Annotations on CHI 98 Technical Program

     Legend:

        Especially Interesting General HCI Papers

        Papers Having to do with Visualization (of all qualities)

        My Comments

Technical Program All-at-Once

 Tuesday, April 21, 11:00 - 12:30

• Humor in Task-Oriented Computer-Mediated Communication and Human-Computer Interaction

John Morkes, Hadyn K. Kernal, Clifford Nass, Stanford University
• Evaluating the Use of Pictographical Representations for TV Menus

Joyce H.D.M. Westerink, Philips Research & IPO; M. van der Korst, Philips Research Laboratories; G. Roberts, Philips Design
• To Click or Not to Click: A Comparison of Two Target-Selection Methods for HCI

Michael Bohan, Alex Chaparro, Wichita State Universtiy
• PatchWork: A Software Tool for Early Design

Maarten van de Kant, Stephanie Wilson, Mathilde Bekker, Hilary Johnson, Peter Johnson, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London
• Linking Between Multiple Points in Design Documents

Steven Clarke, Motorola SPS; Gilbert Cockton, University of Sunderland
• A Study of Commenting Agents as Design Support

Mikael Ericsson, Magnus Bauren, Jonas Lowgren, Yvonne Waern, Linkoping University

• Triangles: Tangible Interface for Manipulation and Exploration of Digital Information Topography

Matthew G. Gorbet, Maggie Orth, Hiroshi Ishii, MIT Media Laboratory
Those crazy folks at the media lab just having fun.  The authors designed a kind of electronic lego: each piece is shaped like an isoceles triangle, about an inch thick and about three inches per side.  The triangles snap together via magnetic connectors that also serve to pass current among them, and so can form interesting 2D and 3D aggregate shapes.  They use a special kind of conductive velcro to pass computerized information among the triangles, but one triangle has to be connected via a wire to a computer.  Some triangles are rigged to be able to record audio data.  User can make up games in which they paint characters on the surface of the triangles and record voice or music, associated a different recording with each side of the triangle.  Connected side A of triangle 1 to side B of triangle 2 can thus help tell a story, such as a fairy tale.
• HandJive: A Device for Interpersonal Haptic Entertainment

BJ Fogg, Sun Microsystems & Stanford University; Larry Cutler, Pixar Animation Studios; Perry Arnold, Trilogy Development Group; Chris Eisbach, Stanford University
• Simplifying the Controls of an Interactive Movie Game

Jeff Johnson, UI Wizards

• NaviPoint: An Input Device for Mobile Information Browsing

Kiyokuni Kawachiya, Hiroshi Ishikawa, IBM Tokyo Research Lab
• The PadMouse: Facilitating Selection and Spatial Positioning for the Non-Dominant Hand

Ravin Balakrishnan, University of Toronto; Pranay Patel, Alias Wavefront
• The Design and Use of Squeezable Computers: An Exploration of Manipulative User Interfaces

Beverly L. Harrison, Ken Fishkin, Anuj Gujar, Carlos Mochon, Roy Want, Xerox PARC

• Web Page Design: Implications of Memory, Structure and Scent for Information Retrieval

Kevin Larson, Mary Czerwinski, Microsoft Research
• Exploring Browser Design Trade-Offs Using a Dynamical Model of Optimal Information Foraging

Peter Pirolli, Xerox PARC
• Information Archiving with Bookmarks: Personal Web Space Construction and Organization

David Abrams, Ron Baecker, Mark Chignell, University of Toronto
    These people set out planning to tweak existing bookmarks but ended up simply studying the ways people use them.  Using surveys and analyzing bookmark logs they determined the following:
• why bookmarks are created (easy to make, quick access to key sites, keep track of where I've been)
• how many bookmarks are made
• how bookmarks are organized (list, hierarchy, nested hierarchy, web page)
• rate of growth of bookmark files
• how often bookmark structure is updated
• rate of revisit (infrequent, but they get reused)
• problems: (labels are bad, structure gets too big and messy)
Design recommendations:
• automated creating of folders and sorting into folders
• order on frequency of use rather than folders
• better viz so all bookmarks can be viewed
• better titles/representation
• integration without leaving the browser

Tuesday, April 21, 14:00 - 15:30

• Frustrating the User on Purpose: Using Biosignals in a Pilot Study to Detect the User's Emotional State

Jocelyn Riseberg, Jonathan Klein, Raul Fernandez, Rosalind W. Picard, MIT Media Laboratory
• Touchpad-Based Remote Control Devices

Neil R.N. Enns, University of Toronto; I. Scott MacKenzie, University of Guelph
• Tracking Hands Above Large Interactive Surfaces with a Low-Cost Scanning Laser Rangefinder

Joshua Strickon, Joseph Paradiso, MIT Media Laboratory
• Comparing Single- and Two-Handed 3D Input for a 3D Object Assembly Task

