Considering context and users in interactive systems analysis

Although the take-up of formal approaches to modelling and reasoning about software has been slow, there has been recent interest and facility in the use of automated reasoning techniques such as model checking [5] on increasingly complex systems. In the case of interactive systems, formal methods can be particularly useful in reasoning about systems that involve complex interactions. These techniques for the analysis of interactive systems typically focus on the device and leave the context of use undocumented. In this paper we look at models that incorporate complexity explicitly, and discuss how they can be used in a formal setting. The paper is concerned particularly with the type of analysis that can be performed with them.This work was carried out in the context of the IVY project, supported by FCT (the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) and FEDER (the European Regional Development Fund) under contract POSC/EIA/26646/2004

Interactive Visual Text Analytics

Human-in-the-Loop machine learning leverages both human and machine intelligence to build a smarter model. Even with the advances in machine learning techniques, results generated by automated models can be of poor quality or do not always match users' judgment or context. To this end, keeping human in the loop via right interfaces to steer the underlying model can be highly beneficial. Prior research in machine learning and visual analytics has focused on either improving model performances or developing interactive interfaces without carefully considering the other side. In this dissertation, we design and develop interactive systems that tightly integrate algorithms, visualizations, and user interactions, focusing on improving interactivity, scalability, and interpretability of the underlying models. Specifically, we present three visual analytics systems to explore and interact with large-scale text data. First, we present interactive hierarchical topic modeling for multi-scale analysis of large-scale documents. Second, we introduce interactive search space reduction to discover relevant subset of documents with high recall for focused analyses. Lastly, we propose interactive exploration and debiasing of word embeddings.Ph.D

Deriving query suggestions for site search

Modern search engines have been moving away from simplistic interfaces that aimed at satisfying a user's need with a single-shot query. Interactive features are now integral parts of web search engines. However, generating good query modification suggestions remains a challenging issue. Query log analysis is one of the major strands of work in this direction. Although much research has been performed on query logs collected on the web as a whole, query log analysis to enhance search on smaller and more focused collections has attracted less attention, despite its increasing practical importance. In this article, we report on a systematic study of different query modification methods applied to a substantial query log collected on a local website that already uses an interactive search engine. We conducted experiments in which we asked users to assess the relevance of potential query modification suggestions that have been constructed using a range of log analysis methods and different baseline approaches. The experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of log analysis to extract query modification suggestions. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that a more fine-grained approach than grouping search requests into sessions allows for extraction of better refinement terms from query log files. © 2013 ASIS&T

Beyond representations: towards an action-centric perspective on tangible interaction

In the light of theoretical as well as concrete technical development, we discuss a conceptual shift from an information-centric to an action-centric perspective on tangible interactive technology. We explicitly emphasise the qualities of shareable use, and the importance of designing tangibles that allow for meaningful manipulation and control of the digital material. This involves a broadened focus from studying properties of the interface, to instead aim for qualities of the activity of using a system, a general tendency towards designing for social and sharable use settings and an increased openness towards multiple and subjective interpretations. An effect of this is that tangibles are not designed as representations of data, but as resources for action. We discuss four ways that tangible artefacts work as resources for action: (1) for physical manipulation; (2) for referential, social and contextually oriented action; (3) for perception and sensory experience; (4) for digitally mediated action

EVEREST IST - 2002 - 00185 : D23 : final report

Deliverable públic del projecte europeu EVERESTThis deliverable constitutes the final report of the project IST-2002-001858 EVEREST. After its successful completion, the project presents this document that firstly summarizes the context, goal and the approach objective of the project. Then it presents a concise summary of the major goals and results, as well as highlights the most valuable lessons derived form the project work. A list of deliverables and publications is included in the annex.Postprint (published version

i-JEN: Visual interactive Malaysia crime news retrieval system

Supporting crime news investigation involves a mechanism to help monitor the current and past status of criminal events. We believe this could be well facilitated by focusing on the user interfaces and the event crime model aspects. In this paper we discuss on a development of Visual Interactive Malaysia Crime News Retrieval System (i-JEN) and describe the approach, user studies and planned, the system architecture and future plan. Our main objectives are to construct crime-based event; investigate the use of crime-based event in improving the classification and clustering; develop an interactive crime news retrieval system; visualize crime news in an effective and interactive way; integrate them into a usable and robust system and evaluate the usability and system performance. The system will serve as a news monitoring system which aims to automatically organize, retrieve and present the crime news in such a way as to support an effective monitoring, searching, and browsing for the target users groups of general public, news analysts and policemen or crime investigators. The study will contribute to the better understanding of the crime data consumption in the Malaysian context as well as the developed system with the visualisation features to address crime data and the eventual goal of combating the crimes

Design as conversation with digital materials

This paper explores Donald Schön's concept of design as a conversation with materials, in the context of designing digital systems. It proposes material utterance as a central event in designing. A material utterance is a situated communication act that depends on the particularities of speaker, audience, material and genre. The paper argues that, if digital designing differs from other forms of designing, then accounts for such differences must be sought by understanding the material properties of digital systems and the genres of practice that surround their use. Perspectives from human-computer interaction (HCI) and the psychology of programming are used to examine how such an understanding might be constructed.</p