Designing an interface for a digital movie browsing system in the film studies domain

This article explains our work in designing an interface for a digital movie browsing system in the specific application context of film studies. The development of MOVIEBROWSER2 follows some general design guidelines based on an earlier user study with film studies students at Dublin City University. These design guidelines have been used as an input to the MOVIEBROWSER2 system design. The rationale for the interface design decisions has been elaborated. An experiment has been carried out among film studies student, together with a one-semester trial deployment. The results show positive feedback and a better performance in the students’ essay outcome with higher perceived satisfaction level

Interactive tag maps and tag clouds for the multiscale exploration of large spatio-temporal datasets

'Tag clouds' and 'tag maps' are introduced to represent geographically referenced text. In combination, these aspatial and spatial views are used to explore a large structured spatio-temporal data set by providing overviews and filtering by text and geography. Prototypes are implemented using freely available technologies including Google Earth and Yahoo! 's Tag Map applet. The interactive tag map and tag cloud techniques and the rapid prototyping method used are informally evaluated through successes and limitations encountered. Preliminary evaluation suggests that the techniques may be useful for generating insights when visualizing large data sets containing geo-referenced text strings. The rapid prototyping approach enabled the technique to be developed and evaluated, leading to geovisualization through which a number of ideas were generated. Limitations of this approach are reflected upon. Tag placement, generalisation and prominence at different scales are issues which have come to light in this study that warrant further work

Image database system for glaucoma diagnosis support

Tato práce popisuje přehled standardních a pokročilých metod používaných k diagnose glaukomu v ranném stádiu. Na základě teoretických poznatků je implementován internetově orientovaný informační systém pro oční lékaře, který má tři hlavní cíle. Prvním cílem je možnost sdílení osobních dat konkrétního pacienta bez nutnosti posílat tato data internetem. Druhým cílem je vytvořit účet pacienta založený na kompletním očním vyšetření. Posledním cílem je aplikovat algoritmus pro registraci intenzitního a barevného fundus obrazu a na jeho základě vytvořit internetově orientovanou tři-dimenzionální vizualizaci optického disku. Tato práce je součásti DAAD spolupráce mezi Ústavem Biomedicínského Inženýrství, Vysokého Učení Technického v Brně, Oční klinikou v Erlangenu a Ústavem Informačních Technologií, Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nurnberg.This master thesis describes a conception of standard and advanced eye examination methods used for glaucoma diagnosis in its early stage. According to the theoretical knowledge, a web based information system for ophthalmologists with three main aims is implemented. The first aim is the possibility to share medical data of a concrete patient without sending his personal data through the Internet. The second aim is to create a patient account based on a complete eye examination procedure. The last aim is to improve the HRT diagnostic method with an image registration algorithm for the fundus and intensity images and create an optic nerve head web based 3D visualization. This master thesis is a part of project based on DAAD co-operation between Department of Biomedical Engineering, Brno University of Technology, Eye Clinic in Erlangen and Department of Computer Science, Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nurnberg.

From Keyword Search to Exploration: How Result Visualization Aids Discovery on the Web

A key to the Web's success is the power of search. The elegant way in which search results are returned is usually remarkably effective. However, for exploratory search in which users need to learn, discover, and understand novel or complex topics, there is substantial room for improvement. Human computer interaction researchers and web browser designers have developed novel strategies to improve Web search by enabling users to conveniently visualize, manipulate, and organize their Web search results. This monograph offers fresh ways to think about search-related cognitive processes and describes innovative design approaches to browsers and related tools. For instance, while key word search presents users with results for specific information (e.g., what is the capitol of Peru), other methods may let users see and explore the contexts of their requests for information (related or previous work, conflicting information), or the properties that associate groups of information assets (group legal decisions by lead attorney). We also consider the both traditional and novel ways in which these strategies have been evaluated. From our review of cognitive processes, browser design, and evaluations, we reflect on the future opportunities and new paradigms for exploring and interacting with Web search results

Data Portraits and Intermediary Topics: Encouraging Exploration of Politically Diverse Profiles

In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others. However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with those who think differently have not worked well. In this paper, we hypothesize, first, that previous approaches have not worked because they have been direct -- they have tried to explicitly connect people with those having opposing views on sensitive issues. Second, that neither recommendation or presentation of information by themselves are enough to encourage behavioral change. We propose a platform that mixes a recommender algorithm and a visualization-based user interface to explore recommendations. It recommends politically diverse profiles in terms of distance of latent topics, and displays those recommendations in a visual representation of each user's personal content. We performed an "in the wild" evaluation of this platform, and found that people explored more recommendations when using a biased algorithm instead of ours. In line with our hypothesis, we also found that the mixture of our recommender algorithm and our user interface, allowed politically interested users to exhibit an unbiased exploration of the recommended profiles. Finally, our results contribute insights in two aspects: first, which individual differences are important when designing platforms aimed at behavioral change; and second, which algorithms and user interfaces should be mixed to help users avoid cognitive mechanisms that lead to biased behavior.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. To be presented at ACM Intelligent User Interfaces 201