Maarten W. Gribnau, James M. Hennessey, Delft University of Technology
• Real Handles, Virtual Images

Colin Ware, Jeff Rose, University of New Brunswick
• A Kinetic and 3D Image Input Device

Shunichi Numazaki, Akira Morishita, Naoko Umeki, Minoru Ishikawa, Miwako Doi, Toshiba

• Patterns of Change in Design Metaphor: A Case Study

William A. Stubblefield, Sandia National Laboratories
• Netscape Communicator's Collapsible Toolbars

Irene Au, Shuang Li, Netscape Communications
• A study of fonts Designed for Screen Display

Daniel Boyarski, Chrisitne M. Neuwirth, Jodi Forlizzi, Susan Harkness Regli, Carnegie Mellon University

• From Documents to Discourse: Shifting Conceptions of Scholarly Publishing

Tamara Sumner, Simon Buckingham Shum, The Open University
• The Effects of Distance in Local versus Remote Human-Computer Interaction

Youngme Moon, MIT
• Design Evolution in a Mutimedia Tutorial on User-Centered Design

Tom Carey, University of Waterloo; Slade Mitchell, Interactive Software Solutions; Dan Peerenboom, University of Waterloo; Mary Lytwyn, Bank of Montreal

• Evaluating the Location of Hot Spots in Interactive Scenes using the 3R Toolbox

Andre Plante, Shoji Tanaka, Seiki Inoue, ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories
This paper addresses the problem of how to modify an image in a multimedia interface so that users' attention is directed to the salient parts of the image.
The authors first did a study in which users marked the parts of images where they though hyperlinks should appear.  The authors then analyzed these results and isolated properties that corresponded to the users' choices.  (They did not verify the results on independent testing data.)
They then built a tool that, given an image, shows the parts that should attract the users' attention.  If these are not the parts the designer wanted to put hyperlinks at, the system will (eventually) give the designer tools to adjust the relevant parameters (hue, brightness, etc).  The designer can run the resulting image through the system again to see if users will now pick the salient parts.
• Providing Advice for Multimedia Designers

Pete Faraday, Alistair Sutcliffe, City University, London
• 101 Spots, or How Do Users Read Menus?

Antti Aaltonen, Aulikki Hyrskykari, Kari-Jouko Räihä, University of Tampere
Many studies have been done on how long it takes users to read menus of varying length but the results are still perplexing.  The authors used eye-tracker technology on various length menus and then tried to generalize from the patterns of fixations and saccades (movement between fixations).  They used SpotFire to plot some of their results -- seemed like a good idea!
They found patterns of sweeps -- horizontal or vertical.  Earlier sweeps in a visual search lasted longer than later ones.   Fast people skimmed with few fixations.  The data needs a lot more analysis and will be reported on later.

Tuesday, April 21, 16:00 - 17:30

• The Sound of Your Stuff: Designing a Complex Auditory Display for an Interactive Museum Exhibit

Maribeth Back, Xerox PARC; Jonathan Cohen, Interval Research
• Synchronization of Speech and Hand Gestures during Multimodal Human-Computer Interaction

Marie-Luce Bourguet, Arkio Ando, NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp.)
• "Just Speak Naturally": Designing for Naturalness in Automated Spoken Dialogues

David Williams, Vocalis; Christine Cheepen, University of Surrey
• Speech Recognition, Children and Reading

Don Nix, Peter Fairweather, Bill Adams, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
• Play It Again: A Study of the Factors Underlying Speech Browsing Behavior

Steve Whittaker, Julia Hirschberg, Christine H. Nakatani, ATT Labs Research
• All Talk and All Action: Strategies for Managing Voicemail Messages

Steve Whittaker, Julia Hirschberg, Christine H. Nakatani, ATT Labs Research

Papers: About Faces

• Visual Tracking for Multimodal Human Computer Interaction

Jie Yang, Rainer Stifelhagen, Uwe Meier, Alex Waibel, Carnegie Mellon University
• When My Face is the Interface: An Experimental Comparison of Interacting With One's Own Face or Someone Else's Face

Clifford Nass, Eun-Young Kim, Eun-Ju Lee, Stanford University
This is part of a long series of work by Nass and his students in the role of emotion and affect in human-computer interaction.  In this latest study the authors find that people respond differently to negative feedback from an audio-visual image of oneself than from an image of someone else of the same gender.  People "claimed more responsibility for the evaluation, thought it was more valid and objective, and showed higher public self-awareness.
• Digital Smart Kiosk Project

Andrew D. Christian, Brian L. Avery, Digital

• The Design of Guided Learner-Adaptable Scaffolding in Interactive Learning Environments

Shari L. Jackson, Joseph Krajcik, Elliot Soloway, University of Michigan
• ARTEMIS: Learner-Centered Design of an Information Seeking Environment for K-12 Education

