Website visualizer : a tool for the visual analysis of website usage

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrónica, Telecomunicações e InformáticaOs sítios web estão incorporados em organizações para sustentar a missão das mesmas e para garantir uma difusão eficaz de informação num quadro de fluxo de trabalho eficiente. Neste contexto, os gestores de conteúdo e informação tem que monitorizar constantemente as necessidades inerentes à missão institucional e reflecti-las na estrutura, conteúdos e paradigmas de interacção das respectivas intranets e extranets. Esta tarefa de monitorização e análise não é de todo trivial, nem automática, sendo difícil garantir a sincronização dos sítios institucionais com as efectivas necessidades da sua missão em dado momento. O objectivo fundamental deste trabalho traduz-se nos exercícios de conceptualização, desenvolvimento e avaliação de uma aplicação capaz de relatar um cenário de análise e visualizar padrões de interacção em sitíos institucionais suportados em tecnologias web, que seja capaz de realçar as áreas mais críticas, com base na análise da estructura, conteúdo e hiperligações. Para este efeito, propôs-se um modelo conceptual e uma arquitectura, bem como um conjunto de métodos de visualização que facilitem essa análise. De forma a validar o modelo conceptual, a arquitectura, as estruturas de informação e os diversos métodos de visualização propostos, desenvolveu-se um protótipo que já comporta algumas fases de avaliação e aferição. Este protótipo pode ser considerado como uma plataforma de suporte à investigação capaz de integrar e testar esquemas específicos de visualização e procedimentos de correlação visual. Em suma, é parte integrante de um dos projectos de investigação da Universidade de Aveiro. Mais específicamente, este trabalho introduz uma arquitectura por camadas que suporta vistas multiplas sincronizadas, bem como novos metódos de visualização, inspecção e interacção. O prototipo integra estes metódos de visualização numa aplicação capaz de capturar, compilar e analizar informação relacionada com a estructura e conteúdo do sitío web, bem como padrões de utilização. O protótipo destina-se fundamentalmente a dar apoio a especialistas de usabilidade ou gestores de conteúdo na organização do espaço de informação de um sitío institucional. Contudo, não se destina a produzir directamente soluções para problemas de usabilidade encontrados, mas sim a ajudar a tomar decisões com base nos problemas de usabilidade diagnosticados, identificados e sinalizados durante o processo de análise. ABSTRACT: Websites are incorporated in organizations to support their mission and guarantee effective information delivery within an efficient information workflow framework. In this context, content managers have to constantly monitor the business needs and reflect them on the structure, contents and interaction paradigm of the institutional websites. This task is not trivial, nor automated, being difficult to guarantee that these websites are synchronized with the actual business requirements. The overall goal of this work is the conceptualization, development and evaluation of an application able to assist usability experts in the analysis and visualization of interaction patterns of organizational web based systems. It should be able to highlight the most critical website areas, based on the analysis of website structure, contents and interconnections. For this purpose, a conceptual model and architecture has been proposed, as well as a set of visualization methods designed to facilitate that analysis. In order to validate the proposed conceptual models, the architecture, information structures and several visualization methods, a prototype was developed, evaluated and refined. It can be considered as an experimental research platform, capable of integrating and testing specific visualization schemes and visual correlation procedures, and is part of an ongoing research program of University of Aveiro. Specifically, this work introduces a layered architecture that supports simultaneously synchronised multiple views, as well as novel visualization, inspection and interaction mechanisms. The prototype integrates these visualization methods in an application able to capture, compile and analyze the information related to the structure, contents and usage patterns of a website. This work is meant mainly to help usability experts or content managers to organize the informational space of an institutional web site. However, this application is not supposed to directly provide solutions for the usability problems of the site but to offer the means to help its users take decisions based on the interpretation of the usability problems identified and highlighted during the analysis process

NPC AI System Based on Gameplay Recordings

Hästi optimeeritud mitte-mängija tegelased (MMT) on vastaste või meeskonna kaaslastena üheks peamiseks osaks mitme mängija mängudes. Enamus mänguroboteid on ehitatud jäikade süsteemide peal, mis võimaldavad vaid loetud arvu otsuseid ja animatsioone. Kogenud mängijad suudavad eristada mänguroboteid inimmängijatest ning ette ennustada nende liigutusi ja strateegiaid. See alandab mängukogemuse kvaliteeti. Seetõttu, eelistavad mitme mängijaga mängude mängijad mängida pigem inimmängijate kui MMTde vastu. Virtuaalreaalsuse (VR) mängud ja VR mängijad on siiani veel väike osa mängutööstusest ja mitme mängija VR mängud kannatavad mängijabaasi kaotusest, kui mänguomanikud ei suuda leida teisi mängijaid, kellega mängida. See uurimus demonstreerib mängulindistustel põhineva tehisintellekt (TI) süsteemi rakendatavust VR esimese isiku vaates tulistamismängule Vrena. Teemamäng kasutab ebatavalist liikumisesüsteemi, milles mängijad liiguvad otsiankrute abil. VR mängijate liigutuste imiteerimiseks loodi AI süsteem, mis kasutab mängulindistusi navigeerimisandmetena. Süsteem koosneb kolmest peamisest funktsionaalsusest. Need funktsionaalsused on mängutegevuse lindistamine, andmete töötlemine ja navigeerimine. Mängu keskkond on tükeldatud kuubikujulisteks sektoriteks, et vähendada erinevate asukohal põhinevate olekute arvu ning mängutegevus on lindistatud ajaintervallide ja tegevuste põhjal. Loodud mängulogid on segmenteeritud logilõikudeks ning logilõikude abil on loodud otsingutabel. Otsingutabelit kasutatakse MMT agentide navigeerimiseks ning MMTde otsuste langetamise mehanism jäljendab olek-tegevus-tasu kontseptsiooni. Loodud töövahendi kvaliteeti hinnati uuringu põhjal, millest saadi märkimisväärset tagasisidet süsteemi täiustamiseks.A well optimized Non-Player Character (NPC) as an opponent or a teammate is a major part of the multiplayer games. Most of the game bots are built upon a rigid system with numbered decisions and animations. Experienced players can distinguish bots from hu-man players and they can predict bot movements and strategies. This reduces the quality of the gameplay experience. Therefore, multiplayer game players favour playing against human players rather than NPCs. VR game market and VR gamers are still a small frac-tion of the game industry and multiplayer VR games suffer from loss of their player base if the game owners cannot find other players to play with. This study demonstrates the applicability of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system based on gameplay recordings for a Virtual Reality (VR) First-person Shooter (FPS) game called Vrena. The subject game has an uncommon way of movement, in which the players use grappling hooks to navigate. To imitate VR players’ movements and gestures an AI system is developed which uses gameplay recordings as navigation data. The system contains three major functionality. These functionalities are gameplay recording, data refinement, and navigation. The game environment is sliced into cubic sectors to reduce the number of positional states and gameplay is recorded by time intervals and actions. Produced game logs are segmented into log sections and these log sections are used for creating a look-up table. The lookup table is used for navigating the NPC agent and the decision mechanism followed a way similar to the state-action-reward concept. The success of the developed tool is tested via a survey, which provided substantial feedback for improving the system

GraphMDL Visualizer: Interactive Visualization of Graph Patterns

International audiencePattern mining algorithms allow to extract structures from data to highlight interesting and useful knowledge. However, those approaches can only be truly helpful if the users can actually understand their outputs. Thus, visualization techniques play a great role in pattern mining, bridging the gap between the algorithms and the users. In this demo paper we propose GraphMDL Visualizer, a tool for the interactive visualization of the graph patterns extracted with GraphMDL, a graph mining approach based on the MDL principle. GraphMDL Visualizer is structured according to the behavior and needs of users when they analyze GraphMDL results. The tool has dierent views, ranging from more general (distribution of pattern characteristics), to more specic (visualization of specic patterns). It is also highly interactive, allowing the users to customize the dierent views, and navigate between them, through simple mouse clicks. GraphMDL Visualizer is freely available online

Personalized Knowledge Service Based on Smart Cell-Phone Usage: A Conceptual Framework

Smart cell-phones include many advanced applications and services, which allow their users to achieve various useful goals. However, many users face difficulties when upgrading their cell-phones devices to more advanced ones, partially because their applications include more complex patterns of use for achieving the users’ goals. We present a conceptual framework that aims to help overcoming usage barrier by providing smart cell-phones’ users a personalized knowledge service. The framework is based on the utilization of task models and on the tracking and analyzing the usage of the applications included in the smart cell-phone that enable to construct users’ stereotypes and suggest personalized help according to their usage patterns. It is assumed that the system monitors the usage patterns of the user, thus enabling dynamic update of his/her belonging to a stereotype. The user can override the suggestions and navigate independently in order to find the required knowledge

Utopia documents: linking scholarly literature with research data

Motivation: In recent years, the gulf between the mass of accumulating-research data and the massive literature describing and analyzing those data has widened. The need for intelligent tools to bridge this gap, to rescue the knowledge being systematically isolated in literature and data silos, is now widely acknowledged

Comparison of two approaches for web-based 3D visualization of smart building sensor data

