14643603
Making use is more than a matter of task analysis
I am pleased and honored that such an impressive group of commentators considered my book Making Use (Carroll, 2000) worthy of discussion and analysis. I would not expect, nor even prefer really, to have everyone agree with me. What would bother me, what would bother any author, is to not be read at all. Dan Diaper’s critical review and the commentaries by David Benyon/Catriona Macaulay, Tom Carey, and Fabio Paterno, will help to make that less likely! Many important themes are raised in Diaper (2002) review and in the commentaries. In this response I want to concentrate on refining a few of the main issues and distinctions. First, I briefly consider contrasts in values. I think that preferences for scenario-based design versus traditional task analytic methods reflect differences in the underlying world views and values of designers and researchers. To some extent, therefore, the issues in this discussion are not just technical, but paradigmatic and moral. Second, I consider the state of design practices in HCI and its implications for where onus lies in contemporary methodological argumentation and for what sorts of data are pertinent and required to address outstanding methodological issues. Finally, I consider the question of how task analysis, in the sense of structured task decomposition, might be reconstructed in the emerging paradigm of scenario-based design.
7151657
Making use: a design representation
16127213
Supporting interactive collaboration on the Web with CORK
Abstract The World Wide Web has served as a medium for collaboration since its inception. Web-based collaboration has, however, been dominated by systems supporting asynchronous activities such as sharing documents and participating in discussion forums. Supporting interactive, synchronous collaboration on the Web has proven much more challenging. In this paper we describe three of the challenges encountered in the context of supporting network-based collaboration among middle and high school science students: integrating synchronous and asynchronous modes of interaction, minimizing consumption of bandwidth, and adapting non-collaborative software components for collaborative use. We then present the Content Object Replication Kit, a toolkit for building interactive Java-based collaborative systems for use on the Web.
1921535
Interface design issues for advice-giving expert systems
Advice giving could become the first successful domain for intelligent interfaces.
15595014
Notification and awareness: synchronizing task-oriented collaborative activity
People working collaboratively must establish and maintain awareness of one another's intentions, actions and results. Notification systems typically support awareness of the presence, tasks and actions of collaborators, but they do not adequately support awareness of persistent and complex activities. We analysed awareness breakdowns in use of our Virtual School system--stemming from problems related to the collaborative situation, group, task and tool support--to motivate the concept of activity awareness. Activity awareness builds on prior conceptions of social and action awareness, but emphasizes the importance of activity context factors like planning and coordination. This work suggests design strategies for notification systems to better support collaborative activity.
148806746
Human-computer interaction: psychology as a science of design.
2252135
Disambiguating Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives Using Automatically Acquired Selectional Preferences
Selectional preferences have been used by word sense disambiguation (WSD) systems as one source of disambiguating information. We evaluate WSD using selectional preferences acquired for English adjectivenoun, subject, and direct object grammatical relationships with respect to a standard test corpus. The selectional preferences are specific to verb or adjective classes, rather than individual word forms, so they can be used to disambiguate the co-occurring adjectives and verbs, rather than just the nominal argument heads. We also investigate use of the one-senseper-discourse heuristic to propagate a sense tag for a word to other occurrences of the same word within the current document in order to increase coverage. Although the preferences perform well in comparison with other unsupervised WSD systems on the same corpus, the results show that for many applications, further knowledge sources would be required to achieve an adequate level of accuracy and coverage. In addition to quantifying performance, we analyze the results to investigate the situations in which the selectional preferences achieve the best precision and in which the one-sense-per-discourse heuristic increases performance.
1954
Corpus Annotation for Parser Evaluation
We describe a recently developed corpus annotation scheme for evaluating parsers that avoids shortcomings of current methods. The scheme encodes grammatical relations between heads and dependents, and has been used to mark up a new publicdomain corpus of naturally occurring English text. We show how the corpus can be used to evaluate the accuracy of a robust parser, and relate the corpus to extant resources.
5584278
Reinforcement Learning Task Clustering
8531327
Towards automatic shaping in robot navigation
Shaping is a potentially powerful tool in reinforcement learning applications. Shaping often fails to function effectively because of a lack of understanding about its effects when applied in reinforcement learning settings and the use of inadequate algorithms in its implementation. Due to these difficulties current shaping techniques require some form of manual intervention. We examine some of the principles involved in shaping and present a new algorithm for automatic transferral of knowledge, which uses the Q-values established in a previous task to guide exploration in the learning of a new task. This algorithm is applied to two different but related robot navigation tasks.
131770741
Structured Case: A Methodological Framework for Building Theory in Information Systems Research
This paper presents a methodological framework, structured-case, that assists IS researchers to undertake and assess theory building research within the interpretive paradigm, and explains its value in achieving convincing explanations that are strongly linked to both the research themes and data collected in the field.