Raven Wallace, Nathan Bos, Joseph Hoffman, Heather Eccleston Hunter, Joseph Krajcik, Elliot Soloway, Dan Kiskis, Elisabeth Klann, Greg Peters, David Richardson, Ofer Ronen, University of Michigan
• Building an Electronic Learning Community: From Design to Implementation

Anne Rose, Wei Ding, Gary Marchionini, Josephus Beale, Jr., Victor Nolet, University of Maryland

• Worldlets: 3D Thumbnails for 3D Browsing

T. Todd Elvins, David R. Nadeau, Rina Schul, David Kirsh, University of California, San Diego
3D thumbnails -- more effective for wayfinding in a 3D world than text or 2D images
• Evolving Video Skims into Useful Multimedia Abstractions

Michael G. Christel, Michael A. Smith, C. Roy Taylor, David B. Winkler, Carnegie Mellon University
• Navigation Guided by Artificial Force Fields

Dongbo Xiao, Roger Hubbold, University of Manchester
A very nicely written and illustrated paper that describes a method for helping users navigate around 3D virtual worlds with a joystick.  Rather than allowing them to walk through chairs, walls, etc, and fly up into ceilings, the standard technique is collision detection, which allows the user to ram into things and sometimes causes them to get stuck into corners, and is generally awkward.
The authors propose an alternative that makes use of a notion of force fields.  Users are forced to slow down as they get near objects and then are shunted around the objects in a gentle arc.  If they need to go between two objects, both objects impose force on the user, guiding them smoothly between the two.  A notion of gravity is also used as a way to help users walk up and down virtual stairs.   The illustrations on the last page are a very nice summary of the different methods.

 Wednesday, April 22, 08:30 - 10:00

• Evolution of the Talking Dinosaur: The (Not So) Natural History of a New Interface for Children

Kristin Alexander, Erik Strommen, Microsoft
• Participatory Simulations: Using Computational Objects to Learn about Dynamic Systems

Vanessa Colella, Richard Borovoy, Mitchel Resnick, MIT Media Lab
I didn't see this but heard about it.  Programmable nametags ahve been built that can light up with a series of six lights (either red or green) that can communicate with one another.  Instructores used the nametags  to teach students about the spread of communicable disease.  A demonstration of this pedagogical technique was done at the conference.  Someone raised their hand at the end and asked "why is my nametag reading P0?" and the instructor replied -- "you were the original infector of everyone else!"

• Focus Troupe: Using Drama to Create Common Context for New Product Concept End-User Evaluations

Tony Salvador, Intel; Karen Howells, Lionheart Consulting
• Remote Usability Evaluation: Can Users Report Their Own Critical Incidents?

Jose C. Castillo, US WEST Information Technologies; H. Rex Hartson, Deborah Hix, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
• The Evaluator Effect in Usability Tests

Niels Ebbe Jacobsen, Carnegie Mellon University; Morten Hertzum, University of Copenhagen; Bonnie E. John, Carnegie Mellon University
• Analytical Versus Empirical Evaluation of Spatial Displays

Mountaz Hascoet, LRI, Universite Paris-Sud
• The Effect of Task Description Detail on Evaluator Performance with Cognitive Walkthroughs

Andrew Sears, DePaul University; David J. Hess, SPSS
• Comparison of GOMS Analysis Methods

Joel D. Baskin, Symix Systems; Bonnie E. John, Carnegie Mellon University

• Bullseye! When Fitts' Law Doesn't Fit

Naomi Friedlander, Kevin Schlueter, Marilyn M. Mantei, University of Toronto
• Cognitive Function Analysis for Human-Centered Automation of Safety-Critical Systems

Guy A. Boy, European Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Engineering
• Delegation and Circumvention: Two Faces of Efficiency

Suresh K. Bhavnani, Bonnie E. John, Carnegie Mellon University

• Quantifying the Effect of User Interface Design Features on Cyberstore Traffic and Sales

Gerald L. Lohse, University of Pennsylvania; Peter Spiller, McKinsey & Company
Interesting results for the business-heads out there. A nice empirical evaluation of 20 online (web-based) "superstores" comparing how various aspects of their web site design and information layouts correlate with sales and traffic.  Regression analysis was used to assess impact of variables.  (Note -- we only get correlation, not necessarily causation.)
Main findings (not all reported here):
• Additional products associated with more traffic
• FAQ section associated with more traffic
• Customer feedback session associated with lower traffic and higher sales
• Improved product lists associated with large increase in sales
• Greater number of "store entrances" associated with more traffic and sales
• Number of shopping modes has no impact on sales
• Promotion on entrace screen generates traffic and sales
• Number of levels between home page and product pages has no significant effect on traffic and sales
• Consistent menu bars have no measurable effect.
• Interactive Advertising: Patterns of Use and Effectiveness

