1577279
Using keyphrases as search result surrogates on small screen devices
This paper investigates user interpretation of search result displays on small screen devices. Such devices present interesting design challenges given their limited display capabilities, particularly in relation to screen size. Our aim is to provide users with succinct yet useful representations of search results that allow rapid and accurate decisions to be made about the utility of result documents, yet minimize user actions (such as scrolling), the use of device resources, and the volume of data to be downloaded. Our hypothesis is that keyphrases that are automatically extracted from documents can support this aim. We report on a user study that compared how accurately users categorized result documents on small screens when the document surrogates consisted of either keyphrases only, or document titles. We found no significant performance differences between the two conditions. In addition to these encouraging results, keyphrases have the benefit that they can be extracted and presented when no other document metadata can be identified.
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 …
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.
22559047
Usability of digital libraries
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.
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.
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?.
153985
Facial Reconstruction Using Volumetric Data
In this paper we demonstrate computer aided techniques in the area of the reconstruction of facial features from skeletal remains. We outline the desired features of a system for skull identification, and demonstrate our progress in the area which builds upon our previous work on distance fields for volumetric data. In addition to the application we demonstrate an accurate 3D closing operator in practise on large data sets, cross correlation for automatic feature detection, and the current output from the technique which uses a 2D warp of the 3D distance field.
9636203
Two case studies in predictable application scheduling using Rialto/NT
This paper analyzes the results of two case studies in applying the Rialto/NT scheduler to real Windows 2000 applications. The first study is of a soft modem-a modem whose signal processing work is performed on the host CPU, rather than on a dedicated signal processing chip. The second is of an audio player application. Both of these are frequently used real-time applications-ones running on systems that were not designed to support predictable real-time execution. To function correctly, both applications require that ongoing computations be performed in a timely manner. In both cases, we first measured an original version designed to run on Windows 2000, and then modified the application to take advantage of ongoing CPU reservations provided by the Rialto/NT scheduler. We report on the benefits and problems observed when using reservations in these real-world scenarios. In both cases, we found that a real-time scheduler can provide the needed predictability for the application in the presence of competing applications, while also providing other benefits, such as minimizing the soft modem's impact on the scheduling predictability of other computations in the system. We also describe the methodologies we used to analyze the real-time behavior of the operating system and applications during these studies, including the use of instrumented kernels to produce execution traces.
22331464
Vector-City Vector Distance Transform
This paper will examine the current chamfer and vector distance transforms for encoding objects as distance fields. A new vector distance transform is introduced which uses the city-block chamfer distance transform as a basis. Detailed error analysis using real CT data is presented, demonstrating the improved accuracy of the new approach over existing methods. The production of a subvoxel accurate distance field is also demonstrated by employing an improved classification. Distance fields are shown for skull and chess piece datasets.