802922
Exploring Small Screen Digital Library Access with the Greenstone Digital Library
In recent years, the use of small screen devices has multiplied rapidly. This paper covers a number of different issues which arise when digital libraries are used in combination with such displays. Known limitations of small screens are presented to the Digital Library community. Two evaluations of pilot small-screen DL systems are presented, with some unexpected cultural and socio-technical concerns which arose. The pilot systems also demonstrate the delivery of small-screen access using an existing popular DL system.
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.
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.
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 …
22559047
Usability of digital libraries
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.
17732369
Predictability requirements of a soft modem
Soft Modems use the main processor to execute modem functions traditionally performed by hardware on the modem card. To function correctly, soft modems require that ongoing signal processing computations be performed on the host CPU in a timely manner. Thus, signal processing is a commonly occurring background real-time application---one running on systems that were not designed to support predictable real-time execution. This paper presents a detailed study of the performance characteristics and resource requirements of a popular soft modem. Understanding these requirements should inform the efforts of those designing and building operating systems needing to support soft modems. Furthermore, we believe that the conclusions of this study also apply to other existing and upcoming soft devices, such as soft Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) cards. We conclude that (1) signal processing in an interrupt handler is not only unnecessary but also detrimental to the predictability of other computations in the system and (2) a real-time scheduler can provide predictability for the soft modem while minimizing its impact on other computations in the system.
40903922
CPJazz-a software framework for vehicle systems integration and wireless connectivity
Integration of new technology into vehicles continues at a rapid pace. New technology includes not only deeply embedded devices for vehicle systems management but also operator interfaces, such as navigation systems, voice-recognition/text-to-speech interfaces and integration of consumer electronic appliances such as the personal digital assistant (PDA). Standardization efforts have attempted to bring these technologies together through common buses, but because these devices have different capabilities and requirements of their own, this is most likely impossible. The CPJazz framework was designed to provide integration of disparate devices and protocols through a dynamic and scalable component-based architecture. In this paper, the capabilities and services provided by CPJazz for vehicle-based software integrators are discussed, as well as the identification of key scenarios that demonstrate its contributions to the vehicle and wireless environment.
2346657
ML Typing, Explicit Polymorphism and Qualified Types
The ML type system was originally introduced as a means of identifying a class of terms in a simple untyped language, often referred to as core-ML, whose evaluation could be guaranteed not to “go wrong”. In subsequent work, the terms of core-ML have also been viewed as a ‘convenient shorthand’ for programs in typed languages. Notable examples include studies of ML polymorphism and investigations of overloading, motivated by the use of type classes in Haskell.
3871712
CPU reservations and time constraints: efficient, predictable scheduling of independent activities
Workstations and personal computers are increasingly being used for applications with real-time characteristics such as speech understanding and synthesis, media computations and I/O, and animation, often concurrently executed with traditional non-real-time workloads. This paper presents a system that can schedule multiple independent activities so that: . activities can obtain minimum guaranteed execution rates with application-specified reservation granularities via CPU Reservations, CPU Reservations, which are of the form reserve X units of time out of every Y units, provide not just an average case execution rate of X/Y over long periods of time, but the stronger guarantee that from any instant of time, by Y time units later, the activity will have executed for at least X time units, . applications can use Time Constraints to schedule tasks by deadlines, with on-time completion guaranteed for tasks with accepted constraints, and . both CPU Reservations and Time Constraints are implemented very efficiently. In particular, . CPU scheduling overhead is bounded by a constant and is not a function of the number of schedulable tasks. Other key scheduler properties are: . activities cannot violate other activities' guarantees, . time constraints and CPU reservations may be used together, separately, or not at all (which gives a round-robin schedule), with well-defined interactions between all combinations, and . spare CPU time is fairly shared among all activities. The Rialto operating system, developed at Microsoft Research, achieves these goals by using a precomputed schedule, which is the fundamental basis of this work.