Kirsten Risden, Mary Czerwinski, Stephanie Worley, Lynda Hamilton, Joe Kubiniec, Microsoft; Hunter Hoffman, Nancy Mickel, Elizabeth Loftus, University of Washington
 
• Persuasive Computers: Perspectives and Research Directions

BJ Fogg, Sun Microsystems & Stanford University

• Student Readers' Use of Library Documents: Implications for Digital Library Technologies

Kenton O'Hara, Fiona Smith, William Newman, Abigail Sellen, Xerox Research Centre Europe
• A Diary Study of Work-Related Reading: Design Implications for Digital Reading Devices

Annette Adler, Anuj Gujar, Beverly L. Harrison, Xerox PARC; Kenton O'Hara, Abigail Sellen, Xerox Research Centre Europe
• Beyond Paper: Supporting Active Reading with Free-form Digital Ink Annotations

Bill N. Schilit, Gene Golovchinsky, Morgan N. Price, FX Palo Alto Laboratory

These three papers together, from various Xerox research labs, continue the tradition of studying how people read, annotate, and generally consume text.  They also make recommendations for the design of online document annotation and present a description of a "active document reader" that does not introduce any novel ideas itself, but puts together a lot of ideas that have been floating around the last few years into one place, using a commercial high-resolution pen-tablet display.

Wednesday, April 22, 11:00 - 12:30

• Integrated Design of Real Architectural Spaces and Virtual Information Spaces

Norbert A. Streitz, GMD-IPSI
• Shuffle, Throw or Take It!: Working Efficiently with an Interactive Wall

Jorg Geissler, GMD-IPSI
• Communication Chairs: Examples of Mobile Roomware Components

Christian Muller-Tomfelde, GMD-IPSI; Wolfgang Reischl, Darmstadt School of Design
Interesting idea: bury the PC in the removable arm of an armchair -- it becomes a work surface and computer in one!
• Water Lamp and Pinwheels: Ambient Projection of Digital Information into Architectural Space

Andrew Dahley, Craig Wisneski, Hiroshi Ishii, MIT Media Laboratory
• Adding Another Communication Channel to Reality: An Experience with a Chat-Augumented Conference

Jun Rekimoto, Sony CSL; Yuji Ayatsuka, University of Tokyo; Hirotaka Uoi, Osaka University; Toshifumi Arai, Hitachi
• Basics of Integrated Information and Physical Spaces: The State of the Art

Norbert A. Streitz, GMD-IPSI; Daniel M. Russell, Xerox PARC
• The Future of Integrated Design of Ubiquitous Computing in Combined Real & Virtual Worlds

Daniel M. Russell, Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC

• Coincident Display Using Haptics and Holographic Video

Wendy Plesniak, Ravikanth Pappu, MIT Media Laboratory
• The Structure of Object Transportation and Orientation in Human-Computer Interaction

Yanqing Wang, Christine L. MacKenzie, Simon Fraser University; Valerie A. Summers, Kellog S. Booth, University of British Columbia
• Quantifying Coordination in Multiple DOF Movement and Its Application to Evaluating 6 DOF Input Devices

Shumin Zhai, IBM Almaden Research Center

• Digital Manipulatives: New Toys to Think With

Mitchel Resnick, Fred Martin, Robert Berg, Richard Borovoy, Vanessa Colella, Kwin Kramer, Brian Silverman, MIT Media Laboratory
What happens with you put simple computers into small toys?  This paper includes experiments with crickets (actually, legos with computer chips), programmable beads that can be snapped together (to form a one dimensional celluar automaton!), balls with chips whose trajectory can be tracked, and the communicating nametags described above.
• When the Interface is a Talking Dinosaur: Learning Across Media with ActiMates Barney

Erik Strommen, Microsoft
A very interesting presentation about a very impressive design of a toy that includes a stuffed animal (yes, Barney) that can sign along with and react to its own television show in real time (I kid you not) and can interact with animated drawing programs and presumably other programs as well.  It can also interact directly with the kids.  A challenge was to design with a uniform interface even in the different contexts.  Each part of Barney's body activates a different kind of action.  Barney thinks EVERYTHING is fun.
• PROP: Personal Roving Presence

Eric Paulos, John Canny, University of California, Berkeley

• An efficient text Input Method for Pen-based Computers

Toshiyuki Masui, Sony Computer Science Laboratory
• A Comparison of Three Selection Techniques for Touchpads

I. Scott MacKenzie, Aleks Oniszczak, University of Guelph
• A Multiple Device Approach for Supporting Whiteboard-Based Interactions

Jun Rekimoto, Sony Computer Science Laboratory
Further adventures of "pick and drop" -- a certified good idea introduced at UIST 97.  Pick and drop allows the user to point at objects on one device -- formerly a PDA of some kind -- and "drop" the object on another PDA.  The idea is extended here to communicating between a PDA and a very large display, like a LiveBoard.  Large displays cause the user to do "aerobic interaction" -- reaching long distances to get to menus and palettes.  Instead, using pick and drop, one can carry the PDA around like an artist's palette, and select commands or clipart and drop them on the large display.  As another example, the user can point at some text on the large display and choose which font to change it to from a menu on the PDA -- kind of like a magic lens.  Additionally, pick and drop on the large surface itself works better than drag and drop.

