7924764
Organizing digital music for use: an examination of personal music collections
Current research on music information retrieval and music digital libraries focuses on providing access to huge, public music collections. In this paper we consider a different, but related, problem: supporting an individual in maintaining and using a personal music collection. We analyze organization and access techniques used to manage personal music collections (primarily CDs and MP3 files), and from these behaviors, to suggest user behaviors that should be supported in a personal music digital library (that is, a digital library of an individual’s personal music collection).
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 …
3300534
Improving mobile internet usability
Mobile internet technologies, such as WAP, are important for pervasive, anytime, anywhere computing. Although much progress has been made in terms of technological innovation, many of mobile internet systems are difficult to use, lack flexibility and robustness. They give a poor user experience. Evaluation and theoretical analysis of usability combined with innovative design can achieve significant improvements in user performance and satisfaction. Using such multidisciplinary methods explains the negative reactions to WAP, and — more constructively — suggest ways of developing more effective and efficient devices and services.
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.
22559047
Usability of digital libraries
39264003
HyperAT: HCI and Web Authoring
We review HCI problems with hypertext, and for authoring World Wide Web documents in particular. We suggest that a framework is required to understand the usability issues, and that these issues cannot be seen as psychological or computing: they are multi-disciplinary. We discuss HyperAT, a protorype authoring tool, being implemented to test these ideas.
23406227
Toward an understanding of similarity judgments for music digital library evaluation
This paper presents an analysis of 7,602 similarity judgments collected for the Symbolic Melodic Similarity (SMS) and Audio Music Similarity and Retrieval (AMS) evaluation tasks in the 2006 Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX). We discuss the influence of task definitions, as well as evaluation metrics on user perceptions of music similarity, and provide recommendations for future Music Digital Library/Music Information Retrieval research pertaining to music similarity.
1818077
I-Vote: an audience voting system
In this paper, we describe the I-Vote system for audience response voting at the Olympic Games. The audience members vote by using a $2 handheld device that they can keep as a souvenir. The devices are simple to use, come in multiple designs, and are tradable. These devices do not hold any personal information so privacy is never an issue. The vote results are presented on a large public display, which is loaded with information in the form of graphs that are quickly understood. People can retrieve their personal votes later on the Internet. The system was designed through a process involving brainstorming, creating scenarios, searching for information, doing cognitive walkthroughs, developing prototypes, and revising and refining ideas.
39305576
Adaptive real-time resource management supporting composition of independently authored time-critical services
This paper describes ongoing investigations at Microsoft Research into algorithms for adaptive real-time scheduling and resource management. We are implementing a system which will allow sets of independently authored real-time applications to be scheduled, providing both initial resource negotiation and dynamic feedback to applications about their resource consumption. Instead of relying on human beings to pre-compute scheduling and resource requirements, applications will be able to dynamically adapt their run-time behavior to the resources available. Under overload conditions, user preferences and policies will be applied in order to bring the total resource requirements within available resources. This will permit chosen applications to continue executing perfectly even while others execute with dynamically renegotiated resource grants or are gracefully shut down, as per user preferences. We believe that this approach will lead to real-time scheduling and resource management algorithms which are appropriate for workstation and home multi-media environments.<<ETX>>
2872475
Texturing and hypertexturing of volumetric objects
Texture mapping is an extremely powerful and flexible tool for adding complex surface detail to an object. This paper introduces a method of surface texturing and hypertexturing complex volumetric objects in real-time. We employ distance field volume representations, texture based volume rendering and procedural texturing techniques with Shader Model 2.0 flexible programmable graphics hardware. We aim to provide a flexible cross-platform, non vendor specific implementation.
2186746
3D distance fields: a survey of techniques and applications
A distance field is a representation where, at each point within the field, we know the distance from that point to the closest point on any object within the domain. In addition to distance, other properties may be derived from the distance field, such as the direction to the surface, and when the distance field is signed, we may also determine if the point is internal or external to objects within the domain. The distance field has been found to be a useful construction within the areas of computer vision, physics, and computer graphics. This paper serves as an exposition of methods for the production of distance fields, and a review of alternative representations and applications of distance fields. In the course of this paper, we present various methods from all three of the above areas, and we answer pertinent questions such as How accurate are these methods compared to each other? How simple are they to implement?, and What is the complexity and runtime of such methods?.