Understanding Mobile Search Task Relevance and User Behaviour in Context

Improvements in mobile technologies have led to a dramatic change in how and when people access and use information, and is having a profound impact on how users address their daily information needs. Smart phones are rapidly becoming our main method of accessing information and are frequently used to perform `on-the-go' search tasks. As research into information retrieval continues to evolve, evaluating search behaviour in context is relatively new. Previous research has studied the effects of context through either self-reported diary studies or quantitative log analysis; however, neither approach is able to accurately capture context of use at the time of searching. In this study, we aim to gain a better understanding of task relevance and search behaviour via a task-based user study (n=31) employing a bespoke Android app. The app allowed us to accurately capture the user's context when completing tasks at different times of the day over the period of a week. Through analysis of the collected data, we gain a better understanding of how using smart phones on the go impacts search behaviour, search performance and task relevance and whether or not the actual context is an important factor.Comment: To appear in CHIIR 2019 in Glasgow, U

Measuring situation awareness in complex systems: Comparison of measures study

Situation Awareness (SA) is a distinct critical commodity for teams working in complex industrial systems and its measurement is a key provision in system, procedural and training design efforts. This article describes a study that was undertaken in order to compare three different SA measures (a freeze probe recall approach, a post trial subjective rating approach and a critical incident interview technique) when used to assess participant SA during a military planning task. The results indicate that only the freeze probe recall method produced a statistically significant correlation with performance on the planning task and also that there was no significant correlation between the three methods, which suggests that they were effectively measuring different things during the trials. In conclusion, the findings, whilst raising doubts over the validity of post trial subjective rating and interview-based approaches, offer validation evidence for the use of freeze probe recall approaches to measure SA. The findings are subsequently discussed with regard to their implications for the future measurement of SA in complex collaborative systems

The impact on work-related stress of mental health teams following team-based learning on clinical risk management

Risk management is viewed as a systematic process based on multiprofessional and multi-agency decision-making. A learning pack was developed as part of a team-based learning project aiming to encourage and develop collaborative working practice. This brought different professionals and agencies working in mental health together to learn. There is little doubt that mental health practice is a source of stress for practitioners. Apart from the stress associated with managing 'risky' situations, risk management is also a relatively new concept. This can increase stress around ability to cope, both on an individual practitioner level and in teams. This article reports the impact that the learning pack had on team members' stress, specifically work-related stress. A range of scales were used to measure change in stress and results demonstrated reduced work-related pressure in a number of areas following the learning. The implications for team learning in relation to clinical risk management are discussed in light of the findings

A Lightweight Distributed Solution to Content Replication in Mobile Networks

Performance and reliability of content access in mobile networks is conditioned by the number and location of content replicas deployed at the network nodes. Facility location theory has been the traditional, centralized approach to study content replication: computing the number and placement of replicas in a network can be cast as an uncapacitated facility location problem. The endeavour of this work is to design a distributed, lightweight solution to the above joint optimization problem, while taking into account the network dynamics. In particular, we devise a mechanism that lets nodes share the burden of storing and providing content, so as to achieve load balancing, and decide whether to replicate or drop the information so as to adapt to a dynamic content demand and time-varying topology. We evaluate our mechanism through simulation, by exploring a wide range of settings and studying realistic content access mechanisms that go beyond the traditional assumptionmatching demand points to their closest content replica. Results show that our mechanism, which uses local measurements only, is: (i) extremely precise in approximating an optimal solution to content placement and replication; (ii) robust against network mobility; (iii) flexible in accommodating various content access patterns, including variation in time and space of the content demand.Comment: 12 page

06472 Abstracts Collection - XQuery Implementation Paradigms

From 19.11.2006 to 22.11.2006, the Dagstuhl Seminar 06472 ``XQuery Implementation Paradigms'' was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Time Pressure and System Delays in Information Search

We report preliminary results of the impact of time pres- sure and system delays on search behavior from a laboratory study with forty-three participants. To induce time pres- sure, we randomly assigned half of our study participants to a treatment condition where they were only allowed five minutes to search for each of four ad-hoc search topics. The other half of the participants were given no task time limits. For half of participants’ search tasks (n=2), five second de- lays were introduced after queries were submitted and SERP results were clicked. Results showed that participants in the time pressure condition queried at a significantly higher rate, viewed significantly fewer documents per query, had significantly shallower hover and view depths, and spent sig- nificantly less time examining documents and SERPs. We found few significant differences in search behavior for sys- tem delay or interaction effects between time pressure and system delay. These initial results show time pressure has a significant impact on search behavior and suggest the de- sign of search interfaces and features that support people who are searching under time pressure