Wednesday, April 22, 14:00 - 15:30

• Computer Support for Distance Art Therapy

Davor Cubranic, Kellog S. Booth, Katie Collie, University of British Columbia
• A Room of Your Own: What Would it Take to Help Remote Groups Work as Well as Collocated Groups?

Judith S. Olson, Lisa Covi, Elena Rocco, University of Michigan; William J. Miller, Paul Allie, Steelcase
• Tickertape: Awareness in a Single Line

Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Sara Parsowith, Bill Segall, Simon Kaplan, University of Queensland
• People Presence or Room Activity Supporting Peripheral Awareness over Distance

Elin Rosby Pedersen, FX Palo Alto Laboratory
• Peripheral Participants in Mediated Communication

Andrew F. Monk, Leon A. Watts, University of York
• When Two Hands Are Better Than One: Enhancing Collaboration Using Single Display Groupware

Jason Stewart, Elaine M. Raybourn, University of New Mexico; Ben Bederson, Allison Druin, University of Maryland

• The Vista Environment for the Co-Evolutionary Design of User Interfaces

Judy Brown, Victoria University of Wellington; T.C. Nicholas Graham, Queen's University; Timothy Wright, Victoria University of Wellington
• Tools For Incremental Development of Educational Software Interfaces

Wolff Daniel Dobson, Christopher K. Riesbeck, Northwestern University
• Visual Task Characterization for Automated Visual Discourse Synthesis

Michelle X. Zhou, Steven K. Feiner, Columbia University

• The First Noble Truth of Cyberspace: People are People, Even When They Moo

Diane J. Schiano, Sean White, Interval Research
• Are Newsgroups Virtual Communities?

Teresa L. Roberts, Sun Microsystems
• Communication and Information: Alternative Uses of the Internet in Households

Robert Kraut, Tridas Mukhopadhyay, Janusz Szczypula, Sara Kiesler, William Scherlis, Carnegie Mellon University

• Visualizing the Evolution of Web Ecologies

Ed H. Chi, James Pitkow, Jock Mackinlay, Peter Pirolli, Rich Gossweiler, Stuart K. Card, Xerox PARC
This is the latest in a series of papers using the PARC information visualizer environment for the purposes of "web foraging".  The initial goal was to graphically show "web ecologies" as they grow and change over time.  However, the end result is not as creative as the stated goal.  Basically, a subset of web  pages associated with a site (Xerox of course) are laid out in what looks much like a hyperbolic tree browser, and color is used to show web traffic and/or modifications of the pages by their creators over time.   This is quite similar to what I've seen in commercial products.  There was also an attempt to show information over time in a "time tube"; this is essentially a series of snapshots of the hyperbolic view over time.  Some interesting behaviors are observed, like the appearance of "deadwood" branches that no longer receive web traffic because the main link to them has been moved to a newer version of that set of pages.  No evaluation was done.
• Hi-Cites: Dynamically-Created Citations with Active Highlighting

Michelle Q. Wang Baldonado, Terry Winograd, Stanford University
This describes the value of highlighting different metadata with different colors, in particular in bibliographic citations.  Users are able to perform tasks like counting the number of citations that have given words in the title faster than if there is no highlighting, but not as fast as if the various kinds of metainformation are enclosed in different columns of a table.  However, the highlighting is preferred over the table view, because the table requires scrolling and people like saturated colors.  It is often observed in IR systems that highlighting query terms is a very good idea.
• DIVA: Exploratory Data Analysis with Multimedia Streams

Wendy E. Mackay, Centre d'Etudes de la Navigation Aérienne and LRI, Université de Paris-Sud; Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, LRI, Université de Paris-Sud
This was an interesting twist on the standard method for showing video stream information.  Users want to annotate video with many different properties; this is a time-consuming task.  This tool animates the flow of many different streams of annotations simultaneously on separate horizontal lines.  It is somewhat like the perspective wall with the interesting twist of placing the current frame of video in the middle of the streams of data (rather than showing it separately, which I think is what is usually done).  Another unusual aspect of this display is the streams are not only shown to the left and right of the video frame, but also stream across the top and bottom, as if the video frame were a cube.  This gives what feels to me like a more vivid sense of past vs. future in the video stream.  It was pointed out to me that a disadvantage of this approach might be difficulty aligning the data in one row with another; I think this could be easily remedied by drawing a vertical line wherever the mouse was placed on the strips.
The paper also presents an algebra that allows the user to modify, cut, paste, and warp the video streams.

