Zoomable User Interfaces for the Authoring and Delivery of Slide Presentations

Millions of slide presentations are being authored and delivered with computer software every day. Yet much of the computer's power for these tasks remains untapped. Existing interaction techniques leave presenters wrestling with limited size computer displays to get meaningful overviews of their work. Without these overviews, they have trouble finding patterns in their data and experimenting with alternate organizations. They also have difficulty communicating the structure of large or complex talks to the audience and keeping the audience oriented during unexpected transitions between ideas. A natural solution is Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs) since they offer the capability to view information at multiple levels of detail and smoothly transition between ideas. This work presents two ZUIs, Niagara and CounterPoint, for authoring and delivering slide presentations. Niagara is a ZUI workspace for authoring presentation content with techniques to improve authoring in the zoomable environment. Empirical evaluations of ZUI-based authoring tools revealed performance improvements and subjective preferences over folder-based interfaces for organization tasks. Users were 30% faster with ZUIs than with folders in completing a simplified shape organization task. Some classes of users were also faster with ZUIs than with folders in completing a text-based organization task. Users performing both tasks exhibited a strong preference for ZUIs over folders. CounterPoint provides a number of features to simplify the creation and delivery of ZUI presentations. The effects of these presentations on the audience were evaluated in a controlled comparison of presentations with slides only, slides with spatial layouts, and slides with spatial layouts and animation. The study revealed a strong subjective preference and higher ratings of organization for presentations with spatial layout. Feedback was also gathered from presenters who used CounterPoint to deliver over 100 real-world presentations. They indicated that CounterPoint helped them communicate overviews and multi-level presentation structures. More experienced CounterPoint presenters also found that CounterPoint helped them keep the audience oriented when navigating the presentation in response to audience feedback

Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Workshop on Automating Software Design. Theme: Domain Specific Software Design

The goal of this workshop is to identify different architectural approaches to building domain-specific software design systems and to explore issues unique to domain-specific (vs. general-purpose) software design. Some general issues that cut across the particular software design domain include: (1) knowledge representation, acquisition, and maintenance; (2) specialized software design techniques; and (3) user interaction and user interface

Layered evaluation of interactive adaptive systems : framework and formative methods

Peer reviewedPostprin

Don’t forget to save! User experience principles for video game narrative authoring tools.

Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) are a natural evolution of traditional storytelling melded with technological improvements brought about by the rapidly increasing digital revolution. This has and continues to enhance the complexities and functionality of the stories that we can tell. Video game narratives, both old and new, are considered close relatives of IDN, and due to their enhanced interactivity and presentational methods, further complicate the creation process. Authoring tool software aims to alleviate the complexities of this by abstracting underlying data models into accessible user interfaces that creatives, even those with limited technical experience, can use to author their stories. Unfortunately, despite the vast array of authoring tools in this space, user experience is often overlooked even though it is arguably one of the most vital components. This has resulted in a focus on the audience within IDN research rather than the authors, and consequently our knowledge and understanding of the impacts of user experience design decisions in authoring tools are limited. This thesis tackles the modeling of complex video game narrative structures and investigates how user experience design decisions within IDN authoring tools may impact the authoring process. I first introduce my concept of Discoverable Narrative which establishes a vocabulary for the analysis, categorization, and comparison of aspects of video game narrative that are discovered, observed, or experienced by players — something that existing models struggle to detail. I also develop and present my Novella Narrative Model which provides support for video game narrative elements and makes several novel innovations that set it apart from existing narrative models. This thesis then builds upon these models by presenting two bespoke user studies that examine the user experience of the state-of-the-art in IDN authoring tool design, together building a listing of seven general Themes and five principles (Metaphor Testing, Fast Track Testing, Structure, Experimentation, Branching) that highlight evidenced behavioral trends of authors based on different user experience design factors within IDN authoring tools. This represents some of the first work in this space that investigates the relationships between the user experience design of IDN authoring tools and the impacts that they can have on authors. Additionally, a generalized multi-stage pipeline for the design and development of IDN authoring tools is introduced, informed by professional industry- standard design techniques, in an effort to both ensure quality user experience within my own work and to raise awareness of the importance of following proper design processes when creating authoring tools, also serving as a template for doing so

