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John Robinson: "Building
Social Science on a Website: Progress and Prospects for WEBUSE.UMD.EDU"
In its first year of operation, the webuse
website has managed to become operational by incorporating more than 10
national surveys of Internet users now available for interactive online
secondary analyses, the major ones being the year 2000 Digital Divide surveys
of NTIA, the General Social Survey and the Pew Internet Project. In addition
the website also contains summaries of more than 50 summer webshop
presentations by leading scholars around the world, an extensive online
annotated bibliography, a collection of 25 individual-level Internet user
qualitative profiles from a representative sample, societal-level
Internet-relevant data on more than 100 characteristics for more than 180
countries, and other materials useful for content analysis, experiments and
observational studies of Internet use. Some early conclusions about Internet
activity and impact from this body of research materials will be reviewed,
along with prospects for future elaborations of the website.
John Robinson (Ph.D., University of Michigan,
1965) is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Internet Scholars
Program and the Americans Use of Time Project at the University of Maryland.
He has been tracking trends in time use, the impact of the mass media
(including the Internet) in public opinion since the 1950s and is a specialist
in social science methodology. He is the author of Time for Life: The
Surprising Ways Americans Spend Time (University Park, PA: Penn State
Press, 1999), Measures of Political Attitudes (San Diego,
California: Academic Press, 1999), and Measures of Personality and Social
Psychological Attitudes (San Diego, California: Academic Press,
1991).
Marti Hearst:
" Moving Towards Automated Web Site
Design Advisors"
Marti Hearst and her team (Melody Ivory and
Rashmi Sinha) are creating interactive tools to help non-professional web site
builders improve their designs. They have
developed a software tool that computes
over 150 quantitative measures to assess page-level and
site-level aspects of a web site's design. Three empirical studies
have verified that these measures can be used to accurately predict
whether a site receives high, moderate, or poor quality ratings
from a panel of experts (94% accuracy on average). From these results the team
constructs profiles of web site design that reflect content type (e.g., news
site, financial site, living site), functional type (e.g.,
home page, content page, link page), page size, and overall site structure.
These profiles are used to provide suggestions for improvements
that reflect the context and particulars of a given site.
Dr. Hearst joined the SIMS faculty at UC Berkeley
in Fall 1997. From 1994-1997 she was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox
PARC working on information access. She received her BA, MS, and PhD degrees
in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in the BAIR
group. Marti also was an intern at Xerox PARC for much of graduate school.
She is on the editorial board for ACM
Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), for Computational Linguistics,
(the journal for the Association for Computational Linguistics), and for IEEE
Intelligent Systems.
She is also a recipient of an NSF
Career Grant, a Hellman Faculty Fund Award, an Okawa Foundation Fellowship,
and an Excellence in Teaching Award.
Shalom Fisch:
"Challenges for the Future of Children's Educational Media"
It is no secret that the world of media and
technology is changing rapidly around us, with new developments arising almost
daily: high-speed broadband access, digital and interactive television,
handheld wireless devices for communication and gaming, nonstandard input
devices that allow interaction through toys or clothing, and so on. Each new
technological development carries the potential to provide a broad audience of
children with educational content and activities in new and different ways.
However, while this technology holds vast
potential, it poses vast challenges as well. For technology to be used to its
greatest benefit, it must be designed and made available in ways that take the
needs, habits, and developmental levels of the target audience into account.
This talk will draw on concrete examples of existing and projected educational
media products for children, to discuss three such classes of issues: access
(in terms of not only the Digital Divide, but also the need for material to be
culturally and linguistically appropriate for the user), design
(regarding both hardware and software), and use (concerning the
nature and constraints of the real-life settings in which the end product will
be used). With technologies and business models changing so rapidly, it is
impossible to know which of the new technologies will emerge as dominant
vehicles for educational content in the future. However, similar
considerations can be applied to all such technologies, to help ensure that
they yield products that are appealing, beneficial, and useful for children
and their families.
Shalom Fisch is Founder and President of
MediaKidz Research & Consulting, a consulting firm that provides
educational content development, hands-on testing, and writing for children's
media. (Current clients include Sony, Nelvana, DC Comics, Sesame
Workshop, and ibooks/Berkeley Books, among others.) Prior to founding
MediaKidz in the summer of 2001, Dr. Fisch was Vice President for Program
Research at Sesame Workshop, where he oversaw curriculum development,
formative research, and summative research for a broad range of television
series, outreach projects, school-age magazines, and interactive material for
online and CD-ROMs. In his 15 years at the Workshop, Dr. Fisch was
Research and/or Content Director for numerous preschool and school-age
media-based projects.
