62719399
Usability, user preferences, effectiveness, and user behaviors when searching individual and integrated full-text databases: implications for digital libraries
This article addresses a crucial issue in the digital library environment: how to support effective interaction of users with heterogeneous and distributed information resources. In particular, this study compared usability, user preference, effectiveness, and searching behaviors in systems that implement interaction with multiple databases through a common interface, and with multiple databases as if they were one (integrated interaction) in an experiment in the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) environment. Twenty-eight volunteers were recruited from the graduate students of the School of Communication, Information, & Library Studies at Rutgers University. Significantly more subjects preferred the common interface to the integrated interface, mainly because they could have more control over database selection. Subjects were also more satisfied with the results from the common interface, and performed better with the common interface than with the integrated interface. Overall, it appears that for this population, interacting with databases through a common interface, is preferable on all grounds to interacting with databases through an integrated interface. These results suggest that: (1) the general assumption of the information retrieval (IR) literature that an integrated interaction is best needs to be revisited; (2) it is important to allow for more user control in the distributed environment; (3) for digital library purposes, it is important to characterize different databases to support user choice for integration; and, (4) certain users prefer control over database selection while still opting for results to be merged.
439941
Iterative exploration, design and evaluation of support for query reformulation in interactive information retrieval
We report on the progressive investigation of techniques for supporting interactive query reformulation in the TREC Interactive Track. Two major issues were explored over four successive years: methods of term suggestion; and, interface design to support different system functionalities. Each year's results led to the following year's investigation, with respect to both of these issues. This paper presents first the general motivation for the entire series of studies; then an overview of each year's investigation, its results, and how they influenced the next year's investigation. We discuss what has been learned through this series of investigations about effective term suggestion, usable and useful interface design, and the relationships between these two in support of the TREC Interactive Track task. We conclude with comments about the general methodology employed over this series of studies, and its relevance to the development and evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems.
34137561
Using Relevance Feedback and Ranking in Interactive Searching
We present results of a study in which 50 searchers, of varying degrees of experience in information retrieval (IR), each performed searches on two TREC-4 adhoc interactive track topics, using a simple interface to the INQUIRY retrieval engine. The foci of our study were : the relationships between the users'models and experience of IR, and their performance in the TREC-4 adhoc task while using a best-match IR system with relevance feedback ; the understanding, use and utility of relevance feedback and ranking in interactive IR ; and, the evaluation of interactive IR.
1442053
User preferences when searching individual and integrated full-text databases
This paper addresses a crucial issue in the digital library environment: how to support effective interaction of users with heterogeneous and distributed information resources. We compared users' preference for systems which implement interaction with multiple databases through a common interface and with multiple databases as if they were one (integrated interaction) in an experiment in the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) environment. Twenty-eight volunteers were recruited from the graduate students of School of Communication, Information, & Library Studies at Rutgers University. Significantly more subjects preferred the common interface (HERMES) to the integrated interface (HERA). For most of the subjects in this study, the greater control in HERMES outweighed the advantages of HERA such as convenience, efficiency, and ease of use. These results suggest that: (1) the general assumption of the information retrieval (IR) literature that an integrated interaction is best needs to be revisited; (2) it is important to allow for more user control in various ways in the distributed environment; and (3) for digital library purposes, it is important to characterize different databases to support user choice for integration.
42030145
Rutgers Interactive Track at TREC-5
The Interactive Track investigation at Rutgers concentrated primarily on three factors: the searchers' uses and understandings of relevance feedback and ranked output, and the utility of relevance feedback for the interactive track task; the searchers' understandings of the interactive track task; and performance differences based on topic characteristics and searcher and order effects. Our official results are for twelve searchers, each of whom did searches on six different topics
2304269
Lightweight logging and recovery for distributed shared memory over virtual interface architecture
As software Distributed Shared Memory(DSM) systems become attractive on larger clusters, the focus of attention moves toward improving the reliability of systems. In this paper, we propose a lightweight logging scheme, called remote logging, and a recovery protocol for home-based DSM. Remote logging stores coherence-related data to the volatile memory of a remote node. The logging overhead can be moderated with high-speed system area network and user-level DMA operations supported by modern communication protocols. Remote logging tolerates multiple failures if the backup nodes of failed nodes are alive. It makes the reliability of DSM grow much higher. Experimental results show that our fault-tolerant DSM has low overhead compared to conventional stable logging and it can be effectively recovered from some concurrent failures.
3150650
Fault-Tolerant All-to-All Broadcasting in Hypercubes
17579236
Adaptive topology control for wireless Ad hoc networks
Topology control in ad-hoc networks is the problem of adjusting the transmission power at network nodes in order to achieve the optimal topology that maximizes network performance. Recently, using effective topology control to optimize energy usage in the network has come into focus in the research community [1, 2]. The common thesis arrived at by existing works is that the transmission range used by mobile nodes should be the minimum required to keep the network connected. We refer to such a topology as the minimally connected topology in the rest of the paper. We argue in this work that the minimally connected topology does not always provide the optimal performance in typical ad-hoc networks. We show that in contrast, for typical ad-hoc networks with a few hundred nodes distributed over a few square miles area, the optimal topology is a function of the traffic load.
38077943
Position-Based Topology-Independent Scheduling Algorithms for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
404376
Power-aware deterministic block allocation for low-power way-selective cache structure
This paper proposes a power-aware cache block allocation algorithm for the way-selective set-associative cache on embedded systems to reduce energy consumption without additional delay or performance degradation. For this goal, way selection logic and specialized replacement policy are designed to enable only one way of set-associative cache as in the direct-mapped cache. Overall cache access time becomes almost the same as that of a conventional set associative cache with accessing additional way selection logic. Because data array can be accessed without waiting for tag comparison, multiplexer delay can be removed totally. The simulation result shows that the proposed architecture can reduce a per access power consumption by 59% over conventional set-associative caches with average 0.06% of negligible performance loss.