Collective intelligence: creating a prosperous world at peace

XXXII, 612 p. ; 24 cmLibro ElectrónicoEn este documento se plantea un tema de interes general mas como lo es especificamente el tema de la evolucion de la sociedad en materia de industria y crecimiento de las actividades humanas en el aspecto de desarrollo de la creatividad enfocada a los mercadosedited by Mark Tovey ; foreword by Yochai Benkler (re-mixed by Hassan Masum) ; prefaces by Thomas Malone, Tom Atlee & Pierre Levy ; afterword by Paul Martin & Thomas Homer-Dixon.The era of collective intelligence has begun in earnest. While others have written about the wisdom of crowds, an army of Davids, and smart mobs, this collection of essays for the first time brings together fifty-five pioneers in the emerging discipline of collective intelligence. They provide a base of tools for connecting people, producing high-functioning teams, collaborating at multiple scales, and encouraging effective peer-production. Emerging models are explored for digital deliberative democracy, self-governance, legislative transparency, true-cost accounting, and the ethical use of open sources and methods. Collective Intelligence is the first of a series of six books, which will also include volumes on Peace Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Gift Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, and Global Intelligence.Table of Contents Dedication i Publisher’s Preface iii Foreword by Yochai Benkler Remix Hassan Masum xi The Wealth of Networks: Highlights remixed Editor’s Preface xxi Table of Contents xxv A What is collective intelligence and what will we do 1 about it? (Thomas W. Malone, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence) B Co-Intelligence, collective intelligence, and conscious 5 evolution (Tom Atlee, Co-Intelligence Institute) C A metalanguage for computer augmented collective 15 intelligence (Prof. Pierre Lévy, Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence, FRSC) I INDIVIDUALS & GROUPS I-01 Foresight I-01-01 Safety Glass (Karl Schroeder, science fiction author 23 and foresight consultant) I-01-02 2007 State of the Future (Jerome C. Glenn & 29 Theodore J. Gordon, United Nations Millennium Project) I-02 Dialogue & Deliberation I-02-01 Thinking together without ego: Collective intelligence 39 as an evolutionary catalyst (Craig Hamilton and Claire Zammit, Collective-Intelligence.US) I-02-02 The World Café: Awakening collective intelligence 47 and committed action (Juanita Brown, David Isaacs and the World Café Community) I-02-03 Collective intelligence and the emergence of 55 wholeness (Peggy Holman, Nexus for Change, The Change Handbook) I-02-04 Knowledge creation in collective intelligence (Bruce 65 LaDuke, Fortune 500, HyperAdvance.com) I-02-05 The Circle Organization: Structuring for collective 75 wisdom (Jim Rough, Dynamic Facilitation & The Center for Wise Democracy) I-03 Civic Intelligence I-03-01 Civic intelligence and the public sphere (Douglas 83 Schuler, Evergreen State College, Public Sphere Project) I-03-02 Civic intelligence and the security of the homeland 95 (John Kesler with Carole and David Schwinn, IngeniusOnline) I-03-03 Creating a Smart Nation (Robert Steele, OSS.Net) 107 I-03-04 University 2.0: Informing our collective intelligence 131 (Nancy Glock-Grueneich, HIGHEREdge.org) I-03-05 Producing communities of communications and 145 foreknowledge (Jason “JZ” Liszkiewicz, Reconfigure.org) I-03-06 Global Vitality Report 2025: Learning to transform I-04 Electronic Communities & Distributed Cognition I-04-01 Attentional capital and the ecology of online social 163 conflict and think together effectively (Peter+Trudy networks (Derek Lomas, Social Movement Lab, Johnson-Lenz, Johnson-Lenz.com ) UCSD) I-04-02 A slice of life in my virtual community (Howard 173 Rheingold, Whole Earth Review, Author & Educator) I-04-03 Shared imagination (Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart, 197 Bootstrap) I-05 Privacy & Openness I-05-01 We’re all swimming in media: