Wedding planner in a box

Marriage describes the connection of two souls who promise to become one heart. Everyone dreams their marriage to be nearly perfect and that will happen only if they are able to make their wedding plan with best packages. In this busy world, many couples delay their wedding mainly because of high budget required to meet their dream wedding ceremony. Wedding ceremony requires careful and meticulous planning from many aspects such as choosing the food, make up, decoration, and gifts

An Exploration into Two Solutions to Propagating Web Accessibility for Blind Computer Users

A model is presented depicting the driving forces (Web industry, consumers, U.S. federal government, and technology) promoting an accessible Web and potential solutions within those forces. This project examines two distinct solutions, lawsuits (a consumer-driven solution) and AcceSS 2.1 transcoder (a technology-driven solution) to provide more information on two under-researched methods that could have far-reaching impacts on Web accessibility for the blind. First, an evaluation of the intraclass correlation (ICC) between homepage Web Accessibility Barrier (WAB) scores and WAB scores of levels 1-3 found that the homepage is not sufficient to detect the accessibility of the website. ICC of the homepage and average of levels 1-3 is 0.250 (p=0.062) and ICC of levels 1, 2, & 3 is 0.784 (p < 0.0001). Evaluating the homepage and first-level pages gives more accurate results of entire site accessibility. Second, an evaluation of the WAB scores of the homepage and first-level pages of websites of five companies sued for alleged inaccessible websites found mixed results: lawsuits worked in two cases, but didn't in three. This is seen through an examination of accessibility and complexity of the websites for years surrounding the lawsuits. Each sued website is compared to a control website within the same industry and to a random group of websites representing the general Web. Third, a usability study of the AcceSS 2.1 transcoding intermediary found that technology can increase users' efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction in Web interaction, regardless of universal design. The study entails a within-subject cross-over design wherein 15 users performed tasks on three websites: one universally designed, one non-universally designed, and one reference site. Paired t-tests examine the effect of AcceSS 2.1 on time, errors, and subjective satisfaction and mixed-model analysis examines the effect of study design on outcomes. Results show that users perform tasks faster, with fewer errors, and with greater satisfaction when accessing pages via AcceSS 2.1, but users where less satisfied with the universally designed website and significant differences were found in the universally designed website and not the non-universally designed website. Website usability and ease of navigation are more important to users than simple accessibility

Broker-based service-oriented content adaptation framework

Electronic documents are becoming increasingly rich in content and varied in format and structure. At the same time, user preferences vary towards the contents and their devices are getting increasingly varied in capabilities. This mismatch between rich contents and user preferences along with the end device capability presents a challenge in providing ubiquitous access to these contents. Content adaptation is primarily used to bridge the mismatch by providing users with contents that is tailored to the given contexts e.g., device capability, preferences, or network bandwidth. Existing content adaptation systems employing these approaches such as client-side, server-side or proxy-side adaptation, operate in isolation, often encounter limited adaptation functionality, get overload if too many concurrent users and open to single point of failure, thus limiting the scope and scale of their services. To move beyond these shortcomings, this thesis establishes the basis for developing content adaptation solutions that are efficient and scalable. It presents a framework to enable content adaptation to be consumed as Web services provided by third-party service providers, which is termed as “service-oriented content adaptation”. Towards this perspective, this thesis addresses five key issues – how to enable content adaptation as services (serviceoriented framework); how to locate services in the network (service discovery protocol); how to select best possible services (path determination); how to provide quality assurance (service level agreement (SLA) framework); and how to negotiate quality of service (QoS negotiation). Specifically, we have: (i) identified the key research challenges for service-oriented content adaptation, along with a systematic understanding of the content adaptation research spectrum, captured in a taxonomy of content adaptation systems; (ii) developed an architectural framework that provides the basis for enabling content adaptation as Web services, providing the facilities to serve clients’ content adaptation requests through the client-side brokering; (iii) developed a service discovery protocol, by taking into account the searching space, searching time, match type of the services and physical location of the service providers; (iv) developed a mechanism to choose the best possible combination of services to serve a given content adaptation request, considering QoS levels offered; (v) developed an architectural framework that provides the basis for managing quality through the conceptualization of service level agreement; and (vi) introduced a strategy for QoS negotiation between multiple brokers and service providers, by taking into account the incoming requests and server utilization and, thus requiring the basis of determining serving priority and negotiating new QoS levels. The performance of the proposed solutions are compared with other competitive solutions and shown to be substantially better