Forensic Methods and Tools for Web Environments

abstract: The Web is one of the most exciting and dynamic areas of development in today’s technology. However, with such activity, innovation, and ubiquity have come a set of new challenges for digital forensic examiners, making their jobs even more difficult. For examiners to become as effective with evidence from the Web as they currently are with more traditional evidence, they need (1) methods that guide them to know how to approach this new type of evidence and (2) tools that accommodate web environments’ unique characteristics. In this dissertation, I present my research to alleviate the difficulties forensic examiners currently face with respect to evidence originating from web environments. First, I introduce a framework for web environment forensics, which elaborates on and addresses the key challenges examiners face and outlines a method for how to approach web-based evidence. Next, I describe my work to identify extensions installed on encrypted web thin clients using only a sound understanding of these systems’ inner workings and the metadata of the encrypted files. Finally, I discuss my approach to reconstructing the timeline of events on encrypted web thin clients by using service provider APIs as a proxy for directly analyzing the device. In each of these research areas, I also introduce structured formats that I customized to accommodate the unique features of the evidence sources while also facilitating tool interoperability and information sharing.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Tools and Methods to Analyze Multimodal Data in Collaborative Design Ideation

Collaborative design ideation is typically characterized by informal acts of sketching, annotation, and discussion. Designers have always used the pencil-and-paper medium for this activity, partly because of the flexibility of the medium, and partly because the ambiguous and ill-defined nature of conceptual design cannot easily be supported by computers. However, recent computational tools for conceptual design have leveraged the availability of hand-held computing devices for creating and sharing ideas. In order to provide computer support for collaborative ideation in a way that augments traditional media rather than imitates it, it is necessary to study the affordances made available by digital media for this process, and to study designers\u27 cognitive and collaborative processes when using such media. In this thesis, we present tools and methods to help make sense of unstructured verbal and sketch data generated during collaborative design, with a view to better understand these collaborative and cognitive processes. This thesis has three main contributions

Web Browsing Behavior Analysis and Interactive Hypervideo

© ACM, 2013. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in, ACM Transactions on the Web, Vol. 7, No. 4, Article 20, Publication date: October 2013.http://doi.acm.org/ 10.1145/2529995.2529996[EN] Processing data on any sort of user interaction is well known to be cumbersome and mostly time consuming. In order to assist researchers in easily inspecting fine-grained browsing data, current tools usually display user interactions as mouse cursor tracks, a video-like visualization scheme. However, to date, traditional online video inspection has not explored the full capabilities of hypermedia and interactive techniques. In response to this need, we have developed SMT 2ǫ, a Web-based tracking system for analyzing browsing behavior using feature-rich hypervideo visualizations. We compare our system to related work in academia and the industry, showing that ours features unprecedented visualization capabilities. We also show that SMT 2ǫ efficiently captures browsing data and is perceived by users to be both helpful and usable. A series of prediction experiments illustrate that raw cursor data are accessible and can be easily handled, providing evidence that the data can be used to construct and verify research hypotheses. Considering its limitations, it is our hope that SMT 2ǫ will assist researchers, usability practitioners, and other professionals interested in understanding how users browse the Web.This work was partially supported by the MIPRCV Consolider Ingenio 2010 program (CSD2007-00018) and the TIN2009-14103-C03-03 project. It is also supported by the 7th Framework Program of the European Commision (FP7/2007-13) under grant agreement No. 287576 (CasMaCat).Leiva Torres, LA.; Vivó Hernando, RA. (2013). Web Browsing Behavior Analysis and Interactive Hypervideo. ACM Transactions on the Web. 7(4):20:1-20:28. https://doi.org/10.1145/2529995.2529996S20:120:287

Whitelisting System State In Windows Forensic Memory Visualizations

Examiners in the field of digital forensics regularly encounter enormous amounts of data and must identify the few artifacts of evidentiary value. The most pressing challenge these examiners face is manual reconstruction of complex datasets with both hierarchical and associative relationships. The complexity of this data requires significant knowledge, training, and experience to correctly and efficiently examine. Current methods provide primarily text-based representations or low-level visualizations, but levee the task of maintaining global context of system state on the examiner. This research presents a visualization tool that improves analysis methods through simultaneous representation of the hierarchical and associative relationships and local detailed data within a single page application. A novel whitelisting feature further improves analysis by eliminating items of little interest from view, allowing examiners to identify artifacts more quickly and accurately. Results from two pilot studies demonstrates that the visualization tool can assist examiners to more accurately and quickly identify artifacts of interest