End-users must be able 201 to keep secrets (Mitch Ratcliffe, BuzzLogic & Tetriad) I-05-02 Working openly (Lion Kimbro, Programmer and 205 Activist) I-06 Integral Approaches & Global Contexts I-06-01 Meta-intelligence for analyses, decisions, policy, and 213 action: The Integral Process for working on complex issues (Sara Nora Ross, Ph.D. ARINA & Integral Review) I-06-02 Collective intelligence: From pyramidal to global 225 (Jean-Francois Noubel, The Transitioner) I-06-03 Cultivating collective intelligence: A core leadership 235 competence in a complex world (George Pór, Fellow at Universiteit van Amsterdam) II LARGE-SCALE COLLABORATION II-01 Altruism, Group IQ, and Adaptation II-01-01 Empowering individuals towards collective online 245 production (Keith Hopper, KeithHopper.com) II-01-02 Who’s smarter: chimps, baboons or bacteria? The 251 power of Group IQ (Howard Bloom, author) II-01-03 A collectively generated model of the world (Marko 261 A. Rodriguez, Los Alamos National Laboratory) II-02 Crowd Wisdom and Cognitive Bias II-02-01 Science of CI: Resources for change (Norman L 265 Johnson, Chief Scientist at Referentia Systems, former LANL) II-02-02 Collectively intelligent systems (Jennifer H. Watkins, 275 Los Alamos National Laboratory) II-02-03 A contrarian view (Jaron Lanier, scholar-in-residence, 279 CET, UC Berkeley & Discover Magazine) II-03 Semantic Structures & The Semantic Web II-03-01 Information Economy Meta Language (Interview with 283 Professor Pierre Lévy, by George Pór) II-03-02 Harnessing the collective intelligence of the World- 293 Wide Web (Nova Spivack, RadarNetworks, Web 3.0) II-03-03 The emergence of a global brain (Francis Heylighen, 305 Free University of Brussels) II-04 Information Networks II-04-01 Networking and mobilizing collective intelligence (G. Parker Rossman, Future of Learning Pioneer) II-04-02 Toward high-performance organizations: A strategic 333 role for Groupware (Douglas C. Engelbart, Bootstrap) II-04-03 Search panacea or ploy: Can collective intelligence 375 improve findability? (Stephen E. Arnold, Arnold IT, Inc.) II-05 Global Games, Local Economies, & WISER II-05-01 World Brain as EarthGame (Robert Steele and many 389 others, Earth Intelligence Network) II-05-02 The Interra Project (Jon Ramer and many others) 399 II-05-03 From corporate responsibility to Backstory 409 Management (Alex Steffen, Executive Editor, Worldchanging.com) II-05-04 World Index of Environmental & Social 413 Responsibility (WISER) By the Natural Capital Institute II-06 Peer-Production & Open Source Hardware II-06-01 The Makers’ Bill of Rights (Jalopy, Torrone, and Hill) 421 II-06-02 3D Printing and open source design (James Duncan, 423 VP of Technology at Marketingisland) II-06-03 REBEARTHTM: 425 II-07 Free Wireless, Open Spectrum, and Peer-to-Peer II-07-01 Montréal Community Wi-Fi (Île Sans Fil) (Interview 433 with Michael Lenczner by Mark Tovey) II-07-02 The power of the peer-to-peer future (Jock Gill, 441 Founder, Penfield Gill Inc.) Growing a world 6.6 billion people would want to live in (Marc Stamos, B-Comm, LL.B) II-07-03 Open spectrum (David Weinberger) II-08 Mass Collaboration & Large-Scale Argumentation II-08-01 Mass collaboration, open source, and social 455 entrepreneurship (Mark Tovey, Advanced Cognitive Engineering Lab, Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton University) II-08-02 Interview with Thomas Homer-Dixon (Hassan 467 Masum, McLaughlin-Rotman Center for Global Health) II-08-03 Achieving collective intelligence via large-scale argumentation (Mark Klein, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence) II-08-04 Scaling up open problem solving (Hassan Masum & 485 Mark Tovey) D Afterword: The Internet and the revitalization of 495 democracy (The Rt. Honourable Paul Martin & Thomas Homer-Dixon) E Epilogue by Tom Atlee 513 F Three Lists 515 1. Strategic Reading Categories 2. Synopsis of the New Progressives 3. Fifty-Two Questions that Matter G Glossary 519 H Index 52

Towards Our Common Digital Future. Flagship Report.