Outside the Workshop, Dr. Fisch has served as
an advisor and reviewer for various government agencies and nonprofit
organizations, such as the U.S. Department of Education, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, the Coalition for Quality Children's Media
(a.k.a. "Kids First!"), and the National Institute for Child Health
and Development. In the academic realm, he has also been an adjunct
professor at Fordham University and New York University, where he received a
Ph.D. in Experimental/Developmental Psychology.
Dr. Fisch has also maintained an active
sideline as a freelance writer since 1984, with most of his credits consisting
of comic book stories for Marvel and DC Comics. In addition, he has
written TV scripts, several books for children and adults, short stories,
magazine articles, and material for the Web. Earlier this year, he
finally managed to bridge the gap among all his disparate interests by
publishing (with Rosemarie Truglio) a book entitled "G" Is for
"Growing": Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street.
He is currently working on a second academic book that reaches beyond Sesame
Street to explore children's learning from educational television in general.
Arkady Pogostkin:
"Automated Software Testing for High-Demand Consumer Applications" Test
automation is playing an ever more important role in the business of software
development. Shrinking product cycles, increasing number of features,
and proliferation of operating environments make test automation a necessity
for any successful software development effort.
AOL has been utilizing black-box test automation for several years,
incrementally growing test coverage and depth of testing. AOL's
philosophy and approach to automated testing will be discussed, an overview of
available tools presented, and examples of automated tests demonstrated.
Arkady Pogostkin is a Principal QA Engineer at AOL Technologies / Test
Automation. Arkady's role as a technical lead for a number of engineers
and developers involves developing test methodology, design and implementation
of solutions for new testing projects, building tools for analysis of test
results, and selection of testing technologies and tools. While
attending UMCP, Arkady worked with the HCIL from 1993 to1995. He
graduated in 1995 with a Computer Science degree from UMCP.
Stephen North: "Network
Visualization Coupled with Data Mining"
The AT&T Infolab is an interdisciplinary
collaboration to explore visualization and data mining toward the
understanding of very large data sets, particularly ones they have describing
global networks and services on them. Visualization is part of a feedback loop
in analyzing these data sets. Not merely the end stage of analysis,
visualization itself can provide new metaphors for expressing data, which can
help spot new patterns unseen by other methods of analysis.
The Infolab has created algorithms and tools
for visualization. Their recent work includes a viewer for dynamic
hierarchical graphs of modest size (envisioned as a technique for browsing
within very large graphs) and an interactive viewer for full-scale data sets
of events and transactions on networks and maps. This viewer was first applied
to a day's worth of phone call records (about 400 million). Researchers then
adapted it to a large frame/ATM packet data network. Mr. North will talk about
the engineering of this system, its applications, what worked and what didn't,
and some ideas about future goals for such systems.
Stephen North received a Ph.D. in Computer
Science from Princeton University in
1986. Before that he earned an MA and MS at Princeton and a B.Sc. at
Montclair University. He considers
his main professional accomplishments to be 1) the creation of graphviz,
the predominant web-enabled open source graph drawing system; 2) the formation
of a discipline-based Information
Visualization Research Department in AT&T Labs in 1998 that has focused
AT&T's work in large-scale network visualization, and 3) in 1976 at
Creative Computing he did the programming for the classic book "101 Basic
Computer Games", and worked for a while with Ted Nelson, a hypertext
pioneer.
Brygg Ullmer:
"Tangible User Interfaces for
Abstract Digital Information"
For more than three decades, people have
relied on screen-based text and graphics
as the primary means for interactively representing digital information.
Whether the screen is desk-mounted, head-mounted, hand-held, or
embedded in the physical environment, the combination of screens and general-purpose
input devices has fostered a predominantly visual paradigm of
human-computer interaction.
The talk will introduce research upon
"tangible interfaces" – user interfaces
in which physical objects serve as both representations and controls
for digital information. In particular, Brygg will discuss the application
of tangible interfaces to abstract information, focusing on approaches
that combine systems of physical tokens with interpretive physical
constraints. In these interfaces, physical tokens represent information
such as data structures and parameters. Physical constraints are
then used to map compositions of these tokens onto interpretations like
indexing, sequencing, and Boolean operations. He
will present examples applying these
techniques to tasks such as manipulating media and querying databases,
and will discuss future directions for these kinds of approaches.
Brygg Ullmer is a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT
Media Laboratory, where he studies with
Prof. Hiroshi Ishii in the Tangible Media group. He holds a B.S.
in computer engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
(1994), and an M.S. from the MIT Media Laboratory (1997).
He has held internships at Interval Research
Corporation (1993-95) and Sony Computer
Science Labs, Tokyo (2000). His research interests include tangible
and graphical user interfaces for distributed information, network
and computing infrastructure, and biological systems, as well as rapid
physical and functional prototyping.
