53246102
Informal prototyping of continuous graphical interactions by demonstration
Informal prototyping tools have shown great potential in facilitating the early stage design of user interfaces. How-ever, continuous interactions, an important constituent of highly interactive interfaces, have not been well supported by previous tools. These interactions give continuous visual feedback, such as geometric changes of a graphical object, in response to continuous user input, such as the movement of a mouse. We built Monet, a sketch-based tool for proto-typing continuous interactions by demonstration. In Monet, designers can prototype continuous widgets and their states of interest using examples. They can also demonstrate com-pound behaviors involving multiple widgets by direct ma-nipulation. Monet allows continuous interactions to be eas-ily integrated with event-based, discrete interactions. Con-tinuous widgets can be embedded into storyboards and their states can condition or trigger storyboard transitions. Monet achieves these features by employing continuous function approximation and statistical classification techniques, without using any domain specific knowledge or assuming any application semantics. Informal feedback showed that Monet is a promising approach to enabling more complete tool support for early stage UI design.
5628621
A context-aware infrastructure for supporting applications with pen-based interaction
Pen-based user interfaces which leverage the affordances of the pen provide users with more flexibility and natural interaction. However, it is difficult to construct usable pen-based user interfaces because of the lack of support for their development. Toolkit-level support has been exploited to solve this problem, but this approach makes it hard to gain platform independence, easy maintenance and easy extension. In this paper a context-aware infrastructure is created, called WEAVER, to provide pen interaction services for both novel pen-based applications and legacy GUI-based applications. WEAVER aims to support the pen as another standard interactive device along with the keyboard and mouse and present a high-level access interface to pen input. It employs application context to tailor its service to different applications. By modeling the application context and registering the relevant action adapters, WEAVER can offer services, such as gesture recognition, continuous handwriting and other fundamental ink manipulations, to appropriate applications. One of the distinct features of WEAVER is that off-the-shelf GUI-based software packages can be easily enhanced with pen interaction without modifying the existing code. In this paper, the architecture and components of WEAVER are described. In addition, examples and feedbacks of its use are presented.
8622581
BrickRoad: a light-weight tool for spontaneous design of location-enhanced applications
It is difficult to design and test location-enhancedapplications. A large part of this difficulty is due to the added complexity of supporting location. Wizard of Oz (WOz) has become an effective technique for the early stage design of location-enhanced applications because it allows designers to test an application prototype bysimulating nonexistent components such as location sensing. However, existing WOz tools 1) require nontrivial effort from designers to specify how a prototype should behave before it can be tested with end users, and 2)support only limited control over application behavior during a test. BrickRoad is a WOz tool for spontaneousdesign of location-enhanced applications. It lowers the threshold to acquiring user feedback and exploring a design space. With BrickRoad, a designer does not need to specify any interaction logic and can experiment on-the-fly with different designs during testing. BrickRoad is a valuable complement to existing tool support for the early stage design of location-enhanced applications.
5419727
Sketching informal presentations
Informal presentations are a lightweight means for fast and convenient communication of ideas. People communicate their ideas to others on paper and whiteboards, which afford fluid sketching of graphs, words and other expressive symbols. Unlike existing authoring tools that are designed for formal presentations, we created SketchPoint to help presenters design informal presentations via freeform sketching. In SketchPoint, presenters can quickly author presentations by sketching slide content, overall hierarchical structures and hyperlinks. To facilitate the transition from idea capture to communication, a note-taking workspace was built for accumulating ideas and sketching presentation outlines. Informal feedback showed that SketchPoint is a promising tool for idea communication.
44498059
Penbuilder: Platform for the Development of Pen-Based User Interface
Pen-based user interfaces is widely used in mobile computing environment, which provides natural, efficient interaction. It has substantial differences from any previous interface and it is difficult to be implemented. A well-designed platform will improve the development of pen-based user interface. In this paper, the architecture of Pen-Book-Page-Paper is presented, which is extended from the metaphor of Pen-Paper. Penbuilder is a development platform based on this architecture. Pen-based user interface can be constructed from three layers of Penbuilder: modal-primitive layer, task-primitive layer and task layer. Each layer provides different extent supports for flexibility and reusability. The components of the platform are discussed in detail and some properties of the platform are argued. Penbuilder is also compliant for the development of distributed user interface. In the section of discussion, we analyze the platform through task tree. The platform provides full supports for extensibility and new interactive devices can be easily added.
3890576
Design and experimental analysis of continuous location tracking techniques for Wizard of Oz testing
Wizard of Oz (WOz) testing has shown promise as an effective way to test location-enhanced applications. However, it is challenging to conduct a location-based WOz test because of the dynamic nature of target settings in the field. In particular, continuous location tracking, a major task in such a test, requires a wizard to frequently update a user's location to simulate a location system. This imposes a heavy task load on a wizard. To ease wizards' tasks for location tracking, we designed two techniques, Directional Crossing and Steering, and conducted a field experiment to investigate the performance of the two techniques. A quantitative analysis shows that Directional Crossing and Steering significantly lowered a wizard's task load for location tracking without sacrificing accuracy.
1475500
Efficient XML Data Management: An Analysis
With XML rapidly gaining popularity as the standard for data exchange on the World Wide Web, a variety of XML management systems (XMLMS) are becoming available. The choice of an XMLMS is made difficult by the significant difference in the expressive power of the queries and the performance shown by these XMLMS. Most XMLMS are legacy systems (mostly relational) extended to load, query, and publish data in XML format. A few are native XMLMS and capture all the characteristics of XML data representation. This paper looks at expressive power and efficiency of various XMLMS. The performance analysis relies on the testbed provided by XOO7, a benchmark derived from OO7 to capture both data and document characteristics of XML. We present efficiency results for two native XMLMS, an XML-enabled semistructured data management system and an XML-enabled RDBMS, which emphasize the need for a delicate balance between the data-centric and document-centric aspects of XML query processing.
15368149
Hierarchical fuzzy filter method for unsupervised feature selection
The problem of feature selection has long been an active research topic within statistics and pattern recognition. So far, most methods of feature selection focus on supervised data where class information is available. For unsupervised data, the related methods of feature selection are few. The presented article demonstrates a way of unsupervised feature selection, which is a two-level filter model removing the redundant and irrelevant features, respectively. The redundant features are eliminated using any clustering algorithm, and a new method is proposed to remove the irrelevant features: first rank the features according to their relevance to cluster and then a subset of relevant features is selected using the Fuzzy Feature Evaluation Index (FFEI) with some changes and extensions. The experimental results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed method for high-dimensional data. Our major contributions are: (1) to present a new hierarchical filter method for unsupervised feature selection; (2) to propose a new algorithm for removing the irrelevant features; (3) to extend the FFEI, and present a method for calculating the approximate weight of feature in FFEI, which improves the efficiency and robustness of the method.
28848292
Rights Protection for Data Cubes
We propose a rights protection scheme for data cubes. The scheme embeds ownership information by modifying a set of selected cell values. The embedded message will not affect the usefulness of data cubes in the sense that the sum queries at any aggregation level are not affected. At the same time, the errors introduced to individual cell values are under control. The embedded message can be detected with a high probability even in the presence of typical data cube attacks. The proposed scheme can thus be used for protecting data cubes from piracy in an open, distributed environment.
1095698
DaNaLIX: a domain-adaptive natural language interface for querying XML
We present DaNaLIX, a prototype domain-adaptive natural language interface for querying XML. Our system is an extension of NaLIX, a generic natural language interface for querying XML. While retaining the portability of a purely generic system like NaLIX, DaNaLIX can exploit domain knowledge, whenever available, to its advantage for query translation. More importantly, in DaNaLIX such domain knowledge does not have to be pre-defined; instead it can be automatically obtained from the interactions between a user and the system. In this demonstration, we describe the overall architecture of DaNaLIX. We also demonstrate how a generic system like DaNaLIX can take advantage of domain knowledge to improve its usability and query translation accuracy. In addition, we show DaNaLIX still possesses the portability of a generic system by using data collections from three different domains. Finally, we present how domain knowledge can be obtained through user interactions in an automatic fashion.
29006676
A Remote Resource Monitoring Approach in Active Networks
Monitoring the resource status in active network nodes is important both for the network administrator to maintain and deploy active networks and for the normal end-users to acquire better performance. Hence, a method that can monitor the resource status at a remote node is needed. Moreover, due to the complexity of the resource usage in active networks, the corresponding method should be able to monitor the status of various resources at remote node dynamically and in a user-specified way. This paper presents the design and implementation of such a resource monitoring method. The method adopts the active application technique to obtain the desired resource status information at a remote network node and transfer them back to the user in the user-specified way. It also allows the user to control the content, the procedure and the precise of the monitoring.