Study of result presentation and interaction for aggregated search

The World Wide Web has always attracted researchers and commercial search engine companies due to the enormous amount of information available on it. "Searching" on web has become an integral part of today's world, and many people rely on it when looking for information. The amount and the diversity of information available on the Web has also increased dramatically. Due to which, the researchers and the search engine companies are making constant efforts in order to make this information accessible to the people effectively. Not only there is an increase in the amount and diversity of information available online, users are now often seeking information on broader topics. Users seeking information on broad topics, gather information from various information sources (e.g, image, video, news, blog, etc). For such information requests, not only web results but results from different document genre and multimedia contents are also becoming relevant. For instance, users' looking for information on "Glasgow" might be interested in web results about Glasgow, Map of Glasgow, Images of Glasgow, News of Glasgow, and so on. Aggregated search aims to provide access to this diverse information in a unified manner by aggregating results from different information sources on a single result page. Hence making information gathering process easier for broad topics. This thesis aims to explore the aggregated search from the users' perspective. The thesis first and foremost focuses on understanding and describing the phenomena related to the users' search process in the context of the aggregated search. The goal is to participate in building theories and in understanding constraints, as well as providing insights into the interface design space. In building this understanding, the thesis focuses on the click-behavior, information need, source relevance, dynamics of search intents. The understanding comes partly from conducting users studies and, from analyzing search engine log data. While the thematic (or topical) relevance of documents is important, this thesis argues that the "source type" (source-orientation) may also be an important dimension in the relevance space for investigating in aggregated search. Therefore, relevance is multi-dimensional (topical and source-orientated) within the context of aggregated search. Results from the study suggest that the effect of the source-orientation was a significant factor in an aggregated search scenario. Hence adds another dimension to the relevance space within the aggregated search scenario. The thesis further presents an effective method which combines rule base and machine learning techniques to identify source-orientation behind a user query. Furthermore, after analyzing log-data from a search engine company and conducting user study experiments, several design issues that may arise with respect to the aggregated search interface are identified. In order to address these issues, suitable design guidelines that can be beneficial from the interface perspective are also suggested. To conclude, aim of this thesis is to explore the emerging aggregated search from users' perspective, since it is a very important for front-end technologies. An additional goal is to provide empirical evidence for influence of aggregated search on users searching behavior, and identify some of the key challenges of aggregated search. During this work several aspects of aggregated search will be uncovered. Furthermore, this thesis will provide a foundations for future research in aggregated search and will highlight the potential research directions

Examining the relationship between student performance and video interactions

In this work, we attempted to predict student performance on a suite of laboratory assessments using students' interactions with associated instructional videos. The students' performance is measured by a graded presentation for each of four laboratory presentations in an introductory mechanics course. Each lab assessment was associated with between one and three videos of instructional content. Using video clickstream data, we define summary features (number of pauses, seeks) and contextual information (fraction of time played, in-semester order). These features serve as inputs to a logistic regression (LR) model that aims to predict student performance on the laboratory assessments. Our findings show that LR models are unable to predict student performance. Adding contextual information did not change the model performance. We compare our findings to findings from other studies and explore caveats to the null-result such as representation of the features, the possibility of underfitting, and the complexity of the assessment.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, submitted to the PERC 2018 proceeding

The benefits of resource discovery for publishers: a librarian’s view

A core goal of librarians is to maximize usage of the content to which their libraries subscribe. Webscale or resource discovery systems offer a single search box for library users to access subscribed content. This article examines usage data at the University of Huddersfield to show how resource discovery has helped to increase the usage of publisher content, which has been made available to discovery vendors and considers the implications for publishers who are yet to do this. The article concludes that resource discovery systems have effectively levelled the playing field, allowing small to medium sized publishers to make content discoverable to users, and encourages publishers who do not have their content indexed in resource discovery systems to speak to discovery service vendor in order to do so at the earliest opportunity

Information Processing in Decisions under Risk: Evidence for Compensatory Strategies based on Automatic Processes

Many everyday decisions have to be made under risk and can be interpreted as choices between gambles with different outcomes that are realized with specific probabilities. The underlying cognitive processes were investigated by testing six sets of hypotheses concerning choices, decision times, and information search derived from cumulative prospect theory, decision field theory, priority heuristic and parallel constraint satisfaction models. Our participants completed forty decision tasks of two gambles with two non-negative outcomes each. Information search was recorded using eye-tracking technology. Results for all dependent measures conflict with the prediction of the non-compensatory priority heuristic and indicate that individuals use compensatory strategies. Choice proportions are well predicted by a cumulative prospect theory. Process measures, however, indicate that individuals do not rely on deliberate calculations of weighted sums. Information integration processes seem to be better explained by models that partially rely on automatic processes such as decision field theory or parallel constraint satisfaction models.Risky Decisions, Cumulative Prospect Theory, Decision Field Theory, Priority Heuristic, Parallel Constraint Satisfaction, Eye Tracking, Intuition