Wednesday, April 22, 16:00 - 17:30

• Experiments in Inhabited TV

Steve Benford, Chris Greenhalgh, Chris Brown, Nottingham University; Graham Walker, Tim Regan, Paul Rea, Jason Morphett, BT Laboratories; John Wyver, Illuminations Television
• The Lightwork Performance: Algorithmically Mediated Interaction for Virtual Environments

John Bowers, Royal Institute of Technology & University of Manchester; Sten-Olof Hellstrom, Kai-Mikael Jaa-Aro, Royal Institute of Technology
• Look Who's Talking: the GAZE Groupware System

Roel Vertegaal, Twente University; Harro Vons, Baan Development; Robert Slagter, Twente University
• Looking for Sound? Selling Perceptual Space in Hierarchically Nested Boxes

Roel Vertegaal, University of Twente; Barry Eaglestone, University of Bradford
• Using Earcons to Improve the Usability of Tool Palettes

Stephen A. Brewster, University of Glasgow
• Multi-Parameter Controllers for Audio Mixing

Craig Wisneski, Ed Hammond, MIT Media Laboratory

• Finding and Visualizing Inter-Site Clan Graphs

Loren Terveen, Will Hill, AT&T Labs - Research
An addition to the growing body of work on how to visualize web site structure and how to automatically find structure in web sites.  The authors define a method for determining if a set of web pages should be considered part of an interconnected site.  It is different than the work of Jon Kleinberg in that a user gets to chose the set of seed pages, thus (hopefully) guaranteeing a set of starting points, the members of which display good coverage while at the same time being of high quality (Kleinberg's seeds are the results of  a search).  Also, rather than trying to find hubs and authority pages, they are just trying to find interlinked clusters of related pages, much more like co-citation work.  They define the graph by an interative algorithm which looks at pages of distance at most two from the current open set of nodes and ranks pages according to how many of the original seed pages they link to.  Absolutely no evaluation of this algorithm is done, and the results are not compared to standard cocitation methods (nor do they really justify why they don't just use standard co-citation analysis.  This may be because their method avoid the need to build a big correlation matrix and do clustering.  But this is not discussed at all.)

They then present a visualization for showing portions of clan graphs (they don't discuss how this scales to graphs larger than the example which has 29 pages).  They started with a standard graph layout and observed the usual problem with spaghetti caused by the in and out links.  They then decided not to show the links explicitly, and instead arrange the pages in concentric circles with those pages higher in their respective sites shown closer to the center.  User feedback revealed that people didn't like this because they wanted an importance ordering on the documents, so they switched to a concentric semi-circle layout, which I haven't seen before.    (However, up to this point this is much like a commercial web analysis tool like InContext WebAnalyzer.)  They call this an auditorium view.  But instead of showing the links as lines when the document is clicked on, they show the links by greying out those documents NOT linked to by the focus document -- a nice innovation.  They also show bitmaps of the pages, which is much better than identical icons, but is slow to generate.  They also use color along the rings to show if a page primarily has inlinks or outlinks, but I doubt this is useful.
 

• Effects of Interfaces for Annotation on Communication in a Collaborative Task

Patricia G. Wojahn, Robert Morris College; Christine M. Neuwirth, Carnegie Mellon University; Barbara Bullock, Wright State University
• Awareness Driven Video Quality of Service in Collaborative Virtual Environments

Gail Reynard, Steve Benford, Chris Greenhalgh, Christian Heath, The University of Nottingham

• Supporting Situated Actions in High Volume Conversational Data Situations

Christopher Lueg, University of Zurich
• Heart Rate Variability: Indicator of User State as an Aid to Human-Computer Interaction

Dennis W. Rowe, MITRE; John Sibert, The George Washington University; Don Irwin, United States Air Force
• Evolution of the Conversation Machine: A Case Study of Bringing Advanced Technology to the Marketplace

Catherine G. Wolf, Wlodek Zadrozny, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

• National Geographic Unplugged: Designing Interactive Nature Films for Classrooms

Brian K. Smith, MIT Media Laboratory; Brian J. Reiser, Northwestern University
• New Media, New Practices: Experiences in Open Learning Course Design

Tamara Sumner, Josie Taylor, The Open University
• Investigating the Capture, Integration and Access Problem of Ubiquitous Computing in an Educational Setting

Gregory D. Abowd, Christopher G. Atkeson, Jason Brotherton, Tommy Enqvist, Paul Gulley, Johan LeMon, Georgia Institute of Technology

Thursday, April 23, 08:30 - 10:00

• The Usability of Transparent Overview Layers

Donald A. Cox, Jasdeep S. Chugh, Carl Gutwin, Saul Greenberg, University of Calgary
An interesting attempt to combine overviews with detailed views.  The main idea is to show users a semi-transparent view of the entire dataset, and show the parts being operated on in a zoomed in mode.  The user can select things in the overview mode and transfer them to the zoomed in mode.  The example was a graphical interface for laying out and interlocking pictures of various objects.   I didn't get to see the demo so can't attest to whether or not this might work.
 
