Arkose: A Prototype Mechanism and Tool for Collaborative Information Generation and Distillation.

The goals of this thesis have been to gain a better understanding of collaborative knowledge sharing and distilling and to build a prototype collaborative system that supports flexible knowledge generation and distillation. To reach these goals, I have conducted two user studies and built two systems. The first system, Arkose 1.0, is a prototype collaborative distillation system for a discussion space, which provides a set of augmentative tools to facilitate the filtering, structuring, and organizing of discussion information. Arkose 1.0 supports editors to distill a discussion space incrementally and collaboratively, and allows a gradual increase in the order and reusability of the information space. The study of an online question-answering community, Naver Knowledge-iN, investigates users’ knowledge sharing behaviors in a large online question-answering community. Through the analyses of a large quantity of question/answer pairs and 26 user interviews, the study analyzes the characteristics of knowledge generation and user participation behavior and gains insights into their motivations, roles, usage and expertise. It reveals that the limiting nature of the reply interfaces of Knowledge-iN leads to the accumulation of simple and easy questions and answers. This tendency is encouraged by the point system that rewards users who answer many questions quickly. Arkose2 is designed and implemented based on the lessons and insights gained in building Arkose 1.0 and examining Naver Knowledge-iN. Arkose2 provides a host of additional interaction mechanisms and supportive tools over Arkose 1.0 that assists users to flexibly generate knowledge and distill and organize it better. Finally, the evaluation of Arkose2 reveals a number of insights, issues, and lessons about users’ distillation activities of discussion spaces and features of Arkose2. These together provide valuable lessons and insights for the architecture and features of the next generation collective intelligent system.Ph.D.InformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78880/1/ksnam_1.pd

Finding usage patterns from generalized weblog data

Buried in the enormous, heterogeneous and distributed information, contained in the web server access logs, is knowledge with great potential value. As websites continue to grow in number and complexity, web usage mining systems face two significant challenges - scalability and accuracy. This thesis develops a web data generalization technique and incorporates it into the web usage mining framework in an attempt to exploit this information-rich source of data for effective and efficient pattern discovery. Given a concept hierarchy on the web pages, generalization replaces actual page-clicks with their general concepts. Existing methods do this by taking a level-based cut through the concept hierarchy. This adversely affects the quality of mined patterns since, depending on the depth of the chosen level, either significant pages of user interests get coalesced, or many insignificant concepts are retained. We present a usage driven concept ascension algorithm, which only preserves significant items, possibly at different levels in the hierarchy. Concept usage is estimated using a small stratified sample of the large weblog data. A usage threshold is then used to define the nodes to be pruned in the hierarchy for generalization. Our experiments on large real weblog data demonstrate improved performance in terms of quality and computation time of the pattern discovery process. Our algorithm yields an effective and scalable tool for web usage mining

Scalable User Interfaces for the Web / by Arman Danesh.

This thesis describes a new approach to developing and delivering user interfaces for Web applications. This approach, termed Scalable User Interfaces (SUI), is designed to allow a developer to create a single user interface definition for a Web application which can then be consumed, rendered and used by any device on the network. These devices can range from small displays such as mobile telephones to the full desktop-sized monitor displays used by personal computers. The goal of Scalable User Interfaces is to allow a single specification to be deployed on all devices without the need for the developer to specify any device-specific vocabularies, transformations, hinting or style sheets such as previous work in automated rendering for mixed displays and work in platform-independent user interface specification. Scalable User Interfaces provides a Flash-based implementation which highlights the utility of Flash as a tool for user interface design and research. Our work also illustrates the application of recursive rendering in laying out forms for various-sized displays