost of disruption to the users. In this paper, we describe the results a low-fidelity prototype performed in a meeting situation, the design space for such an application, and our plans for continued investigation.
3968249
Topiary: a tool for prototyping location-enhanced applications
Location-enhanced applications use the location of people, places, and things to augment or streamline interaction. Location-enhanced applications are just starting to emerge in several different domains, and many people believe that this type of application will experience tremendous growth in the near future. However, it currently requires a high level of technical expertise to build location-enhanced applications, making it hard to iterate on designs. To address this problem we introduce Topiary, a tool for rapidly prototyping location-enhanced applications. Topiary lets designers create a map that models the location of people, places, and things; use this active map to demonstrate scenarios depicting location contexts; use these scenarios in creating storyboards that describe interaction sequences; and then run these storyboards on mobile devices, with a wizard updating the location of people and things on a separate device. We performed an informal evaluation with seven researchers and interface designers and found that they reacted positively to the concept.
2759655
Cha-Cha: A System for Organizing Intranet Search Results
Although search over World Wide Web pages has recently received much academic and commercial attention, surprisingly little research has been done on how to search the web pages within large, diverse intranets. Intranets contain the information associated with the internal workings of an organization. 
 
A standard search engine retrieves web pages that fall within a widely diverse range of information contexts, but presents these results uniformly, in a ranked list. As an alternative, the Cha-Cha system organizes web search results in such a way as to reflect the underlying structure of the intranet. In our approach, an "outline" or "table of contents" is created by first recording the shortest paths in hyperlinks from root pages to every page within the web intranet. After the user issues a query, these shortest paths are dynamically combined to form a hierarchical outline of the context in which the search results occur. The system is designed to be helpful for users with a wide range of computer skills. Preliminary user study and survey results suggest that some users find the resulting structure more helpful than the standard retrieval results display for intranet search.
7311237
Marmite: end-user programming for the web
A tremendous amount of semi-structured data is available today on the web but is not necessarily in a form which is suitable for a user's tasks. For example, a website may show a listing of local events but a user wants to filter out those which are too far from him. To address this problem, we are developing a tool called Marmite that helps users extract data from web pages and create new applications using a dataflow architecture in a manner similar to Unix pipes. In this paper, we describe formative user studies, some evaluations of low-fidelity prototypes, and a set of design recommendations for this tool.
1292565
WebQuilt: a framework for capturing and visualizing the web experience
is a web logging and visualization system that helps web design teams run usability tests (both local and remote) and analyze the collected data. Logging is done through a proxy, overcoming many of the problems with server-side and client-side logging. Captured usage traces can be aggregated and visualized in a zooming interface that shows the web pages people viewed. The visualization also shows the most common paths taken through the website for a given task, as well as the optimal path for that task as designated by the designer. This paper discusses the architecture of WebQuilt and also describes how it can be extended for new kinds of analyses and visualizations.
795921
Marmite: Towards End-User Programming for the Web
Many information tasks on the web require users to make use of multiple websites, for both content as well as information processing or visualization features. Programmers have created "mashups," which customize or combine the functionality of multiple websites by extracting information from web pages or accessing web services APIs. Non-programmers lack the tools or skills create such customizations because of the programming obstacles involved. Marmite is a tool that empowers non-programmers to create functionality similar to those found in mashups.
31155982
Animating smoke with dynamic balance
We propose a numerical method for maintaining a dynamic rolling motion of animated gaseous phenomena, such as smoke, that avoids dissipation due to numerical error. We compensate for the errors induced by a semi-Lagrangian scheme using an error estimate for each time interval. We develop a new advection term and perform vortex advection based on a vorticity confinement force. Example simulations show that this method is able to keep smoke features alive, even near the center of a vortex. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
15285732
Animation of Bubbles in Liquid
We present a new fluid animation technique in which liquid and gas interact with each other, using the example of bubbles rising in water. In contrast to previous studies which only focused on one fluid, our system considers both the liquid and the gas simultaneously. In addition to the flowing motion, the interactions between liquid and gas cause buoyancy, surface tension, deformation and movement of the bubbles. For the natural manipulation of topological changes and the removal of the numerical diffusion, we combine the volume-of-fluid method and the front-tracking method developed in the field of computational fluid dynamics. Our minimum-stress surface tension method enables this complementary combination. The interfaces are constructed using the marching cubes algorithm. Optical effects are rendered using vertex shader techniques.
14840492
Towards Reusable Colored Petri Nets
Reuse has long been recognized as a key technology that can bring about signi cant productivity gains in software development. Code-level reuse is wellunderstood and frequently practiced. However, reuse in software requirements, another phase where much bene t can be expected, remains inadequately addressed. Hierarchical Colored Petri Net (HCPN) formalism has been successfully used on several large-scale industrial projects, and it includes features designed to enhance modularity and understandability of the model. Unfortunately, such features fall short of making HCPN reusable. In this paper, we provide formal de nitions of RCPN as a reuse extension to the HCPN. RCPN can reduce complexity and cost of modeling and analysis in requirements engineering phase and increase software development productivity. We demonstrate an application of RCPN by demonstrating how a RCPN component for water level monitoring system (WLMS) can be reused in a co ee vending machine (CVM) model.
13982146
Interaction Translation Methods for XML/SNMP Gateway
XML-based network management has been proposed as an alternative or to complement SNMP-based network management. But the XML-based network management does not yet provide a method to manage networks equipped with legacy SNMP agents in the integrated management system. This integrated management system must include an XML/SNMP gateway, which translates and relays messages between the XML-based manager and the SNMP agent. In this paper, we propose three methods for interaction translation in the gateway. First, we propose a DOM-based translation, which provides a method for XML-based manager to directly access management information through the standard DOM interfaces. Second, we propose an HTTP-based translation using URI extenstion with XPath and XQuery. Finally, we apply SOAP, which is accepted as a standard protocol for XML, and propose a translation method for the gateway to advertise the translation services to the manager using SOAP RPC. We also compare the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed translation methods.
42258742
Discontinuous fluids
At interfaces between different fluids, properties such as density, viscosity, and molecular cohesion are discontinuous. To animate small-scale details of incompressible viscous multi-phase fluids realistically, we focus on the discontinuities in the state variables that express these properties. Surface tension of both free and bubble surfaces is modeled using the jump condition in the pressure field; and discontinuities in the velocity gradient field. driven by viscosity differences, are also considered. To obtain derivatives of the pressure and velocity fields with sub-grid accuracy, they are extrapolated across interfaces using continuous variables based on physical properties. The numerical methods that we present are easy to implement and do not impact the performance of existing solvers. Small-scale fluid motions, such as capillary instability, breakup of liquid sheets, and bubbly water can all be successfully animated.