• MetricViews: Design of Multiple Spreadsheets into a Single Dynamic View

David Small, MIT Media Laboratory; Yin Yin Wong; Sergio Cannetti, Bell Atlantic Technology & Engineering
Basically a tool for showing charts and graphs and switching between them by clicking on a list of available attribures.  Nothing particularly novel.
 
• Goal-Directed Zoom

Allison Woodruff, James Landay, Michael Stonebraker, University of California at Berkeley
A neat idea by our very own Allison Woodruff.  In a pan + zoom environment that contains a notion of elevantion, users can specify the kind of representation of objects they'd like to see, rather than an elevation, thus goal directed zoom, within a semantic zooming environment.  She suggests that such a system provide users with menus of possible object representations, graphical previews of these objects, and automatic zoom to the right level of description.
 
• Integrated Multi Scale Text Retrieval Visualization

Karlis Kaugars, New Mexico State University
A combination of flip-zooming, Document Lens, SeeSoft, and TileBars.  Show text in columns of varying degrees of magnification.  Highlight query term hits on the miniatures as well as the zoomed in versions.  When one text is made larger (brought into focus) the rest shrink accordingly.  Possible drawback, as in SeeSoft, is that you loose the information inherent in the page-style layout of the document.
 
• Designing Visualization Tools for Learning

Brian J. Foley, University of California at Berkeley
A dot-density viz helped middle school students learn the difference between heat and temperature.
 
• Symphony: Exploring User Interface Representations for Learner-Centered Process Scaffolding

Chris Quintana, Elliot Soloway, Joseph Krajcik, Andrew Carra, Matt Houser, Mike McDonald, Mike Mouradian, Aaron Saarela, Naresh Vyas, Michele Wisnudel, University of Michigan

• Composing Magic Lenses

David Fox, NYU Media Research Lab
• Generalized Pointing: Enabling Multiagent Interaction

Dan R. Olsen, Jr., Daniel Boyarski, Matt Phelps, Jack Moffat, Edson Lo, Carnegie Mellon University
• Scripting Graphical Applications by Demonstration

Brad A. Myers, Carnegie Mellon University

• Trust Breaks Down in Electronic Contexts but Can Be Repaired by Some Initial Face-to-Face Contact

Elena Rocco, University of Michigan
• Expertise and Collaborative Design

Alonso H. Vera, Thomas Kvan, Robert L. West, Simon Lai, The University of Hong Kong
• Effects of Awareness Support on Groupware Usability

Carl Gutwin, University of Saskatchewan; Saul Greenberg, University of Calgary

Thursday, April 23, 11:00 - 12:30

• The Rise of Personal Web Pages at Work

Sara A. Bly, Sara Bly Consulting; Linda Cook, Tim Bickmore, Intelligent Software Associates; Elizabeth Churchill, Joseph W. Sullivan, FX PAL
• Does Every Link Have the Same Usability?: An Exploratory Study of the Link Structure of Cyber Malls

Jinwoo Kim, Byunggon Yoo, Yonsei University
• Polynesian Navigation: Locomotion and Previewing Aspects

Kent Wittenburg, Wissam Ali-Ahmad, Daniel LaLiberte, Tom Lanning, GTE Laboratories
• A Java-Based Approach to Active Collaborative Filtering

Christopher Lueg, Christoph Landolt, University of Zurich
• Applying Writing Guidelines to Web Pages

John Morkes, Jakob Nielsen, Sun Microsystems
A summary of the talk Nielsen gave at SIMS this semester -- people prefer concise, informative, contentful text on web pages (as opposed to flowery, polite, full-sentence verbiage).
 
• A Method for Evaluating Web Page Design Concepts

Thomas S. Tullis, Fidelity Investments Systems
An interesting method for evaluating alternative web page designs.  Show the candidates to the users as minatures with greek letters and obscured images.  Have the users guess where in the layout various items would occur.  I'd find this more convincing except their test case was the Fidelity web pages and I find these to be among the least navigable of any I use since they changed the layout.

