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.
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.
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.
2264317
Web Mash-ups and Patchwork Prototyping: User-driven technological innovation with Web 2.0 and Open Source Software
The recent emergence of Web mash-ups and open source software is driving the development of new practices in software and systems development. In this paper we explore novel practices of user-driven innovation through an examination of several case studies which illustrate how users and developers are exploiting the proliferation of open APIs and open source systems. Developers can rapidly create proofs of concept that are robust enough for actual use by combining preexisting software components. The underlying programming processes involved make use of tried-and-true software development techniques, and may not appear innovative at first. However, the application of these practices and techniques to problem solving by non-programmers shows a high degree of creative innovation, giving rise to new ways of thinking about technology design and production
14189118
A Theory of Qualified Types
• The ability to include local constraints as part of the type of an object. This enables the definition and use of polymorphic overloaded values within a program. ∗An earlier version of this paper was presented at the European Symposium on Programming, Rennes, France, February 1992 and appears in the conference proceedings published in Springer Verlag LNCS Volume 582. †Address from September 1992: Yale University, Department of Computer Science, P.O. Box 2158 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-2158, USA.
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.
13294915
Voxelisation: Modelling for Volume Graphics
Voxelisation is the term given to the process of converting data from one source type into a three dimensional volume of data values. The techniques known collectively as volume visualisation can then be applied to the data in order to produce a graphical representation of the object. This paper gives a new practical approach to the voxelisation of data which fills the entire volume. Its use is demonstrated on various datasets such as triangular mesh objects, CT data, and objects defined by trivariate functions.
13870178
Simplifying and improving qualified types
Qualified types provide a general framework for constrained type systems, with applications including type class overloading, subtyping and record calculi. This paper presents an extended version of the type inference algorithm used in previous work, that can take account of the satisfiability of constraints to obtain more accurate principal types. The new algorithm is obtained by adding two new rules, one for simplification and one for improvement of constraint sets. In particular, it permits a better treatment for the previously troublesome multiple parameter extensions of Haskell type classes. For example, a form of parametric type classes, proposed by Chen, Hudak and Odersky, can be viewed as a special case of this work.