SmartEx: a case study on user profiling and adaptation in exhibition booths

An investigation into user profiling and adaptation with exhibition booth as a case study is reported. First a review of the field of exhibitions and trade fairs and a summary introduction to adaptation and profiling are given. We then introduce three criteria for the evaluation of exhibition booth: effectiveness, efficiency and affect. Effectiveness is related the amount of information collected, efficiency is a measurement of the time taken to collect the information, and affect is the perception of the experience and the mood booth visitors have during and after their visit. We have selected these criteria to assess adaptive and profiled exhibition booths, we call smart exhibition (SmartEx). The assessment is performed with an experiment with three test conditions (non-profiled/non adaptive, profiled/non-adaptive and profiled adaptive presentations). Results of the experiment are presented along discussion. While there is significant improvements of effectiveness and efficiency between the two-first test conditions, the improvement is not significant for the last test condition, for reasons explained. As for the affect, the results show that it has an under-estimated importance in people minds and that it should be addressed more carefully

HASKEU: An editor to support visual and textual programming in tandem

Typical text editors allow "Free Typing" (syntax/semantics-free editing) to construct and maintain textual programs rapidly and easily by expert programmers, but this style does not support novice programmers learning the syntax and semantics of a language. On the other hand, visual editors enforce correct construction of programs using syntax-directed editing. Additionally, they clearly represent the program flow in a visual way. Both textual and visual editors have pros and cons for learners and experts. This paper argues that an editor that offers both a visual and a textual representation of the program in tandem has advantages to offer both learner and expert programmers. It describes the editor, HASKEU, which embodies this principle by providing visual and textual support for editing Haskell functional programs

Mining document, concept, and term associations for effective biomedical retrieval - Introducing MeSH-enhanced retrieval models

Manually assigned subject terms, such as Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in the health domain, describe the concepts or topics of a document. Existing information retrieval models do not take full advantage of such information. In this paper, we propose two MeSH-enhanced (ME) retrieval models that integrate the concept layer (i.e. MeSH) into the language modeling framework to improve retrieval performance. The new models quantify associations between documents and their assigned concepts to construct conceptual representations for the documents, and mine associations between concepts and terms to construct generative concept models. The two ME models reconstruct two essential estimation processes of the relevance model (Lavrenko and Croft 2001) by incorporating the document-concept and the concept-term associations. More specifically, in Model 1, language models of the pseudo-feedback documents are enriched by their assigned concepts. In Model 2, concepts that are related to users’ queries are first identified, and then used to reweight the pseudo-feedback documents according to the document-concept associations. Experiments carried out on two standard test collections show that the ME models outperformed the query likelihood model, the relevance model (RM3), and an earlier ME model. A detailed case analysis provides insight into how and why the new models improve/worsen retrieval performance. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed. This study provides new ways to formally incorporate semantic annotations, such as subject terms, into retrieval models. The findings of this study suggest that integrating the concept layer into retrieval models can further improve the performance over the current state-of-the-art models.Ye

Using an essentiality and proficiency approach to improve the web browsing experience of visually impaired users

Increased volumes of content exacerbate the Web accessibility issues faced by people with visual impairments. Essentiality & Proficiency is presented as one method of easing access to information in Websites by addressing the volume of content coupled with how it is presented. This research develops the concept of Essentiality for Web authors. A preliminary survey was conducted to understand the accessibility issues faced by people with visual impairments. Structured interviews were conducted with twelve participants and a further 26 participants responded to online questionnaires. In total there were 38 participants (both sexes), aged 18 to 54 years. 68% had visual impairments, three had motor issues, one had a hearing impairment and two had cognitive impairments. The findings show that the overload of information on a page was the most prominent difficulty experienced when using the Web. The findings from the preliminary survey fed into an empirical study. Four participants aged 21 to 54 years (both sexes) from the preliminary survey were presented with a technology demonstrator to check the feasibility of Essentiality & Proficiency in the real environment. It was found that participants were able to identify and appreciate the reduced volume of information. This initiated the iterative development of the prototype tool. Microformatting is used in the development of the Essentiality & Proficiency prototype tool to allow the reformulated Web pages to remain standards compliant. There is a formative evaluation of the prototype tool using an experimental design methodology. A convenience sample of nine participants (both sexes) with a range of visual impairments, aged 18 to 52 performed tasks on a computer under three essentiality conditions. With an alpha level .05, the evaluation of the Essentiality & Proficiency tool has been shown to offer some improvement in accessing information

