46831078
Realistic books: a bizarre homage to an obsolete medium?
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.
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.
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.
1424753
Monad transformers and modular interpreters
We show how a set of building blocks can be used to construct programming language interpreters, and present implementations of such building blocks capable of supporting many commonly known features, including simple expressions, three different function call mechanisms (call-by-name, call-by-value and lazy evaluation), references and assignment, nondeterminism, first-class continuations, and program tracing.
The underlying mechanism of our system is monad transformers, a simple form of abstraction for introducing a wide range of computational behaviors, such as state, I/O, continuations, and exceptions.
Our work is significant in the following respects. First, we have succeeded in designing a fully modular interpreter based on monad transformers that incudes features missing from Steele's, Espinosa's, and Wadler's earlier efforts. Second, we have found new ways to lift monad operations through monad transformers, in particular difficult cases not achieved in Moggi's original work. Third, we have demonstrated that interactions between features are reflected in liftings and that semantics can be changed by reordering monad transformers. Finally, we have implemented our interpreter in Gofer, whose constructor classes provide just the added power over Haskell's type classes to allow precise and convenient expression of our ideas. This implementation includes a method for constructing extensible unions and a form of subtyping that is interesting in its own right.
9087296
Using Types to Parse Natural Language
We describe a natural language parser that uses type information to determine the grammatical structure of simple sentences and phrases. This stands in contrast to studies of type inference where types and grammatical structure play opposite roles, the former being determined by the latter. Our parser is implemented in Haskell and is based on a linguistic theory called applicative universal grammar (AUG). Our results should be interesting to computer scientists in the way in which AUG relates to types and combinatory calculus, and to linguists in the way in which a very simple, brute force parsing strategy performs surprisingly well in both performance and accuracy.
6680702
Melting Objects
This paper describes a technique for producing realistic animations of melting objects. The work presented here introduces a method that accurately models both thermal flow and the latent heat during the phase change. The mechanism for energy transfer to the model is via both boundary conditions and radiation. Emphasis is made on accurately modelling the solid object and the method is particularly suited to rigid solids with complex surface geometry. The underlying objects are constructed using Volume Graphics modelling techniques (specifically voxelization), and a numerical simulation computes the time-dependent heat flow throughout the object. A technique for computing the phase transition is given, and details for rendering the melting objects are provided. The melting is controlled by material parameters, such as specific heat capacity, thermal conductivity, latent heat and temperature. Examples are given of melting ice and a plastic man.
41482626
A New Approach to the Construction of Surfaces from Contour Data
This paper presents a new approach to the construction of a surface from a stack of contour slices. Unlike most existing methods, this new approach handles ambiguous conditions consistently without employing an algorithm to establish a correspondence between vertices on one contour and those on the next. It is easy to implement and fast to compute, requiring only basic geometric properties, namely closedness and simplicity, to be available with contour data. The advantages of this new approach have also been demonstrated with solutions to a few classical problems from the literature and some practical problems in medical imaging. It can also be applied to geographical surveying and keyframe animations.
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.