In the report “Towards Our Common Digital Future”, the WBGU makes it clear that sustainability strategies and concepts need to be fundamentally further developed in the age of digitalization. Only if digital change and the Transformation towards Sustainability are synchronized can we succeed in advancing climate and Earth-system protection and in making social progress in human development. Without formative political action, digital change will further accelerate resource and energy consumption, and exacerbate damage to the environment and the climate. It is therefore an urgent political task to create the conditions needed to place digitalization at the service of sustainable development

Intuitive interaction: Steps towards an integral understanding of the user experience in interaction design

A critical review of traditional practices and methodologies demonstrates an underplaying of firstly the role of emotions and secondly aspects of exploration in interaction behaviour in favour of a goal orientated focus in the user experience (UX). Consequently, the UX is a commodity that can be designed, measured, and predicted. An integral understanding of the UX attempts to overcome the rationalistic and instrumental mindset of traditional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) on several levels. Firstly, the thesis seeks to complement a functional view of interaction with a qualitative one that considers the complexity of emotions. Emotions are at the heart of engagement and connect action irreversibly to the moment it occurs; they are intettwined with cognition, and decision making. Furthermore, they introduce the vague and ambiguous aspects of experience and open it up to potentiality of creation. Secondly, the thesis examines the relationship between purposive and non-purposive user behaviour such as exploration, play and discovery. The integral position proposed here stresses the procedurally relational nature and complexity of interaction experience. This requires revisiting and augmenting key themes of HCI practice such as interactivity and intuitive design. Intuition is investigated as an early and unconscious form of learning, and unstructured browsing discussed as random interaction mechanisms as forms of implicit learning. Interactivity here is the space for user's actions, contributions and creativity, not only in the design process but also during interaction as co-authors of their experiences. Finally, I envisage integral forms of usability methods to embrace the vague and the ambiguous, in order to enrich HCI's vocabulary and design potential. Key readings that inform this position cut across contemporary philosophy, media and interaction studies and professional HCI literature. On a practical level, a series of experimental interaction designs for web-browsing aim to augment the user's experience, and create space for user's intuition

Developing Future UK Energy Performance Standards: The St Nicholas Court project, Final Report

The St Nicholas Court Project was set up to explore the implications of an enhanced energy performance standard for new housing for the design, construction and performance of timber framed dwellings. The energy performance standard, EPS08, is modelled on proposals made by the DETR in June 2000 for a possible review of Part L of the Building Regulations in the second half of the present decade. The overall goal of the project was to support the next revision of Part L through an enhanced body of qualitative and quantitative evidence on options and impacts. The seeds of the project were contained in a report – Towards Sustainable Housing - commissioned by Joseph Rowntree Foundation at the start of the last review of this part of the Building Regulations. The project itself has been based on the St Nicholas Court Development which involves the design and construction of a group of 18 low energy and affordable dwellings on a brown field site in York (see site plan below). The research project was established in two stages. Initial funding was provided by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in the spring of 1999. This ensured the involvement of the research team from the outset of the development process. Additional funding was provided from late 2000 by the Housing Corporation and by the DETR through the Partners in Innovation programme (responsibility for which now lies with the DTI). The research project was originally divided into five phases – project definition, design, construction, occupation, and communication and dissemination. Delays in site acquisition initially allowed the design phase to be extended, but ultimately forced the abandonment of the construction and occupation phases, and the scaling down of the communication and dissemination phase. Despite the delays, the development itself will now go ahead, with construction starting in mid-2003

