The design of a visual history tool to help users refind information within a website

On the WWW users frequently revisit information they have previously seen, but "keeping found things found" is difficult when the information has not been visited frequently or recently, even if a user knows which website contained the information. This paper describes the design of a tool to help users refind information within a given website. The tool encodes data about a user's interest in webpages (measured by dwell time), the frequency and recency of visits, and navigational associations between pages, and presents navigation histories in list-and graph-based forms

Thumbnail Summarization Techniques for Web Archives

Abstract. Thumbnails of archived web pages as they appear in common browsers such as Firefox or Chrome can be useful to convey the nature of a web page and how it has changed over time. However, creating thumbnails for all archived web pages is not feasible for large collections, both in terms of time to create the thumbnails and space to store them. Furthermore, at least for the purposes of ini-tial exploration and collection understanding, people will likely only need a few dozen thumbnails and not thousands. In this paper, we develop different algo-rithms to optimize the thumbnail creation procedure for web archives based on information retrieval techniques. We study different features based on HTML text that correlate with changes in rendered thumbnails so we can know in advance which archived pages to use for thumbnails. We find that SimHash correlates with changes in the thumbnails (ρ = 0.59, p < 0.005). We propose different algorithms for thumbnail creation suitable for different applications, reducing the number of thumbnails to be generated to 9 % – 27 % of the total size.

Grouplab at SkiGraph

Collaboration among distributed workgroup members is hampered by the lack of good tools to support informal interactions. These tools either fail to provide teleawareness or enable smooth transitions into and out of informal interactions. Video media spaces---always-on video links---have been proposed as a solution to this problem. However, the "always-on" nature of video media spaces results in a conflict between the desire to provide awareness and the need to preserve privacy. The present study examines distortion filtration applied to always-on video as means of resolving this tension. Our discussions include the inter-related concepts of informal interactions, awareness, and privacy; and the treatment afforded by existing distributed collaboration support tools. We then outline the present study, where our goal is to understand the effect of distortion filtration on awareness and privacy. Keywords Tele-awareness, telepresence, privacy, informal interaction, video media spaces, di..