1186186
Piazza: a desktop environment supporting impromptu and planned interactions
Much of the support for communication across distributed communities has focused on meetings and intentional contact. However, most interactions within co-located groups occur when people happen to run into each other. Such unintended interactions should also be supported among distributed communities. We conducted a study of the communication patterns of a large, distributed organization and found that people tend to disseminate information using formal techniques, even though people usually receive information informally. We then designed a system called Piazza that is intended to support the range of communication styles evident in large communities, paying particular attention to adchessing the problems revealed in our study. Piazza allows people to be aware of others who are doing similar tasks when they are using their computers, the~by enabling unintended interactions. It also supports intentiomd contacts and planned meetings. We discuss issues for analysis in an upcoming use study.
734467
Montage: providing teleproximity for distributed groups
Montage is a reseatch prototype that explores using video to help collaborators find opportune times to interact with eaeh other. Physical proximity with colleagues affords walking down hallways and peeking into offices in order to find a good time to contact someone. By helping members of dis- tributed work groups more naturally find opportunities to interact with each other, Montage aims to provide a sense of teleproximity Montage uses momentary, reciprocal glances among networked workstations to make it easy to peek into someone's office. From a Montage glance, users can quickly start a full-featured desktop video conference. If the glance shows that the person is not in her office, Montage provides quick access to browse her on-line calendar, send her e-mail, or send her an electronic note that pops up on her screen. Preliminary usage data show that users had short, lightweight interactions through Montage, although most glances did not result in an interactive cmnmtmication.
206793142
What video can and cannot do for collaboration: A case study
As multimedia become an integral part of collaborative systems, we must understand how to design such systems to support the user's rich set of existing interaction skills, rather than requiring people to adapt to arbitrary constraints of technology-driven designs. To understand how we can make effective use of video in remote collaboration, we compared a small team's interactions through a desktop video conferencing prototype with face-to-face interactions and phone conversations. We found that, compared with audio-only, the video channel of our desktop video conferencing prototype adds or improves the ability to show understanding, forecast responses, give nonverbal information, enhance verbal descriptions, manage pauses, and express attitudes. These findings suggest that video may be better than the phone for handling conflict and other interaction-intense activities. However, the advantages of video depend critically on the nearly-instantaneous transmission of audio, even if it means getting out of sync with the video image. Nonetheless, when compared with face-to-face interaction, it can be difficult in video interactions to notice peripheral cues, control the floor, have side conversations, point to things or manipulate real-world objects. To enable rich interactions fully, video should be integrated with other distributed tools that increase the extent and type of shared space in a way that enables natural collaborative behaviors within those environments.
6797006
Exploring web browser history comparisons
This work explores how comparing web navigation histories between two people and presenting the results to them might allow them to gain insight about each other. We developed a prototype that presents web matches sorted according to frequency, recency, and web site. Interviews with users of the prototype suggest that common interests and preferences can be inferred from these comparisons.
6543572
Findings from Observational Studies of Collaborative Work
Abstract The work activity of small groups of three to four people was videotaped and analysed in order to understand collaborative work and to guide the development of tools to support it. The analysis focused on the group's shared drawing activity—their listing, drawing, gesturing and talking around a shared drawing surface. This analysis identified specific features of collaborative work activity that raise design implications for collaborative technology: (1) collaborators use hand gestures to uniquely communicate significant information; (2) the process of creating and using drawings conveys much information not contained in the resulting drawings; (3) the drawing space is an important resource for the group in mediating their collaboration; (4) there is a fluent mix of activity in the drawing space; and (5) the spatial orientation among the collaborators and the drawing space has a role in structuring their activity. These observations are illustrated with examples from the video data, and the design implications they raise are discussed.
10355154
Supporting distributed groups with a Montage of lightweight interactions
The Montage prototype provides lightweight audio-video glances among distributed collaborators and integrates other applications for coordinating future contact. We studied a distributed group across three conditions: before installing Montage, with Montage, and after removing Montage. We collected quantitative measures of usage as well as video-tape and user perception data. We found that the group used Montage glances for short, lightweight interactions that were like face-to-face conversations in many respects. Yet like the phone, Montage offered convenient access to other people without leaving the office. Most glances revealed that the person was not available, so it was important to integrate other tools for coordinating future interaction. Montage did not appear to displace the use of e-mail, voice-mail, or scheduled meetings.