A Generic architecture for semantic enhanced tagging systems

The Social Web, or Web 2.0, has recently gained popularity because of its low cost and ease of use. Social tagging sites (e.g. Flickr and YouTube) offer new principles for end-users to publish and classify their content (data). Tagging systems contain free-keywords (tags) generated by end-users to annotate and categorise data. Lack of semantics is the main drawback in social tagging due to the use of unstructured vocabulary. Therefore, tagging systems suffer from shortcomings such as low precision, lack of collocation, synonymy, multilinguality, and use of shorthands. Consequently, relevant contents are not visible, and thus not retrievable while searching in tag-based systems. On the other hand, the Semantic Web, so-called Web 3.0, provides a rich semantic infrastructure. Ontologies are the key enabling technology for the Semantic Web. Ontologies can be integrated with the Social Web to overcome the lack of semantics in tagging systems. In the work presented in this thesis, we build an architecture to address a number of tagging systems drawbacks. In particular, we make use of the controlled vocabularies presented by ontologies to improve the information retrieval in tag-based systems. Based on the tags provided by the end-users, we introduce the idea of adding “system tags” from semantic, as well as social, resources. The “system tags” are comprehensive and wide-ranging in comparison with the limited “user tags”. The system tags are used to fill the gap between the user tags and the search terms used for searching in the tag-based systems. We restricted the scope of our work to tackle the following tagging systems shortcomings: - The lack of semantic relations between user tags and search terms (e.g. synonymy, hypernymy), - The lack of translation mediums between user tags and search terms (multilinguality), - The lack of context to define the emergent shorthand writing user tags. To address the first shortcoming, we use the WordNet ontology as a semantic lingual resource from where system tags are extracted. For the second shortcoming, we use the MultiWordNet ontology to recognise the cross-languages linkages between different languages. Finally, to address the third shortcoming, we use tag clusters that are obtained from the Social Web to create a context for defining the meaning of shorthand writing tags. A prototype for our architecture was implemented. In the prototype system, we built our own database to host videos that we imported from real tag-based system (YouTube). The user tags associated with these videos were also imported and stored in the database. For each user tag, our algorithm adds a number of system tags that came from either semantic ontologies (WordNet or MultiWordNet), or from tag clusters that are imported from the Flickr website. Therefore, each system tag added to annotate the imported videos has a relationship with one of the user tags on that video. The relationship might be one of the following: synonymy, hypernymy, similar term, related term, translation, or clustering relation. To evaluate the suitability of our proposed system tags, we developed an online environment where participants submit search terms and retrieve two groups of videos to be evaluated. Each group is produced from one distinct type of tags; user tags or system tags. The videos in the two groups are produced from the same database and are evaluated by the same participants in order to have a consistent and reliable evaluation. Since the user tags are used nowadays for searching the real tag-based systems, we consider its efficiency as a criterion (reference) to which we compare the efficiency of the new system tags. In order to compare the relevancy between the search terms and each group of retrieved videos, we carried out a statistical approach. According to Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test, there was no significant difference between using either system tags or user tags. The findings revealed that the use of the system tags in the search is as efficient as the use of the user tags; both types of tags produce different results, but at the same level of relevance to the submitted search terms

Recent Trends in Software Engineering Research As Seen Through Its Publications

This study provides some insight into the field of software engineering through analysis of its recent research publications. Data for this study are taken from the ACM\u27s Guide to Computing Literature (GUIDE) They include both the professionally assigned Computing Classification System (CCS) descriptors and the title text of each software engineering publication reviewed by the GUIDE from 1998 through 2001. The first part of this study provides a snapshot of software engineering by applying co-word analysis techniques to the data. This snapshot indicates recent themes or areas of interest, which, when compared with the results from earlier studies, reveal current trends in software engineering. Software engineering continues to have no central focus. Concepts like software development, process improvement, applications, parallelism, and user interfaces are persistent and, thus, help define the field, but they provide little guidance for researchers or developers of academic curricula. Of more interest and use are the specific themes illuminated by this study, which provide a clearer indication of the current interests of the field. Two prominent themes are the related issues of programming-in-the-large and best practices. Programming-in-the-large is the term often applied to large-scale and long-term software development, where project and people management, code reusability, performance measures, documentation, and software maintenance issues take on special importance. These issues began emerging in earlier periods, but seem to have risen to prominence during the current period. Another important discovery is the trend in software development toward using networking and the Internet. Many network- and Internet-related descriptors were added to the CCS in 1998. The prominent appearance and immediate use of these descriptors during this period indicate that this is a real trend and not just an aberration caused by their recent addition. The titles of the period reflect the prominent themes and trends. In addition to corroborating the keyword analysis, the title text confirms the relevance of the CCS and its most recent revision. By revealing current themes and trends in software engineering, this study provides some guidance to the developers of academic curricula and indicates directions for further research and study