Effects of hyperlinks on navigation in virtual environments

Hyperlinks introduce discontinuities of movement to 3-D virtual environments (VEs). Nine independent attributes of hyperlinks are defined and their likely effects on navigation in VEs are discussed. Four experiments are described in which participants repeatedly navigated VEs that were either conventional (i.e. obeyed the laws of Euclidean space), or contained hyperlinks. Participants learned spatial knowledge slowly in both types of environment, echoing the findings of previous studies that used conventional VEs. The detrimental effects on participants' spatial knowledge of using hyperlinks for movement were reduced when a time-delay was introduced, but participants still developed less accurate knowledge than they did in the conventional VEs. Visual continuity had a greater influence on participants' rate of learning than continuity of movement, and participants were able to exploit hyperlinks that connected together disparate regions of a VE to reduce travel time

Web Mediators for Accessible Browsing

We present a highly accurate method for classifying web pages based on link percentage, which is the percentage of text characters that are parts of links normalized by the number of all text characters on a web page. K-means clustering is used to create unique thresholds to differentiate index pages and article pages on individual web sites. Index pages contain mostly links to articles and other indices, while article pages contain mostly text. We also present a novel link grouping algorithm using agglomerative hierarchical clustering that groups links in the same spatial neighborhood together while preserving link structure. Grouping allows users with severe disabilities to use a scan-based mechanism to tab through a web page and select items. In experiments, we saw up to a 40-fold reduction in the number of commands needed to click on a link with a scan-based interface, which shows that we can vastly improve the rate of communication for users with disabilities. We used web page classification and link grouping to alter web page display on an accessible web browser that we developed to make a usable browsing interface for users with disabilities. Our classification method consistently outperformed a baseline classifier even when using minimal data to generate article and index clusters, and achieved classification accuracy of 94.0% on web sites with well-formed or slightly malformed HTML, compared with 80.1% accuracy for the baseline classifier.National Science Foundation (IIS-0308213, IIS-039009, IIS-0093367, P200A01031, EIA-0202067

Grounded Visual Analytics: A New Approach to Discovering Phenomena in Data at Scale

We introduce Grounded Visual Analytics, a new method that integrates qualitative and quantitative approaches in order to help investigators discover patterns about human activity. Investigators who develop or study systems often use log data, which keeps track of interactions their participants perform. Discovering and characterizing patterns in this data is important because it can help guide interactive computing system design. This new approach integrates Visual Analytics, a field that investigates Information Visualization and interactive machine learning, and Grounded Theory, a rigorous qualitative research method for discovering nuanced understanding of qualitative data. This dissertation defines and motivates this new approach, reviews relevant existing tools, builds the Log Timelines system. We present and analyze six case studies that use Log Timelines, a probe that we created in order explore Grounded Visual Analytics. In a series of case studies, we collaborate with a participant-investigator on their own project and data. Their use of Grounded Visual Analytics generates ideas about how future research can bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative methods

MCloud

supervisor Dr. Abed El-Hamid ZougborStoring and sharing files is a task that all internet users do every day, in recent years the way people store their files is changed due the emergence of cloud storages services such as Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox, etc. They introduced a great solution for most users when it comes to storing files and sharing it with others. There are a ton of cloud storages options out there. Inevitably, everyone finds a favorite, but more than likely, a lot of users end up with a bunch of unused free storage from other services or the circumstances dictates them to use different cloud drives in case the user prefers Google Drive for example, but his work’s infrastructure uses Dropbox and his friends keep sharing files and photos using OneDrive. As a result the user begin to suffer from the same problem that was hoping to avoid from the first place, it became so frustrating to manage, store and share his files because it’s scattered in several storages and each one requires its own login. Duo to this, MCloud was born. MCloud is a web-based application essentially as cloud service that can put multiple cloud drives into one. It mainly serves for the users who have multiple cloud drives and in the need for managing all the files in their cloud drives through just one single account. MCloud users can connect their MCloud profile to other cloud storage services such as Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox. This connection allows the MCloud user to browse all files of these different drives in the same place without opening too many tabs or keeping longing in and out. Furthermore the team made sure that most functionalities that were available in the original cloud drives are also exists in MCloud system as well for instances the user can share files on social media and copy a sharable link to send it via email or a chat, also the major file management tools like creating, deleting and renaming files and folders are available, in addition to that the user also able to download and upload files easily. The team was dedicated to develop the system in the most fitted development practices with the available skills by using the ASP.NET MVC as the development framework with C# as programming language for our system following the incremental model with all the shear amount of advantages it offers. MCloud system is designed with a easy to use and user-friendly interface with responsive design technologies in order to give the user the ultimate solution for using cloud storage services

Seamlessly Editing the Web

The typical process of editing content on the web is strongly moded. Authors are forced to switch between editing and previewing and publishing modes before, during, and after the editing process. This thesis explores a new paradigm of editing content on the web called seamless editing. Unlike existing techniques for editing content on the web, seamless editing is modeless, enabling authors to directly edit content on web pages without the need to switch between any modes. The absence of modes reduces the amount of cognitive complexity involved with the editing process. A software framework called Seaweed was developed for providing seamlessly editable web pages in any common web browser, and is shown that it can be integrated into any content management system. For the purposes of experimentation, the content management system WordPress was selected, and a plugin using the Seaweed framework developed for it that provided a seamlessly editable environment. Two experiments were conducted. The first study observed users with no or minimal experience with using WordPress, following a set of prescribed tasks, both with and without the plugin. The second study was conducted over a longer time period in a real-world context, where existing WordPress users were naturally observed using the plugin within their own blogs. Analysis of logged interactions and pre-questionnaires and post-questionnaires showed that, in both studies, the participants found the Seaweed software to be intuitive and the new way of editing content to be easily adaptable. Additionally, the analysis showed that the participants found the concept of seamless editing to be useful, and could see it being useful in many other contexts, other than blogs