1746627
Inversion Medians Outperform Breakpoint Medians in Phylogeny Reconstruction from Gene-Order Data
Phylogeny reconstruction from gene-order data has attracted much attention over the last few years. The two software packages used for that purpose, BPAnalysis and GRAPPA, both use so-called breakpoint medians in their computations. Some of our past results indicate that using inversion scores rather than breakpoint scores in evaluating trees leads to the selection of better trees. On that basis, we conjectured that phylogeny reconstructions could be improved by using inversion medians, which minimize evolutionary distance under an inversions-only model of genome rearrangement. Recent algorithmic developments have made it possible to compute inversion medians for problems of realistic size.Our experimental studies unequivocally show that inversion medians are strongly preferable to breakpoint medians in the context of phylogenetic reconstruction from gene-order data. Improvements are most pronounced in the reconstruction of ancestral genomes, but are also evident in the topological accuracy of the reconstruction as well as, surprisingly, in the overall running time. Improvements are strongest for small average distances along tree edges and for evolutionary scenarios with a preponderance of inversion events, but occur in all cases, including evolutionary scenarios with high proportions of transpositions.All of our tests were run using our GRAPPA package, available (under GPL) at www.cs.unm.edu/~moret/GRAPPA; the next release will include the inversion median software we used in this study. The software used includes RevMed, developed by the authors and available at www.cs.unm.edu/~acs, and A. Caprara's inversion median code, generously made available for testing.
1484935
Improving genome rearrangement phylogeny using sequence-style parsimony
The study of genome rearrangements, the evolutionary events that change the order and strandedness of genes within genomes, presents new opportunities for discoveries about deep evolutionary events. The best software so far, GRAPPA, solves breakpoint and inversion phylogenies by scoring each tree topology through iterative improvements of internal node gene orders. We find that the greedy hill-climbing approach means the accuracy is limited because of multiple local optima. To address this problem, we propose integration GRAPPA with MPME, a string encoding of gene adjacency relationships whose optimal internal node assignments can be determined globally in polynomial time, to provide better initializations for GRAPPA. In simulation studies, the new algorithm yields shorter tree lengths and better accuracy in phylogeny reconstruction.
8476755
Succinct Text Indexes on Large Alphabet
In this paper, we first consider some properties of strings who have the same suffix array. Next, we design a data structure to support rank and select operations on an alphabet Σ using nlog|Σ| + (nlog|Σ|) bits in O(log|Σ|) time for a text of length n. It also supports an extended rank, namely rank≤, such that rank$^{\rm \leq}_{\alpha}$(T,i) returns the number of letters which are smaller than α in string T, plus the number of αs up to position i. Also, it runs in O(log|Σ|) time. By this structure, we implement the DAWG succinctly. The main structure only takes nlog|Σ| + o(nlog|Σ|) bits and supports basic operations of DAWG efficiently.
4300632
Keyword Extraction Using Support Vector Machine
This paper is concerned with keyword extraction. By keyword extraction, we mean extracting a subset of words/phrases from a document that can describe the ‘meaning' of the document. Keywords are of benefit to many text mining applications. However, a large number of documents do not have keywords and thus it is necessary to assign keywords before enjoying the benefit from it. Several research efforts have been done on keyword extraction. These methods make use of the ‘global context information', which makes the performance of extraction restricted. A thorough and systematic investigation on the issue is thus needed. In this paper, we propose to make use of not only ‘global context information', but also ‘local context information' for extracting keywords from documents. As far as we know, utilizing both ‘global context information' and ‘local context information' in keyword extraction has not been sufficiently investigated previously. Methods for performing the tasks on the basis of Support Vector Machines have also been proposed in this paper. Features in the model have been defined. Experimental results indicate that the proposed SVM based method can significantly outperform the baseline methods for keyword extraction. The proposed method has been applied to document classification, a typical text mining processing. Experimental results show that the accuracy of document classification can be significantly improved by using the keyword extraction method.
27349578
On multilevel voting
SummaryIn a distributed system mutual exclusion is often used to maintain consistency when restricted operations are performed. Mechanisms guaranteeing mutual exclusions should be both resilient and efficient. Resiliency implies high resource availability in the face of failures, while efficiency implies low overhead incurred by performing restricted operations. In this paper, we propose and study a general paradigm, called multilevel voting, which provides a general framework to assist in the design of resilient and efficient mutual exclusion mechanisms. The proposed method uses multiple level quorum consensus. Unlike another method based on the use of multiple quorum consensus, the proposed model only contains one type of integrity constraints. This has the benefit of being conceptually simple and easy to reason about. The strong resemblance with the traditional quorum consensus makes it easy for the proposed paradigm to embed any technique based on traditional quorum schemes. We show that the proposed model represents the exact class of coteries. This means that not only does it have all the power of coteries, but also all schemes under the model are correct. Thus, should the need arise, we can interchange two schemes freely without using any extra mechanisms to ensure correctness. We study a number of issues that have impact on performance such as the degree of a multilevel scheme and the order of a coterie. We explain how the model can be extended also to model the schemes for the synchronization of read and write of replicated data. We provide algorithms for the design of multilevel schemes in the context of mutual exclusion and that of read and write of replicated data.