A Programming System for End-user Functional Programming

This research involves the construction of a programming system, HASKEU, to support end-user programming in a purely functional programming language. An end-user programmer is someone who may program a computer to get their job done, but has no interest in becoming a computer programmer. A purely functional programming language is one that does not require the expression of statement sequencing or variable updating. The end-user is offered two views of their functional program. The primary view is a visual one, in which the program is presented as a collection of boxes (representing processes) and lines (representing data flow). The secondary view is a textual one, in which the program is presented as a collection of written function definitions. It is expected that the end-user programmer will begin with the visual view, perhaps later moving on to the textual view. The task of the programming system is to ensure that the visual and textual views are kept consistent as the program is constructed. The foundation of the programming system is a implementation of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern as a reactive program using the elegant Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) framework. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) principles and methods are considered in all design decisions. A usabilty study was made to find out the effectiveness of the new system

Semantically Enriched Text-Based Retrieval in Chemical Digital Libraries

During the last decades, the information gathering process has considerably changed in science, research and development, and the private life. Whereas Web pages for private information seeking are usually accessed using well-known text-based search engines, complex documents for scientific research are often stored in digital libraries and will usually be accessed through domain specific Web portals. Considering the specific domain of chemistry, portals usually rely on graphical user-interfaces allowing for pictorial structure queries. The difficulty with purely text-based searches is that information seeking in chemical documents is generally focused on chemical entities, for which current standard search relies on complex and hard to extract structures. In this thesis, we introduce a retrieval workflow for chemical digital libraries enabling text-based searches. First, we explain how to automatically index chemical documents with high completeness by creating enriched index pages containing different entity representations and synonyms. Next, we analyze different similarity measures for chemical entities. We further describe how to model the chemists’ implicit knowledge to personalize the retrieval process. Furthermore, since users often search for chemical entities occurring in a specific context, we also show how to use contextual information to further enhance the retrieval quality. Since, the annotated context terms will not help for contextual search if the users use different vocabulary, we present an approach that semantically enriches documents with Wikipedia concepts to overcome the vocabulary problem. Since for most queries a huge amount of possibly relevant hits are returned to the user, we further present an approach summarizing the documents’ content using Wikipedia categories. Finally, we present an architecture for a chemical digital library provider combining the different steps enabling semantically enriched text-based retrieval for the chemical domain.Über die letzten Jahre hat sich der Prozess der Informationssuche stark verändert. Während im privaten Bereich meistens über eine text-basierte Websuche auf Informationen zugegriffen wird, erfolgt der Zugriff auf Dokumente für den wissenschaftlichen Gebrauch in der Regel über domänenspezifische Web Portale. Betrachtet man beispielsweise die Domäne der Chemie, basieren Web Portale auf speziellen grafischen Benutzeroberflächen, die gezeichnete, strukturbasierte Anfragen ermöglichen. Da die Informationssuche für chemische Dokumente generell auf chemischen Entitäten basiert, die wiederum aus komplexen Strukturen bestehen, birgt eine reine text-basierte Suche eine Vielzahl von Herausforderungen. In dieser Arbeit entwickeln wir einen Retrieval Workflow für eine chemische digitale Bibliothek, der text-basierte Suchen ermöglicht. Als erstes erzeugen wir für chemische Dokumente semantisch angereicherte Indexseiten. Im Folgenden analysieren wir wie man Ähnlichkeit zwischen chemischen Entitäten bestimmen kann. Im Anschluss zeigen wir wie man das subjektive Relevanzempfinden der Chemiker modellieren kann, um ein personalisiertes Retrieval zu ermöglichen. Dann beschäftigen wir uns mit der Tatsache, dass Benutzer häufig nach chemischen Entitäten suchen, die in einem bestimmten Kontext auftreten. Allerdings sind die annotierten Kontext-Terme nutzlos, falls die Benutzer ein völlig anderes Vokabular verwenden. Deshalb reichern wir die Dokumente semantisch mit Wikipedia Konzepten an um das Problem des unterschiedlichen Vokabulars zu beheben. Da für die meisten Anfragen eine Vielzahl von relevanten Treffern zurückgeliefert wird, präsentieren wir eine Methode um den Inhalt der Dokumente auf übersichtliche Weise mit Hilfe von Wikipedia Kategorien darzustellen. Schlussendlich kombinieren wir die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse und stellen eine Architektur für eine chemische digitale Bibliothek vor, die semantisch angereicherte, text-basierte Suchen in der Chemie ermöglicht