Abstract. This thesis presents a comparative study on two different approaches for visualizing sensor data collected from smart buildings on the web using 3D virtual environments. The sensor data is provided by sensors that are deployed in real buildings to measure several environmental parameters including temperature, humidity, air quality and air pressure. The first approach uses the three.js WebGL framework to create the 3D model of a smart apartment where sensor data is illustrated with point and wall visualizations. Point visualizations show sensor values at the real locations of the sensors using text, icons or a mixture of the two. Wall visualizations display sensor values inside panels placed on the interior walls of the apartment. The second approach uses the Unity game engine to create the 3D model of a 4-floored hospice where sensor data is illustrated with aforementioned point visualizations and floor visualizations, where the sensor values are shown on the floor around the location of the sensors in form of color or other effects. The two approaches are compared with respect to their technical performance in terms of rendering speed, model size and request size, and with respect to the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two development environments as experienced in this thesis

Integrated web visualizations for protein-protein interaction databases

BACKGROUND: Understanding living systems is crucial for curing diseases. To achieve this task we have to understand biological networks based on protein-protein interactions. Bioinformatics has come up with a great amount of databases and tools that support analysts in exploring protein-protein interactions on an integrated level for knowledge discovery. They provide predictions and correlations, indicate possibilities for future experimental research and fill the gaps to complete the picture of biochemical processes. There are numerous and huge databases of protein-protein interactions used to gain insights into answering some of the many questions of systems biology. Many computational resources integrate interaction data with additional information on molecular background. However, the vast number of diverse Bioinformatics resources poses an obstacle to the goal of understanding. We present a survey of databases that enable the visual analysis of protein networks. RESULTS: We selected M =10 out of N =53 resources supporting visualization, and we tested against the following set of criteria: interoperability, data integration, quantity of possible interactions, data visualization quality and data coverage. The study reveals differences in usability, visualization features and quality as well as the quantity of interactions. StringDB is the recommended first choice. CPDB presents a comprehensive dataset and IntAct lets the user change the network layout. A comprehensive comparison table is available via web. The supplementary table can be accessed on http://tinyurl.com/PPI-DB-Comparison-2015. CONCLUSIONS: Only some web resources featuring graph visualization can be successfully applied to interactive visual analysis of protein-protein interaction. Study results underline the necessity for further enhancements of visualization integration in biochemical analysis tools. Identified challenges are data comprehensiveness, confidence, interactive feature and visualization maturing

ALMA versus DDD

To be a debugger is a good thing! Since the very beginning of the programming activity, debuggers are the most important and widely used tools after editors and compilers; we completely recognize their importance for software development and testing. Debuggers work at machine level, after the compilation of the source program; they deal with assembly, or binary-code, and are mainly data structure inspectors. Alma is a program animator based on its abstract representation. The main idea is to show the algorithm being implemented by the program, independently from the language used to implement it. To say that ALMA is a debugger, with no value added, is not true! ALMA is a source code inspector but it deals with programming concepts instead of machine code. This makes possible to understand the source program at a conceptual level, and not only to fix run time errors. In this paper we compare our visualizer/animator system, ALMA, with one of the most well-known and used debuggers, the graphical version of GDB, the DDD program. The aim of the paper is twofold: the immediate objective is to prove that ALMA provides new features that are not usually offered by debuggers; the main contribution is to recall the concepts of debugger and animator, and clarify the role of both tools in the field of program understanding, or program comprehension.FC

What Is an Interface and Why Does a Digital Poet Care?

The navigation, interaction with and exploration of digital content requires some form of interface. It is, in the simplest terms, the element connecting the human to the digital, an extension of the hand, eye, and ear. However, within digital poetry and writing, the interface is more than just a vehicle for content delivery. Instead, the interface is a critical literary component, as important to the creation and reading experience of a digital poem as the texts of words, images, sounds, animation, and code. Depending on the interface developed and how it is utilized, the digital poem changes shape, reconfigures meaning and becomes an interactive and responsive poetic/fictional creature. Since my first digital poem over a decade ago, interface has often functioned as the starting point, the generator of inspiration and driver of the creative process. This essay explores the role of interface in a number of my digital poems and fictions, explaining the origin and literary nature of particular interfaces. Additionally, it reflects on the methodologies for creating and mining code and software, as well as on the techniques needed to give birth to highly interactive and non-linear interfaces, such as game engines, infinite mo­saic generators, and other organic digitally created applications

A framework for automated association mining over multiple databases

Literature on association mining, the data mining methodology that investigates associations between items, has primarily focused on efficiently mining larger databases. The motivation for association mining is to use the rules obtained from historical data to influence future transactions. However, associations in transactional processes change significantly over time, implying that rules extracted for a given time interval may not be applicable for a later time interval. Hence, an analysis framework is necessary to identify how associations change over time. This paper presents such a framework, reports the implementation of the framework as a tool, and demonstrates the applicability of and the necessity for the framework through a case study in the domain of finance