Design Research For Personal Information Management Systems To Support Undergraduate Students

This dissertation investigated the personal information management (PIM) behaviors and practices of undergraduate college students during a four month academic semester period. Qualitative data on the day-to-day PIM practices for 15 students enrolled in an honors biology class were collected through in-depth observations and interviews. Four students experimented with MyLifeBits--a next-generation PIM system developed at Microsoft Research. A participatory design session involving six students explored and identified new directions for PIM design. Analysis of the field data revealed that students engage regularly in project management activities, and their work is often highly collaborative. Students were observed to have difficulty with core PIM activities, such as managing tasks and reminders (and both PIM and technical skills vary widely among students). Students were observed to manage a diverse array of information formats, applications, and media, which are rarely integrated. Gaps in understanding and awareness among students and instructors were also noted. MyLifeBits was found to be intuitive and effective for visual browsing and refinding, although specific elements of the MyLifeBits user interface could likely be improved to support efficient task completion. The MyLifeBits system includes annotation, collection building, and other features that may support new approaches for making order and stimulating reflection. Observations of student usage suggested further design modifications to improve these features and supporting user interfaces. Implications for future research and design include: Incorporating social awareness and communication into PIM systems to help reduce gaps in understanding and facilitate reflection; integrating collaboration technologies into PIM systems to support students' highly collaborative work practices; providing tools to stimulate reflection (e.g., personal analytics) and create reflective artifacts (e.g., journals, multimedia scrapbooks); shifting the focus of design to outcomes (such as, "getting my assignment done on time, and in the way the teacher expects") that PIM supports rather than the PIM process itself; and developing ways to scaffold students' learning of PIM skills, such as metadata creation, project analysis and management, collaboration, and reflection

Annotation of multimedia learning materials for semantic search

Multimedia is the main source for online learning materials, such as videos, slides and textbooks, and its size is growing with the popularity of online programs offered by Universities and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The increasing amount of multimedia learning resources available online makes it very challenging to browse through the materials or find where a specific concept of interest is covered. To enable semantic search on the lecture materials, their content must be annotated and indexed. Manual annotation of learning materials such as videos is tedious and cannot be envisioned for the growing quantity of online materials. One of the most commonly used methods for learning video annotation is to index the video, based on the transcript obtained from translating the audio track of the video into text. Existing speech to text translators require extensive training especially for non-native English speakers and are known to have low accuracy. This dissertation proposes to index the slides, based on the keywords. The keywords extracted from the textbook index and the presentation slides are the basis of the indexing scheme. Two types of lecture videos are generally used (i.e., classroom recording using a regular camera or slide presentation screen captures using specific software) and their quality varies widely. The screen capture videos, have generally a good quality and sometimes come with metadata. But often, metadata is not reliable and hence image processing techniques are used to segment the videos. Since the learning videos have a static background of slide, it is challenging to detect the shot boundaries. Comparative analysis of the state of the art techniques to determine best feature descriptors suitable for detecting transitions in a learning video is presented in this dissertation. The videos are indexed with keywords obtained from slides and a correspondence is established by segmenting the video temporally using feature descriptors to match and align the video segments with the presentation slides converted into images. The classroom recordings using regular video cameras often have poor illumination with objects partially or totally occluded. For such videos, slide localization techniques based on segmentation and heuristics is presented to improve the accuracy of the transition detection. A region prioritized ranking mechanism is proposed that integrates the keyword location in the presentation into the ranking of the slides when searching for a slide that covers a given keyword. This helps in getting the most relevant results first. With the increasing size of course materials gathered online, a user looking to understand a given concept can get overwhelmed. The standard way of learning and the concept of “one size fits all” is no longer the best way to learn for millennials. Personalized concept recommendation is presented according to the user’s background knowledge. Finally, the contributions of this dissertation have been integrated into the Ultimate Course Search (UCS), a tool for an effective search of course materials. UCS integrates presentation, lecture videos and textbook content into a single platform with topic based search capabilities and easy navigation of lecture materials

Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library

This report updates and expands on A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, originally commissioned by the DLF as an internal report in summer 2003, and released to the public later that year. It highlights major developments affecting the ecosystem of scholarly communications and digital libraries since the last survey and provides an analysis of OAI implementation demographics, based on a comparative review of repository registries and cross-archive search services. Secondly, it reviews the state-of-practice for a cohort of digital library aggregation services, grouping them in the context of the problem space to which they most closely adhere. Based in part on responses collected in fall 2005 from an online survey distributed to the original core services, the report investigates the purpose, function and challenges of next-generation aggregation services. On a case-by-case basis, the advances in each service are of interest in isolation from each other, but the report also attempts to situate these services in a larger context and to understand how they fit into a multi-dimensional and interdependent ecosystem supporting the worldwide community of scholars. Finally, the report summarizes the contributions of these services thus far and identifies obstacles requiring further attention to realize the goal of an open, distributed digital library system

Creating Virtual CD-ROM Collections

Over the past 20 years, more than 100,000 CD-ROM titles have been published including thousands of collections of government documents and data. CD-ROMs present preservation challenges at the bit level and in ensuring usability of the preserved artifact. We present techniques we have developed to archive and support user access to a collection of approximately 2,900 CD-ROMs published under the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) by the United States Government Printing Office (GPO). The project provides web-based access to CD-ROM contents using both migration and emulation and supports remote execution of the raw CD-ROM images. Our project incorporates off-the-shelf, primarily open-source software. The raw data and (METS) metadata are made available through AFS, a standard distributed file system, to encourage sharing among libraries

Flexible photo retrieval (FlexPhoReS) : a prototype for multimodel personal digital photo retrieval

Digital photo technology is developing rapidly and is motivating more people to have large personal collections of digital photos. However, effective and fast retrieval of digital photos is not always easy, especially when the collections grow into thousands. World Wide Web (WWW) is one of the platforms that allows digital photo users to publish a collection of photos in a centralised and organised way. Users typically find their photos by searching or browsing uSing a keyboard and mouse. Also in development at the moment are alternative user interfaces such as graphical user interfaces with speech (S/GUI) and other multimodal user interfaces which offer more flexibility to users. The aim of this research was to design and evaluate a flexible user interface for a web based personal digital photo retrieval system. A model of a flexible photo retrieval system (FlexPhoReS) was developed based on a review of the literature and a small-scale user study. A prototype, based on the model, was built using MATLAB and WWW technology. FlexPhoReS is a web based personal digital photo retrieval prototype that enables digital photo users to . accomplish photo retrieval tasks (browsing, keyword and visual example searching (CBI)) using either mouse and keyboard input modalities or mouse and speech input modalities. An evaluation with 20 digital photo users was conducted using usability testing methods. The result showed that there was a significant difference in search performance between using mouse and keyboard input modalities and using mouse and speech input modalities. On average, the reduction in search performance time due to using mouse and speech input modalities was 37.31%. Participants were also significantly more satisfied with mouse and speech input modalities than with mouse and keyboard input modalities although they felt that both were complementary. This research demonstrated that the prototype was successful in providing a flexible model of the photo retrieval process by offering alternative input modalities through a multimodal user interface in the World Wide Web environment.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

How to Use Litigation Technology to Prepare & Present Your Case at Trial October 27, 2021

Meeting proceedings of a seminar by the same name, held October 27, 2021

HealthCyberMap: Mapping the Health Cyberspace Using Hypermedia GIS and Clinical Codes

