Designing Universally Accessible Networking Services for a Mobile Personal Assistant

At present, a tendency towards smaller computer sizes and at the same time increasingly inaccessible web content can be noted. Despite the worldwide recognized importance of Web accessibility, the lack of accessibility of web services has an increasingly negative impact on all users. In order to address this issue, W3C has released a recommendation on Mobile Web Best Practices, supplementary to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This paper presents the design and prototype development of universally accessible networking services that fully comply with those standards. Validation and expert accessibility evaluation on the XHTML Basic prototypes present 100% compliance. The followed design process is presented in details, outlining general as well as specific issues and related solutions that may be of interest to other designers. The results will be further verified through user tests on implemented services

Query Merging: Improving Query Subscription Processing in a Multicast Environment

This paper introduces techniques for reducing data dissemination costs of query subscriptions in amulticast environment. The reduction is achieved by merging queries with overlapping, but not necessarily equal, answers. The paper formalizes the query-merging problem and introduces a general framework and cost model for evaluating merging. We prove that the problem is NP-hard and propose exhaustive algorithms and three heuristic algorithms: the Pair Merging Algorithm, the Directed Search Algorithm and the Clustering Algorithm. We develop a simulator, which uses geographical queries as a representative example, for evaluating the di erent heuristics and show that the performance of our heuristics is close to optimal

Accordion Summarization for End-Game Browsing on PDAs and Cellular Phones

We demonstrate a new browsing technique for devices with small displays such as PDAs or cellular phones. We concentrate on end-game browsing, where the user is close to or on the target page. We make browsing more efficient and easier by Accordion Summarization. In this technique the Web page is first represented as a short summary. The user can then drill down to discover relevant parts of the page. If desired, keywords can be highlighted and exposed automatically. We discuss our techniques, architecture, interface facilities, and the result of user evaluations. We measured a 57 % improvement in browsing speed and 75% reduction in input effort

A social network caught in the Web

We present an analysis of Club Nexus, an online community at Stanford University. Through the Nexus site we were able to study a reflection of the real world community structure within the student body. We observed and measured social network phenomena such as the small world effect, clustering, and the strength of weak ties. Using the rich profile data provided by the users we were able to deduce the attributes contributing to the formation of friendships, and to determine how the similarity of users decays as the distance between them in the network increases. In addition, we found correlations between users' personalities and their other attributes, as well as interesting correspondences between how users perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others