• User Interfaces for Computer-Based Patient Records - Workshop Review

Tom Brinck, Diamond Bullet Design; Gary York, ComFrame Software
• Voice-Enabled Structured Medical Reporting

Mary-Marshall Teel, Kurzweil A.I./Lernout & Hausoie Speech Products; Matt Belge, Vision & Logic; Rachel Sokolowski, Dave Rosenthal, Kurweil A.I.
• Interactive Storytelling Environments; Coping with Cardiac Illness at Boston Children's Hospital

Marina Umaschi Bers, MIT Media Laboratory; Edith Ackermann, MERL; Justine Cassell, MIT Research Laboratory

• Illuminating Light: An Optical Design Tool with a Physical Interface

John Underkoffler, Hiroshi Ishii, MIT Media Laboratory
• Insight Lab: An Immersive Team Environment Linking Paper, Displays, and Data

Beth M. Lange, Mark A. Jones, James L. Meyers, Andersen Consulting
• Reinventing the Familiar: Exploring an Augmented Reality Design Space for Air Traffic Control

Wendy E. Mackay, Anne-Laure Fayard, Laurent Frobert, Lionel Médini, Centre d'Etudes de la Navigation Aérienne

• Designing Audio Aura

Elizabeth D. Mynatt, Maribeth Back, Roy Want, Michael Baer, Jason B. Ellis, Xerox PARC
A design paper discussing the use of various kinds of non-voice audio to indicate background information,  or information in the periphery, of one's workspace.  The authors developed new sounds with particular characteristics (such as a gradually opening and closing "envelop") as well as sets of sounds associated with themes such as "the ocean".  They made summer students walk around PARC wearing headphones and experiencing the aura, and made a VRML simulation as well.  This relies on the use of active badges in order to glean information like: you stop by Karin's office and hear a sound indicating that she was last there two hours ago.
• Communicating Graphical Information to Blind Users Using Music: The Role of Context in Design

James L. Alty, Loughborough University; Dimitrios I. Rigas, Liverpool John Moores University
A very interesting approach to mapping 2D graphics, like those produced by a drawing program, to musical sounds, for the hearing impaired.  The X direction is represented by increasing scale of one instrument (a piano) and the Y direction by another.  Then each kind of object has a characteristic set of sounds that starts with a timpani roll and then moves along the scale the appropriate "distance" for each side of the object.  Apparently users learn the shape patterns very quickly -- but plotting the objects in the right coordinates is, not unexpectedly, more difficult.  They did a study in which people drew the picture while listening to the sounds, and showed the best example, which indeed looked quite good.
• What Can I Say?: Evaluating a Spoken Language Interface to Email

Marilyn A. Walker, AT&T Labs Research; Jeanne Fromer, MIT AI Lab; Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio, Craig Mestel, Don Hindle, AT&T Labs Research
An interesting study in which the main (surprising) result is people prefer rigid, predictable interfaces to spoken language interfaces (like voicemail) over more open (and faster, on average) interfaces.  However, they do like to "barge in" on the interface in the rigid situation.  This was done with a Wizard of Oz method -- they didn't build the system; rather they had a person pretending to be the computer interacting with the subjects.  They also recommend a particular methodology for this kind of study, but I believe this appears in a different paper (called PARADISE, cited in the paper as being from ACL 97).

Thursday, April 23, 14:00 - 15:30

• The Baby Sense Environment: Enriching and Monitoring Infants' Experiences and Communication

Gili Weinberg, Rich Fletcher, Seum-Lim Gan, MIT Media Laboratory
• PingPongPlus: Augmentation and Transformation of Athletic Interpersonal Interaction

Craig Wisneski, Julian Orbanes, Hiroshi Ishii, MIT Media Laboratory
More media lab-like craziness.  Playing ping pong with a smart table -- impact of the ball on the table causes colors to appear, and the table can kind of count -- or at least tell if one person is really walloping the other.
• GroupWear: Nametags that Tell about Relationships

Richard Borovoy, Fred Martin, Mitchel Resnick, Brian Silverman, MIT Media Laboratory
• Fabric Computing Interfaces

Maggie Orth, Rehmi Post, Emily Cooper, MIT Media Laboratory
• It/I: An Experiment Towards Interactive Theatrical Performances

Claudio S. Pinhanez, Aaron F. Bobick, MIT Media Laboratory
• An Interactive Poetic Garden

Tom White, David Small, MIT Media Laboratory

• Progessive Design: Staged Evolution of Scenarios in the Design of a Collaborative Science Learning Environment

George Chin, Mary Beth Rosson, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
• Adapting User Interface Design Methods to the Design of Educational Activities

Clayton Lewis, Cathy Brand, Gina Cherry, Cyndi Rader, University of Colorado
• The Design of the Progress Portfolio: Steps Toward a Classroom-Centered Design Framework

Ben Loh, Josh Radinsky, Eric Russell, Louis M. Gomez, Brian J. Reiser, Daniel C. Edelson, Northwestern University

Thursday, April 23, 16:00 - 17:30

Plenary: Technological Humanism and Values-Driven Design

Brenda Laurel

Founder and Vice President, Design
A great talk about the importance of taking humanistic ideals into account in all of one's endeavors, and very humorous reasons for why girls don't like standard video games (not because they are violent or noisy ... but because they are BORING.)