HealthCyberMap () is a Semantic Web service for healthcare professionals and librarians, patients and the public m general that aims at mappmg parts of medical/ health information resources in cyberspace in novel ways to improve their retrieval and navigation. The Semantic Web ( and ) aims to be the next-generation World Wide Web by giving machine-readable semantics and context to the currently presentation-based Web pages. HealthCyberMap features an unconventional use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to map conceptual spaces occupied by collections of medical/ health information resources. Besides mapping the semantic and non-geographical aspects of these resources using suitable spatial metaphors, HealthCyberMap also collects and maps the geographical provenance of these resources. Some of HealthCyberMap Web interfaces are visual (maps for browsing resources by clinical/ health topic, by provenance and by type), while others are textual (multilingual interfaces for browsing resources by language, and a directory of topical resource categories, besides HealthCyberMap Semantic Subject Search Engine that goes beyond conventional free-text and keyword-based search engines, and supports synonyms, disease variants, subtypes, as well as some semantic relationships between terms). HealthCyberMap adopts a clinical metadata framework built upon a clinical coding scheme (vocabulary or ontology—ICD-9-CM* clinical classification in the current pilot service). Clinical coding schemes serve as a reliable common backbone for topical resource indexing, automated topical classification, topical visualisation and navigation of coded resource pools (using suitable metaphors), and enhanced information retrieval and linking. A resource metadata base based on Dublin Core metadata set with HealthCyberMap’s own extensions holds information about selected high-quality resources. HealthCyberMap then uses GIS spatialisation methods to generate interactive navigational cybermaps from the metadata base. These visual cybermaps are based on familiar metaphors for image-word association to give users a broad overview and understanding of what is available in this complex conceptual space of medical/ health Internet resources and help them navigate it more efficiently and effectively. HealthCyberMap cybermaps can be considered as semantically-spatialised, ontology-based browsing views of the underlying resource metadata base. Using a clinical coding scheme as a metric for spatialisation (“semantic distance”) is unique to HealthCyberMap and is very much suited for the semantic categorisation and navigation of medical/ health Internet information resources. HealthCyberMap also introduces a useful form of cyberspatial analysis for the detection of topical coverage gaps in its resource pool using choropleth (shaded) maps of human body systems. The project features a cost-effective method for serving Web hypermaps with dynamic metadata base drill-down functionality. It also demonstrates the feasibility of Electronic Patient Record to Online Information Services (like HealthCyberMap) Problem to Knowledge Linking using clinical codes as crisp problem-knowledge linkers or knowledge hooks. The Semantic Subject Search Engine queries the same HealthCyberMap resource metadata base. Explicit concepts in resource metadata map onto a brokering domain ontology (ICD-9-CM) allowing the search engine to infer implicit meanings (synonyms and semantic relationships) not directly mentioned in either the resource or its metadata. Similarly, user queries would map to the same ontology allowing the search engine to infer the implicit semantics of user queries and use them to optimise retrieval. A formative evaluation study of HealthCyberMap pilot service using an online user evaluation questionnaire, in addition to analysis of HealthCyberMap server transaction log, has been conducted during the period from 18 April 2002 to 1 June 2002 with very encouraging results. This two-method evaluation approach was guided by methodologies described in NIH Web Site Evaluation and Performance Measures Toolkit among other resources. Many exciting future possibilities have been also investigated by the author, including the further development of HealthCyberMap as a customisable, location-based medical/ health information service

Interactive visualization systems and data integration methods for supporting discovery in collections of scientific information

Technological developments have been enabling additional sharing and reuse of scientific information. Current indexing methods support query-based search and filtering, however they do not support overviews and exploration. Due to these limitations of existing indexing methods, it is challenging to discover records and connections that relate information in new and potentially insightful ways. We developed prototype systems and computational methods for integrating collections from multiple sources within a domain into a single, unified graph data structure. Graph-theoretic measures and visualizations were then applied to identify relations and records that support discovery tasks. Three collections of molecular information were studied: (1) influenza protein sequences from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, (2) Open Notebook Science notebooks and databases from Drexel University and other academic chemical research laboratories, and (3) project data from drug discovery projects at Pfizer R&D. We designed methods for data integration within these collections. We then analyzed the integrated collections to design interactive visual tools and computational methods that could systematically identify relations and records that have a high potential to lead to novel discoveries in these areas. We conducted interviews with domain experts to evaluate the effectiveness of these designs. These studies demonstrate the feasibility of the new indexing methods to improve the discoverability of novel connections across multiple collections within a domain.Ph.D., Information Science -- Drexel University, 201