132,260 research outputs found
You can't always sketch what you want: Understanding Sensemaking in Visual Query Systems
Visual query systems (VQSs) empower users to interactively search for line
charts with desired visual patterns, typically specified using intuitive
sketch-based interfaces. Despite decades of past work on VQSs, these efforts
have not translated to adoption in practice, possibly because VQSs are largely
evaluated in unrealistic lab-based settings. To remedy this gap in adoption, we
collaborated with experts from three diverse domains---astronomy, genetics, and
material science---via a year-long user-centered design process to develop a
VQS that supports their workflow and analytical needs, and evaluate how VQSs
can be used in practice. Our study results reveal that ad-hoc sketch-only
querying is not as commonly used as prior work suggests, since analysts are
often unable to precisely express their patterns of interest. In addition, we
characterize three essential sensemaking processes supported by our enhanced
VQS. We discover that participants employ all three processes, but in different
proportions, depending on the analytical needs in each domain. Our findings
suggest that all three sensemaking processes must be integrated in order to
make future VQSs useful for a wide range of analytical inquiries.Comment: Accepted for presentation at IEEE VAST 2019, to be held October 20-25
in Vancouver, Canada. Paper will also be published in a special issue of IEEE
Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) IEEE VIS
(InfoVis/VAST/SciVis) 2019 ACM 2012 CCS - Human-centered computing,
Visualization, Visualization design and evaluation method
Spectroscopic Analysis in the Virtual Observatory Environment with SPLAT-VO
SPLAT-VO is a powerful graphical tool for displaying, comparing, modifying
and analyzing astronomical spectra, as well as searching and retrieving spectra
from services around the world using Virtual Observatory (VO) protocols and
services. The development of SPLAT-VO started in 1999, as part of the Starlink
StarJava initiative, sometime before that of the VO, so initial support for the
VO was necessarily added once VO standards and services became available.
Further developments were supported by the Joint Astronomy Centre, Hawaii until
2009. Since end of 2011 development of SPLAT-VO has been continued by the
German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory, and the Astronomical Institute of the
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. From this time several new features
have been added, including support for the latest VO protocols, along with new
visualization and spectra storing capabilities. This paper presents the history
of SPLAT-VO, it's capabilities, recent additions and future plans, as well as a
discussion on the motivations and lessons learned up to now.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy &
Computin
Construction and abstraction: contrasting methods of supporting model building in learning science
No description supplie
Interactive Search and Exploration in Online Discussion Forums Using Multimodal Embeddings
In this paper we present a novel interactive multimodal learning system,
which facilitates search and exploration in large networks of social multimedia
users. It allows the analyst to identify and select users of interest, and to
find similar users in an interactive learning setting. Our approach is based on
novel multimodal representations of users, words and concepts, which we
simultaneously learn by deploying a general-purpose neural embedding model. We
show these representations to be useful not only for categorizing users, but
also for automatically generating user and community profiles. Inspired by
traditional summarization approaches, we create the profiles by selecting
diverse and representative content from all available modalities, i.e. the
text, image and user modality. The usefulness of the approach is evaluated
using artificial actors, which simulate user behavior in a relevance feedback
scenario. Multiple experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the quality
of our multimodal representations, to compare different embedding strategies,
and to determine the importance of different modalities. We demonstrate the
capabilities of the proposed approach on two different multimedia collections
originating from the violent online extremism forum Stormfront and the
microblogging platform Twitter, which are particularly interesting due to the
high semantic level of the discussions they feature
Alexandria: Extensible Framework for Rapid Exploration of Social Media
The Alexandria system under development at IBM Research provides an
extensible framework and platform for supporting a variety of big-data
analytics and visualizations. The system is currently focused on enabling rapid
exploration of text-based social media data. The system provides tools to help
with constructing "domain models" (i.e., families of keywords and extractors to
enable focus on tweets and other social media documents relevant to a project),
to rapidly extract and segment the relevant social media and its authors, to
apply further analytics (such as finding trends and anomalous terms), and
visualizing the results. The system architecture is centered around a variety
of REST-based service APIs to enable flexible orchestration of the system
capabilities; these are especially useful to support knowledge-worker driven
iterative exploration of social phenomena. The architecture also enables rapid
integration of Alexandria capabilities with other social media analytics
system, as has been demonstrated through an integration with IBM Research's
SystemG. This paper describes a prototypical usage scenario for Alexandria,
along with the architecture and key underlying analytics.Comment: 8 page
Coherence compilation: applying AIED techniques to the reuse of educational resources
The HomeWork project is building an exemplar system to provide individualised experiences for individual and groups of children aged 6-7 years, their parents, teachers and classmates at school. It employs an existing set of broadcast video media and associated resources that tackle both numeracy and literacy at Key Stage 1. The system employs a learner model and a pedagogical model to identify what resource is best used with an individual child or group of children collaboratively at a particular learning point and at a particular location. The Coherence Compiler is that component of the system which is designed to impose an overall narrative coherence on the materials that any particular child is exposed to. This paper presents a high level vision of the design of the Coherence Compiler and sets its design within the overall framework of the HomeWork project and its learner and pedagogical models
Search and Discovery Tools for Astronomical On-line Resources and Services
A growing number of astronomical resources and data or information services
are made available through the Internet. However valuable information is
frequently hidden in a deluge of non-pertinent or non up-to-date documents. At
a first level, compilations of astronomical resources provide help for
selecting relevant sites. Combining yellow-page services and meta-databases of
active pointers may be an efficient solution to the data retrieval problem.
Responses generated by submission of queries to a set of heterogeneous
resources are difficult to merge or cross-match, because different data
providers generally use different data formats: new endeavors are under way to
tackle this problem. We review the technical challenges involved in trying to
provide general search and discovery tools, and to integrate them through upper
level interfaces.Comment: 7 pages, 2 Postscript figures; to be published in A&A
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