Development and evaluation of clustering techniques for finding people

Typically in a large organisation much expertise and knowledge is held informally within employees' own memories. When employees leave an organisation many documented links that go through that person are broken and no mechanism is usually available to overcome these broken links. This match making problem is related to the problem of finding potential work partners in a large and distributed organisation. This paper reports a comparative investigation into using standard information retrieval techniques to group employees together based on their webpages. This information can, hopefully, be subsequently used to redirect broken links to people who worked closely with a departed employee or used to highlight people, say indifferent departments, who work on similar topics. The paper reports the design and positive results of an experiment conducted at Risø National Laboratory comparing four different IR searching and clustering approaches using real users' web pages

Supporting different search strategies in a video query interface

This paper reports the design and development of the Diceman Query Application. the paper discusses the implications of the interface on the underlying search engine

Formal models, usability and related work in IR (editorial for special edition)

The Glasgow IR group has carried out both theoretical and empirical work, aimed at giving end users efficient and effective access to large collections of multimedia data

Towards a multidisciplinary user-centric design framework for context-aware applications

The primary aim of this article is to review and merge theories of context within linguistics, computer science, and psychology, to propose a multidisciplinary model of context that would facilitate application developers in developing richer descriptions or scenarios of how a context-aware device may be used in various dynamic mobile settings. More specifically, the aim is to:1. Investigate different viewpoints of context within linguistics, computer science, and psychology, to develop summary condensed models for each discipline. 2. Investigate the impact of contrasting viewpoints on the usability of context-aware applications. 3. Investigate the extent to which single-discipline models can be merged and the benefits and insightfulness of a merged model for designing mobile computers. 4. Investigate the extent to which a proposed multidisciplinary modelcan be applied to specific applications of context-aware computing

Investigating context-aware clues to assist navigation for visually impaired people

It is estimated that 7.4 million people in Europe are visually impaired [1]. Limitations of traditional mobility aids (i.e. white canes and guide dogs) coupled with a proliferation of context-aware technologies (e.g. Electronic Travel Aids, Global Positioning Systems and Geographical Information Systems), have stimulated research and development into navigational systems for the visually impaired. However, current research appears very technology focused, which has led to an insufficient appreciation of Human Computer Interaction, in particular task/requirements analysis and notions of contextual interactions. The study reported here involved a smallscale investigation into how visually impaired people interact with their environmental context during micro-navigation (through immediate environment) and/or macro-navigation (through distant environment) on foot. The purpose was to demonstrate the heterogeneous nature of visually impaired people in interaction with their environmental context. Results from a previous study involving sighted participants were used for comparison. Results revealed that when describing a route, visually impaired people vary in their use of different types of navigation clues - both as a group, when compared with sighted participants, and as individuals. Usability implications and areas for further work are identified and discussed

Keyword based categorisation of diary entries to support personal Internet content pre-caching on mobile devices

This paper presents a study into the effectiveness of our algorithm for automatic categorisation of real users' diary entries, as a first step towards personal Internet content pre-caching on mobile devices. The study reports an experiment comparing trial subjects allocations of 99 diary entries to those predicted by a keyword-based algorithm. While leaving considerable grounds for improvement, results are positive and show pave the way for supporting mobile services based on categorising users' diary entries

Towards a user-centric and multidisciplinary framework for designing context-aware applications

Research into context-aware computing has not sufficiently addressed human and social aspects of design. Existing design frameworks are predominantly software orientated, make little use of cross-disciplinary work, and do not provide an easily transferable structure for cross-application of design principles. To address these problems, this paper proposes a multidisciplinary and user-centred design framework, and two models of context, which derive from conceptualisations within Psychology, Linguistics, and Computer Science. In a study, our framework was found to significantly improve the performance of postgraduate students at identifying the context of the user and application, and the usability issues that arise

Investigating design issues of context-aware mobile guides for people with visual impairments

While mobile wayfinding systems for visually impaired people offer huge potential, most insufficiently address the differences between visual impairments and contextual environments, and offer very little context-awareness - usability issues of which are vital in supporting independent mobility. Participants experiencing a loss of central vision, loss of peripheral vision, and total vision loss made up three groups. Our multidisciplinary model of context was used to design a user study, which involved asking participants to walk to pre-determined outdoor and indoor landmarks. Significant differences were found between groups relating to information requirements, and the environmental cues encoded and used to orientate and navigate. The study also found differences between indoor and outdoor contexts. It was concluded that what is meaningful to one form of visual impairment is incidental to another. These issues need to be captured and accounted for if wayfinding systems are to be usable

Evaluation of a prototype interface for structured document retrieval

Document collections often display either internal structure, in the form of the logical arrangement of document components, or external structure, in the form of links between documents. Structured document retrieval systems aim to exploit this structural information to provide users with more effective access to structured documents. To do this, the associated interface must both represent this information explicitly and support users in their browsing behaviour. This paper describes the implementation and user-centred evaluation of a prototype interface, the RelevanceLinkBar interface. The results of the evaluation show that the RelevanceLinkBar interface supported users in their browsing behaviour, allowing them to find more relevant documents, and was strongly preferred over a standard results interface

Visual information seeking on palmtop devices

Ahlberg and Shneiderman's Starfield displays have been shown to provide fast and convenient access to large collections of data. However, the standard design requires a large, high-resolution, colour screen. This paper presents the results of a short project investigating this visual information seeking technique on a monochrome palmtop