7930341
StoryBank: an indian village community digital library
This paper considers information access styles for a community digital library in an Indian village. We present our impressions of the community gathered during a field-study and show how these have influenced the interaction design. The prototype aims to overcome low-textual literacy and lack of computing experience by combining touch-based interaction, engaging visual presentations and drawing on villagers' familiarity with radio listening.
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 …
22559047
Usability of digital libraries
9543196
Children as Design Partners and Testers for a Children's Digital Library
Most of today's digital libraries (DLs) are not designed for children. To produce usable and useful DLs, designers need to ensure that good design features are incorporated, taking into consideration users' needs. We describe our experience working with children as design partners and testers in building a children's DL of stories and poems for 11-14 year olds, using a concrete example to demonstrate our design philosophy and research approach, The study provides insights on useful design features children's DLs should have, and their importance to children. The initial work we have done highlights issues and provides a basis for the building of usable and useful digital libraries for children.
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.
3325969
Improving web search on small screen devices
Abstract Small handheld devices—mobile phones, Pocket PCs etc.—are increasingly being used to access the web. Search engines are the most used web services and are an important factor of user support. Search engine providers have begun to offer their services on the small screen. This paper presents a detailed evaluation of the how easy to use such services are in these new contexts. An experiment was carried out to compare users' abilities to complete search tasks using a mobile phone-sized, handheld computer-sized and conventional, desktop interface to the full Google™ index. With all three interfaces, when users succeed in completing a task, they do so quickly (within 2–3 min) and using few interactions with the search engine. When they fail, though, they fail badly. The paper examines the causes of failures in small screen searching and proposes guidelines for improving these interfaces. In addition, we present and discuss novel interaction schemes that put these guidelines into practice.
10888216
Hypertexturing complex volume objects
This paper will examine hypertexture rendering techniques and will demonstrate how volume data sets may be adapted in order for hypertexture to be applied. Details are given of a process for the conversion of complex objects, such as CT scans, into accurate distance fields. Hypertexture is applied to these objects and example renderings include the UNC CThead, a chess piece, a dodecahedron and a tank. Additional information is given about soft objects, density modulation functions, ray marching and controlling hypertexture application.
6608650
Dictionary-free overloading by partial evaluation
One of the most novel features in the functional programming language Haskell is the system oftype classes used to support a combination of overloading and polymorphism. Current implementations of type class overloading are based on the use ofdictionary values, passed as extra parameters to overloaded functions. Unfortunately, this can have a significant effect on run-time performance, for example, by reducing the effectiveness of important program analyses and optimizations.This paper describes how a simple partial evaluator can be used to avoid the need for dictionary values at run-time by generating specialized versions of overloaded functions. This eliminates the run-time costs of overloading. Furthermore, and somewhat surprisingly given the presence of multiple versions of some functions, for all of the examples that we have tried so far, specialization actually leads to a reduction in the size of compiled programs.
40878593
Structured Development? A Structurational Analysis of the Development of an Executive Information System
8113193
Consumer real-time systems
14178775
A Parallel Algorithm for Mesh Smoothing
Maintaining good mesh quality during the generation and refinement of unstructured meshes in finite-element applications is an important aspect in obtaining accurate discretizations and well-conditioned linear systems. In this article, we present a mesh-smoothing algorithm based on nonsmooth optimization techniques and a scalable implementation of this algorithm. We prove that the parallel algorithm has a provably fast runtime bound and executes correctly for a parallel random access machine (PRAM) computational model. We extend the PRAM algorithm to distributed memory computers and report results for two- and three-dimensional simplicial meshes that demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of this approach for a number of different test cases. We also examine the effect of different architectures on the parallel algorithm and present results for the IBM SP supercomputer and an ATM-connected network of SPARC Ultras.