Alexandra Holloway

Easing the burdens of HPC file management

While the amount of data we can process and store grows, our ability to find data remains dependent upon our own memories more often than not. Manual metadata management is common among scientific users, consuming their time while not making use of the computing resources at hand. Our system design proposes to empower users with more powerful data finding tools, such as unified search spaces, provenance, and ranked file system search. By returning the responsibility of file management to the file system, we enable scientists to focus on their science without the need for a customized file organization scheme for their work.

The prepared partner: can a video game teach labor and childbirth support techniques?

The experience of childbirth is highly individualized. Proper preparation and support before, during, and after the onset of labor is key to shortening labor, decreasing the need for interventions during labor, and ultimately increasing maternal happiness. This paper reports the evaluation of The Prepared Partner, a simple game with goals to introduce natural ways to help a woman in labor, and their effects on labor; to introduce the mechanics of labor and childbirth; to practice interacting with a woman in labor; and to simulate the stages of labor. The user evaluation of The Prepared Partner showed an overwhelming majority of positive responses to the subjective portion of the study, and showed participants performed significantly better on a post-test about labor and childbirth than on a pre-test (p<0.01). Furthermore, labor support was a major theme in a write-in question about childbirth, thus highlighting the effectiveness of The Prepared Partner in introducing the profound need for supporting a woman throughout birth.

The purge threat: scientists' thoughts on peta-scale usability

In high-performance scientific computing, users output millions of files per project or simulation, resulting in petabytes of information. Little is known about how users make sense of it all, and what the major usability issues are in interacting with a file system at scale. We conducted interviews with scientists at national laboratories to identify common practices and issues with current peta-scale file system usage. The major usability problem encountered in the interviews was the purge threat, triggered when the parallel file system reaches capacity, and warning users about impending data loss. We show that the threat is not communicated to the users of the system in a meaningful way. We present three methods scientists used to address the purge threat--analysis, automation, and subversion--and discuss how subversion of the purging system is a clear indication of its lack of utility and indicative of its cognitive complexity. We define reactionary and cautionary archiving and draw a parallel between archiving methods and data production paradigms. Finally, we propose two non-hierarchical file and directory representation models to address the purge threat.

Better Birth through Games: The Design of the Prepared Partner and Digital Birth

Childbirth is a complex and multidimensional experience for the mother, riddled with unforgettable emotions and sensations. In todays cultural climate in California, a mothers primary attendant for social support throughout labor is usually her partner. Preparing the partner is an integral step to making sure that the mother is well-supported in her birth. Because the mothers experience is influenced by the support she receives, and because birth partners need more support than is recognized, the author targets birth partners with a learning intervention. The author investigates video games as a vehicle for knowledge transfer to the birth partner, both as currently available and as a positive learning tool. To address the problem of limited access to childbirth preparation methods, especially for under-served Californians, the author investigated, designed, created, and evaluated two tools: The Prepared Partner and Digital Birth. The Prepared Partner is an online Flash game, and Digital Birth is a free iPhone application that is still undergoing revision and testing. Both games allow the user to practice various supportive actions in the realm of childbirth support for a mother in labor. The author found that players met the learning goals due to The Prepared Partner, and answered positively on the survey questions about their enjoyment of the game.

On creating a native real-time-strategy game user interface for multi-touch devices

Historically, real-time strategy video games, such as Star-craft (1999) and Command and Conquer (1995), were intended to be played on desktop or laptop computers, with interfaces that afford the user dozens of keys and key combinations, mouse gestures including clicking and dragging, and several mouse buttons to further complicate the interface while allowing customization and a wide range of possibilities to the user. On a mobile multi-touch platform, there are constraints of limited visual real estate, which is actually shared with the touch command interface. Though work has been done to port real-time strategy games to the mobile platform, to date, there has not been a significant effort to enhance the usability of these interfaces by removing redundancies and tailoring the game commands to these multi-touch devices. The touch interface presents unique challenges as there are touches and gestures rather than buttons and key combinations. In this paper, we present a rapidly-prototyped user-centered design in a ten-week project of a real-time strategy user interface native for the iPad. As the users experience is key in creating a robust and intuitive interface, we incorporate the users feedback in several stages of the design and prototyping of the project. We show changes to the design of the user interface over several iterations and, finally, show a prototype of the user interface system using a game of our own design as a test platform. The contributions of this project are the interface designed for a new mode of interaction (i.e., the iPad platform), the bubble menu, and the ability to cancel orders.