19,698 research outputs found
Designing and evaluating the usability of a machine learning API for rapid prototyping music technology
To better support creative software developers and music technologists' needs, and to empower them as machine learning users and innovators, the usability of and developer experience with machine learning tools must be considered and better understood. We review background research on the design and evaluation of application programming interfaces (APIs), with a focus on the domain of machine learning for music technology software development. We present the design rationale for the RAPID-MIX API, an easy-to-use API for rapid prototyping with interactive machine learning, and a usability evaluation study with software developers of music technology. A cognitive dimensions questionnaire was designed and delivered to a group of 12 participants who used the RAPID-MIX API in their software projects, including people who developed systems for personal use and professionals developing software products for music and creative technology companies. The results from the questionnaire indicate that participants found the RAPID-MIX API a machine learning API which is easy to learn and use, fun, and good for rapid prototyping with interactive machine learning. Based on these findings, we present an analysis and characterization of the RAPID-MIX API based on the cognitive dimensions framework, and discuss its design trade-offs and usability issues. We use these insights and our design experience to provide design recommendations for ML APIs for rapid prototyping of music technology. We conclude with a summary of the main insights, a discussion of the merits and challenges of the application of the CDs framework to the evaluation of machine learning APIs, and directions to future work which our research deems valuable
Global-Scale Resource Survey and Performance Monitoring of Public OGC Web Map Services
One of the most widely-implemented service standards provided by the Open
Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to the user community is the Web Map Service (WMS).
WMS is widely employed globally, but there is limited knowledge of the global
distribution, adoption status or the service quality of these online WMS
resources. To fill this void, we investigated global WMSs resources and
performed distributed performance monitoring of these services. This paper
explicates a distributed monitoring framework that was used to monitor 46,296
WMSs continuously for over one year and a crawling method to discover these
WMSs. We analyzed server locations, provider types, themes, the spatiotemporal
coverage of map layers and the service versions for 41,703 valid WMSs.
Furthermore, we appraised the stability and performance of basic operations for
1210 selected WMSs (i.e., GetCapabilities and GetMap). We discuss the major
reasons for request errors and performance issues, as well as the relationship
between service response times and the spatiotemporal distribution of client
monitoring sites. This paper will help service providers, end users and
developers of standards to grasp the status of global WMS resources, as well as
to understand the adoption status of OGC standards. The conclusions drawn in
this paper can benefit geospatial resource discovery, service performance
evaluation and guide service performance improvements.Comment: 24 pages; 15 figure
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