Using an essentiality & proficiency approach to improve the web browsing experience of visually impaired users

Increased volumes of content exacerbate the Web accessibility issues faced by people with visual impairments. Essentiality & Proficiency is presented as one method of easing access to information in Websites by addressing the volume of content coupled with how it is presented. This research develops the concept of Essentiality for Web authors. A preliminary survey was conducted to understand the accessibility issues faced by people with visual impairments. Structured interviews were conducted with twelve participants and a further 26 participants responded to online questionnaires. In total there were 38 participants (both sexes), aged 18 to 54 years. 68% had visual impairments, three had motor issues, one had a hearing impairment and two had cognitive impairments. The findings show that the overload of information on a page was the most prominent difficulty experienced when using the Web. The findings from the preliminary survey fed into an empirical study. Four participants aged 21 to 54 years (both sexes) from the preliminary survey were presented with a technology demonstrator to check the feasibility of Essentiality & Proficiency in the real environment. It was found that participants were able to identify and appreciate the reduced volume of information. This initiated the iterative development of the prototype tool. Microformatting is used in the development of the Essentiality & Proficiency prototype tool to allow the reformulated Web pages to remain standards compliant. There is a formative evaluation of the prototype tool using an experimental design methodology. A convenience sample of nine participants (both sexes) with a range of visual impairments, aged 18 to 52 performed tasks on a computer under three essentiality conditions. With an alpha level .05, the evaluation of the Essentiality & Proficiency tool has been shown to offer some improvement in accessing information.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Using an essentiality & proficiency approach to improve the web browsing experience of visually impaired users

Increased volumes of content exacerbate the Web accessibility issues faced by people with visual impairments. Essentiality & Proficiency is presented as one method of easing access to information in Websites by addressing the volume of content coupled with how it is presented. This research develops the concept of Essentiality for Web authors. A preliminary survey was conducted to understand the accessibility issues faced by people with visual impairments. Structured interviews were conducted with twelve participants and a further 26 participants responded to online questionnaires. In total there were 38 participants (both sexes), aged 18 to 54 years. 68% had visual impairments, three had motor issues, one had a hearing impairment and two had cognitive impairments. The findings show that the overload of information on a page was the most prominent difficulty experienced when using the Web. The findings from the preliminary survey fed into an empirical study. Four participants aged 21 to 54 years (both sexes) from the preliminary survey were presented with a technology demonstrator to check the feasibility of Essentiality & Proficiency in the real environment. It was found that participants were able to identify and appreciate the reduced volume of information. This initiated the iterative development of the prototype tool. Microformatting is used in the development of the Essentiality & Proficiency prototype tool to allow the reformulated Web pages to remain standards compliant. There is a formative evaluation of the prototype tool using an experimental design methodology. A convenience sample of nine participants (both sexes) with a range of visual impairments, aged 18 to 52 performed tasks on a computer under three essentiality conditions. With an alpha level .05, the evaluation of the Essentiality & Proficiency tool has been shown to offer some improvement in accessing information.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo