Information scraps: how and why information eludes our personal information management tools

In this paper we describe information scraps -- a class of personal information whose content is scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on corners of random sheets of paper, buried inside the bodies of e-mail messages sent to ourselves, or typed haphazardly into text files. Information scraps hold our great ideas, sketches, notes, reminders, driving directions, and even our poetry. We define information scraps to be the body of personal information that is held outside of its natural or We have much still to learn about these loose forms of information capture. Why are they so often held outside of our traditional PIM locations and instead on Post-its or in text files? Why must we sometimes go around our traditional PIM applications to hold on to our scraps, such as by e-mailing ourselves? What are information scraps' role in the larger space of personal information management, and what do they uniquely offer that we find so appealing? If these unorganized bits truly indicate the failure of our PIM tools, how might we begin to build better tools? We have pursued these questions by undertaking a study of 27 knowledge workers. In our findings we describe information scraps from several angles: their content, their location, and the factors that lead to their use, which we identify as ease of capture, flexibility of content and organization, and avilability at the time of need. We also consider the personal emotive responses around scrap management. We present a set of design considerations that we have derived from the analysis of our study results. We present our work on an application platform, jourknow, to test some of these design and usability findings

Growing Story Forest Online from Massive Breaking News

We describe our experience of implementing a news content organization system at Tencent that discovers events from vast streams of breaking news and evolves news story structures in an online fashion. Our real-world system has distinct requirements in contrast to previous studies on topic detection and tracking (TDT) and event timeline or graph generation, in that we 1) need to accurately and quickly extract distinguishable events from massive streams of long text documents that cover diverse topics and contain highly redundant information, and 2) must develop the structures of event stories in an online manner, without repeatedly restructuring previously formed stories, in order to guarantee a consistent user viewing experience. In solving these challenges, we propose Story Forest, a set of online schemes that automatically clusters streaming documents into events, while connecting related events in growing trees to tell evolving stories. We conducted extensive evaluation based on 60 GB of real-world Chinese news data, although our ideas are not language-dependent and can easily be extended to other languages, through detailed pilot user experience studies. The results demonstrate the superior capability of Story Forest to accurately identify events and organize news text into a logical structure that is appealing to human readers, compared to multiple existing algorithm frameworks.Comment: Accepted by CIKM 2017, 9 page

A COEVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING THE PARADOX OF SOCIAL PRESSURES VERSUS ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY ACROSS THE WORLD'S FOOD CHAINS

Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Empowering Expression for Users with Aphasia through Constrained Creativity

Creative activities allow people to express themselves in rich, nuanced ways. However, being creative does not always come easily. For example, people with speech and language impairments, such as aphasia, face challenges in creative activities that involve language. In this paper, we explore the concept of constrained creativity as a way of addressing this challenge and enabling creative writing. We report an app, MakeWrite, that supports the constrained creation of digital texts through automated redaction. The app was co-designed with and for people with aphasia and was subsequently explored in a workshop with a group of people with aphasia. Participants were not only successful in crafting novel language, but, importantly, self-reported that the app was crucial in enabling them to do so. We refect on the potential of technology-supported constrained creativity as a means of empowering expression amongst users with diverse needs

Arts for All: Connecting to New Audiences

Summarizes discussions among arts leaders and experts at an April 2008 conference on how to build arts appreciation and participation in a new environment through better marketing, new technology, and audience research