Generalized Team Draft Interleaving

Interleaving is an online evaluation method that compares two ranking functions by mixing their results and interpret- ing the users' click feedback. An important property of an interleaving method is its sensitivity, i.e. the ability to obtain reliable comparison outcomes with few user interac- tions. Several methods have been proposed so far to im- prove interleaving sensitivity, which can be roughly divided into two areas: (a) methods that optimize the credit assign- ment function (how the click feedback is interpreted), and (b) methods that achieve higher sensitivity by controlling the interleaving policy (how often a particular interleaved result page is shown). In this paper, we propose an interleaving framework that generalizes the previously studied interleaving methods in two aspects. First, it achieves a higher sensitivity by per- forming a joint data-driven optimization of the credit as- signment function and the interleaving policy. Second, we formulate the framework to be general w.r.t. the search do- main where the interleaving experiment is deployed, so that it can be applied in domains with grid-based presentation, such as image search. In order to simplify the optimization, we additionally introduce a stratifed estimate of the exper- iment outcome. This stratifcation is also useful on its own, as it reduces the variance of the outcome and thus increases the interleaving sensitivity. We perform an extensive experimental study using large- scale document and image search datasets obtained from a commercial search engine. The experiments show that our proposed framework achieves marked improvements in sensitivity over efective baselines on both datasets

Affective feedback: an investigation into the role of emotions in the information seeking process

User feedback is considered to be a critical element in the information seeking process, especially in relation to relevance assessment. Current feedback techniques determine content relevance with respect to the cognitive and situational levels of interaction that occurs between the user and the retrieval system. However, apart from real-life problems and information objects, users interact with intentions, motivations and feelings, which can be seen as critical aspects of cognition and decision-making. The study presented in this paper serves as a starting point to the exploration of the role of emotions in the information seeking process. Results show that the latter not only interweave with different physiological, psychological and cognitive processes, but also form distinctive patterns, according to specific task, and according to specific user

Using Cloudworks to Support OER Activities

This report forms the third and final output of the Pearls in the Clouds project, funded by the Higher Education Academy. It focuses on evaluation of the use of a social networking site, Cloudworks, to support evidence-based practice. The aim of this project (Pearls in the Clouds) has been to evaluate the ways in which web 2.0 tools like Cloudworks can support evidence-informed practices in relation to learning and teaching. We have reviewed evidence from empirically grounded studies surrounding the uses of web2.0 in higher education and highlighted the gap between using web2.0 to support learning and teaching, and using it to support learning about learning and teaching (in an evidence-informed way) (Conole and Alevizou, 2010). We have reported on findings from a case study focusing on the use of Cloudworks by a community of practice - educational technologists - reflecting upon, and, negotiating their role in enhancing teaching and learning in higher education (Galley et al., 2010). The object of this study is to explore and evaluate the use of the site by individuals and communities involved in the production of, and research on, the development, delivery and use of Open Educational Resources (OER)

Quality assurance of rectal cancer diagnosis and treatment - phase 3 : statistical methods to benchmark centres on a set of quality indicators

In 2004, the Belgian Section for Colorectal Surgery, a section of the Royal Belgian Society for Surgery, decided to start PROCARE (PROject on CAncer of the REctum), a multidisciplinary, profession-driven and decentralized project with as main objectives the reduction of diagnostic and therapeutic variability and improvement of outcome in patients with rectal cancer. All medical specialties involved in the care of rectal cancer established a multidisciplinary steering group in 2005. They agreed to approach the stated goal by means of treatment standardization through guidelines, implementation of these guidelines and quality assurance through registration and feedback. In 2007, the PROCARE guidelines were updated (Procare Phase I, KCE report 69). In 2008, a set of 40 process and outcome quality of care indicators (QCI) was developed and organized into 8 domains of care: general, diagnosis/staging, neoadjuvant treatment, surgery, adjuvant treatment, palliative treatment, follow-up and histopathologic examination. These QCIs were tested on the prospective PROCARE database and on an administrative (claims) database (Procare Phase II, KCE report 81). Afterwards, 4 QCIs were added by the PROCARE group. Centres have been receiving feedback from the PROCARE registry on these QCIs with a description of the distribution of the unadjusted centre-averaged observed measures and the centre’s position therein. To optimize this feedback, centres should ideally be informed of their risk-adjusted outcomes and be given some benchmarks. The PROCARE Phase III study is devoted to developing a methodology to achieve this feedback