Rob Miller:
"New Approaches to Text Editing: Multiple
Selections and Outlier Finding"
Multiple selections, though heavily used in
file managers and drawing editors, are
virtually nonexistent in text editing. This talk will describe
how multiple selections can automate repetitive text editing. A
multiple selection is inferred from positive and negative examples given
by the user. The selection is then used for typing, deleting, copying,
pasting, or other editing. Multiple-selection editing has been
evaluated by user studies and shown to be fast and usable by novices.
One inference technique required only 1.26 examples per selection
in the user study, closely approaching the one-example ideal.
When users handle large amounts of data,
however, errors can be hard to notice.
"Outlier finding" is a new way to reduce errors by drawing the
user's attention to inconsistent data that may indicate errors. Rob
has developed an outlier finder for text that can suggest both false
positives and false negatives in a multiple selection. When integrated
into the multiple-selection editor and tested in a small user
study, outlier finding reduced errors.
These techniques are implemented in LAPIS, a
freely-available, open-source text
editor/web browser written in Java (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rcm/lapis).
LAPIS is based on the idea of "lightweight
structure," an extensible library of patterns and parsers.
Lightweight structure has applications not only to smart text
editing, but also to web browsing, program transformation, and
semistructured databases.
This is joint work with Brad Myers at CMU.
Rob Miller is a PhD candidate in computer
science at Carnegie Mellon University,
where his interests include text processing, software engineering,
end-user automation, and mobile and ubiquitous computing. He
received bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and
computer science from MIT (1995). Prior to that, as a high school student,
he helped found a short-lived startup that sold information access
via the phone --- five years before the Web, and ten years before
cell phones became nearly ubiquitous. He sometimes wishes the company
had survived a little longer.
Brian Bailey:
"DEMAIS: Designing Multimedia Applications with Interactive Storyboards"
To create an innovative interactive multimedia
application, a multimedia designer needs
to rapidly explore numerous behavioral design ideas early in the design
process, as creating innovative behavior is the cornerstone of creating
innovative multimedia. Current tools and
techniques do not support a designer’s need
for early behavior exploration. To address this need, Brian and team at the
University of Minnesota have developed DEMAIS,
a sketch-based, interactive multimedia storyboard tool that uses a designer’s
ink strokes and textual annotations as an input design vocabulary.
By operationalizing this vocabulary, DEMAIS
transforms an otherwise static sketch into
a working example. The behavioral sketch can be quickly edited using
gestures and an expressive visual language. Evaluation of DEMAIS has produced
new lessons for designing gesture-based interfaces and has shown that the
tool has a positive impact on the early design process.
Brian Bailey is a Ph.D. candidate at the
University of Minnesota. He
received his bachelor's degree from Purdue University and his master's degree
from University of Minnesota. Both degrees are in Computer Science.
Francois
Guimbretiere:
"Fluid Interaction for High
Resolution Wall-size Displays"
As computers become more ubiquitous, direct
interaction with wall-size, high resolution
displays will become commonplace. The familiar desktop computer interface
will be ill suited to the affordances of these displays. Current Graphical
User Interfaces (GUIs) do not take into account the cost of reaching
for a far-away menu bar, and they rely heavily on the keyboard for rapid
interactions. GUIs are extremely powerful, but
their interaction style contrasts sharply
with the casual interaction style provided by traditional wall-size
displays such as whiteboards and pin-boards.
Francois' work explores how to bridge the gap
between the power provided by current
desktop computer interfaces and the fluid use of whiteboards and pin-boards.
Observing fluid expert interactions in our everyday life, such as
driving a car or playing a violin, he and his team have designed, and built a
fluid interaction framework which
encourages gesture memory, reduces the need for dialog
with the user, and provides a scoping mechanism for modes. As the user
acquires expertise, these features let the cognitive load of using the interface
progressively disappear. The user is now free to focus on other tasks the same
way one can drive a car while conversing with a passenger.
To validate the design, Francois and others at
Stanford University built the Stanford Interactive Mural, a 9 Mpixel whiteboard-size
screen, evaluated the performance of their proposed menu system
FlowMenu (preliminary results will be discussed), and implemented PostBrainstorm
a digital brainstorming tool. PostBrainstorm lets users gather
and organize sketches, snapshots of physical documents, and a variety of
digital documents on the Interactive Mural. PostBrainstorm was very well
received by professional designers during
testing, and was used in the early design
stage of the Chrysler Design Award 2001. It demonstrates the feasibility
of fluid, transparent interactions for complex, real life applications.
More information can be found at: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~francois
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