Mobile information system adoption and use: beliefs and attitudes in mobile context

During the last decades scholars and practitioners have been interested in the reasons why users either accept or reject Information Systems (IS). Users' perceptions of information technology have mainly been studied from acceptance, success, or usability perspectives. Although these research approaches have provided valuable information, they all have a limited view. Thus, there is a need for an integrated framework that fulfills the gaps between different approaches. In this study the acceptance and use of mobile systems are analyzed by combining the results of different disciplines. The main result of the study is a new model for Mobile IS Adoption and Use (MISAU). It integrates the elements of technology acceptance, information system success, and usability studies into a single model. As information system acceptance must always be analyzed in context of use, MISAU is based on the mobile service supply chain. The main differences between stationary and mobile systems can be found in network performance and usability of mobile devices. MISAU serves as a framework for case studies in which the effects of these special characteristics on users' perceptions are analyzed. The results of the study indicate that the ever-increasing transmission speeds of mobile networks are not alone adequate to increase the use of mobile services. Perceived quality of service is an outcome of multiple factors. The successful implementation of a mobile IS requires high quality in all elements of service supply chain (i.e. end-user devices, networks, and services). The small size of mobile devices is a serious threat to usability - especially to text entry and navigation within an application. Further studies are still needed in these sectors

Supporting Exploratory Search Tasks Through Alternative Representations of Information

Information seeking is a fundamental component of many of the complex tasks presented to us, and is often conducted through interactions with automated search systems such as Web search engines. Indeed, the ubiquity of Web search engines makes information so readily available that people now often turn to the Web for all manners of information seeking needs. Furthermore, as the range of online information seeking tasks grows, more complex and open-ended search activities have been identified. One type of complex search activities that is of increasing interest to researchers is exploratory search, where the goal involves "learning" or "investigating", rather than simply "looking-up". Given the massive increase in information availability and the use of online search for tasks beyond simply looking-up, researchers have noted that it becomes increasingly challenging for users to effectively leverage the available online information for complex and open-ended search activities. One of the main limitations of the current document retrieval paradigm offered by modern search engines is that it provides a ranked list of documents as a response to the searcher’s query with no further support for locating and synthesizing relevant information. Therefore, the searcher is left to find and make sense of useful information in a massive information space that lacks any overview or conceptual organization. This thesis explores the impact of alternative representations of search results on user behaviors and outcomes during exploratory search tasks. Our inquiry is inspired by the premise that exploratory search tasks require sensemaking, and that sensemaking involves constructing and interacting with representations of knowledge. As such, in order to provide the searchers with more support in performing exploratory activities, there is a need to move beyond the current document retrieval paradigm by extending the support for locating and externalizing semantic information from textual documents and by providing richer representations of the extracted information coupled with mechanisms for accessing and interacting with the information in ways that support exploration and sensemaking. This dissertation presents a series of discrete research endeavour to explore different aspects of providing information and presenting this information in ways that both extraction and assimilation of relevant information is supported. We first address the problem of extracting information – that is more granular than documents – as a response to a user's query by developing a novel information extraction system to represent documents as a series of entity-relationship tuples. Next, through a series of designing and evaluating alternative representations of search results, we examine how this extracted information can be represented such that it extends the document-based search framework's support for exploratory search tasks. Finally, we assess the ecological validity of this research by exploring error-prone representations of search results and how they impact a searcher's ability to leverage our representations to perform exploratory search tasks. Overall, this research contributes towards designing future search systems by providing insights into the efficacy of alternative representations of search results for supporting exploratory search activities, culminating in a novel hybrid representation called Hierarchical Knowledge Graphs (HKG). To this end we propose and develop a framework that enables a reliable investigation of the impact of different representations and how they are perceived and utilized by information seekers

Human-Computer Interaction

In this book the reader will find a collection of 31 papers presenting different facets of Human Computer Interaction, the result of research projects and experiments as well as new approaches to design user interfaces. The book is organized according to the following main topics in a sequential order: new interaction paradigms, multimodality, usability studies on several interaction mechanisms, human factors, universal design and development methodologies and tools

Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE 2023)

This volume gathers the papers presented at the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events 2023 Workshop (DCASE2023), Tampere, Finland, during 21–22 September 2023