Andreas Dieberger

Hierarchical brushing in a collection of video data

The amount of digital video and associated metadata being generated and stored is increasing rapidly. Given the complex spatial and temporal structure of video information it is a formidable challenge to provide compact and human-readable representations of such content. The solution has to be versatile in order to satisfy different user needs, such as browsing, zooming (looking for something specific), discovering or recording access patterns performing partial searches that can be re-used later, etc. We present a new approach that addresses many of the difficulties. Our representation provides at-a-glance high-level overview of the video collection and also serves as a navigational tool in that collection. While the user navigates to finer-level representations in the video collection our visualization allows him to maintain a sense of location and context within the collection. We introduce the movieDNA as an abstraction to visualize interesting features in a video. Our compact, yet flexible, representation is applicable to any type of linear data. In order to access even larger amounts of data in one view and to express several levels of granularity and compactness we extend the movieDNA to a hierarchical movieDNA. Hierarchical brushing enables browsing, navigating and visualizing several semantic levels of video content. We discuss hierarchical brushing of video content for various user scenarios and present examples demonstrating the versatility of our approach.

CoWeb - Experiences with Collaborative Web spaces

Co Webs, short for collaborative webs, are web-based collaborative tools that have been in continuous use at Georgia Tech and many other places for several years. Originally Co Webs were relatively simple but flexible web servers that allowed everybody to easily modify content. Their openness, and the fact that every user has essentially the same rights and abilities in the space, distinguishes Co Webs from many other collaborative systems.

The use patterns of large, interactive display surfaces: Case studies of media design and use for blueboard and MERboard

During the past several years we have been developing large, interactive display surfaces for collaboration uses in a variety of work settings. People in small work groups can easily create, annotate and share media with their partners. The Blueboard, developed at IBM Research, is a large display system for groups to use in exchanging information in a lightweight, informal collaborative way. It began as a large, ubiquitously placed display surface for walk-by use in a corporate setting and has evolved in response to task demands and user needs. At NASA, the MERboard is being designed to support surface operations for the upcoming Mars exploration rover missions. The MERboard extends the design to support the collaboration requirements for viewing, annotating, linking and distributing information for the science and engineering teams that will operate two rovers on the surface of Mars. Here we examine differing implementations of the same idea: a collaborative information tool that began from the same design goals, but which grew into somewhat different systems under the evolutionary pressures of the NASA and IBM task environments. Lessons about how media are designed, task requirements for collaborative use, information flow requirements and work practice drive the evolution of a system are illustrated.

Evolution of storage management: transforming raw data into information

Exponential growth in storage requirements and an increasing number of heterogeneous devices and application policies are making enterprise storage management a nightmare for administrators. Back-of-the-envelope calculations, rules of thumb, and manual correlation of individual device data are too error prone for the day-to-day administrative tasks of resource provisioning, problem determination, performance management, and impact analysis. Storage management tools have evolved over the past several years from standardizing the data reported by storage subsystems to providing intelligent planners. In this paper, we describe that evolution in the context of the IBM Total Storage® Productivity Center (TPC)--a suite of tools to assist administrators in the day-to-day tasks of monitoring, configuring, provisioning, managing change, analyzing configuration, managing performance, and determining problems. We describe our ongoing research to develop ways to simplify and automate these tasks by applying advanced analytics on the performance statistics and raw configuration and event data collected by TPC using the popular Storage Management Initiative-Specification (SMI-S). In addition, we provide details of SMART (storage management analytics and reasoning technology) as a library that provides a collection of data-aggregation functions and optimization algorithms.

Visualizing interaction history on a collaborative web server

A CoWeb is a collaborative Web space that allows people to modify content and create new pages in a very easy fashion. We modified the original CoWeb to visualize interaction history information in an effort to make it a more social space and to allow users to engage in social navigation.

Exploratory navigation in large multimedia documents using Context Lenses

The Context Lens (CL) is a focus plus context visualization and navigation tool particularly suited for navigating large documents, or collections of documents. Context Lenses have been applied successfully to navigating Web pages, video collections and slide presentations. We discuss our experiences both with linear as well as with hierarchical Context Lenses. We focus on the use of information scent in the hierarchical Context Lens, and on supporting an exploratory navigation style in documents. Exploratory navigation is supported by the fact that a CL delays commitment in the user interface through an interaction style called brushing. Brushing lowers the cost of exploring a section of the document and therefore does not only support, but actively encourage an exploratory navigation style. This aspect of Context Lenses is especially valuable for navigation of large amounts of media data on low bandwidth devices, such as wireless PDA.

Large visualizations for system monitoring of complex, heterogeneous systems

As systems grow larger in size and complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult for administrators to maintain some shared sense of awareness of what’s going on in the system. We implemented a large public display with appropriately designed visualizations that allow for rapid assessment and peripheral awareness of system health. By placing the visualizations on a large display in a shared, commonly used team location, system administrators can monitor behavior as they walk past. Such a display helps administrators identify emerging problems early on and be a focal point for discussions of the system. It allows them not only to share information with colleagues on an “as-noticed” basis, but also highlights interconnected problems that would not be otherwise evident. We found that this approach significantly reduces the workload of individual system administrators, changing the nature of their work by radically simplifying a complex task through social sharing of peripherally noticed state.

Synthesizing evocative imagery through design patterns

Automatically creating images that give a sense of content can be useful in a number of settings. Such images can summarize a larger collection of media in novel ways, giving an evocation of the whole, rather than a precise linguistic summary. Paradoxically, such visual summaries are often found to be more useful as indicators of the gestalt of a media than more traditional language summaries. We demonstrate a design pattern based method that creates visual compositions by selecting imagery from the source document(s) and instantiating several design patterns. Each pattern has a set of slots and roles that are filled with source imagery and then constrained to fit within the pattern visual specifications. Examples are given of the process and its end result. A pilot study has shown that these visual summaries lead to faster retrieval of relevant documents than textual summaries.

Scalability in system management GUIs: a designer's nightmare

As Information Technology (IT) advances, traditional concerns over performance are being overtaken by concerns over manageability and scalability in system management interfaces [1]. Designing effective interactions and representations of large complex systems with intricate relationships among components is a formidable challenge. In this paper we describe the design of a topology viewer application for enterprise-scale storage systems. A key issue in this design effort was to create a graphical topology viewer that would scale to the complexity of typical storage environments and support administrators effectively in various activities. Our approach to address these issues was to use semantic zooming and progressive information disclosure techniques extensively; thus essentially shifting the scalability challenge from purely visual design to mostly interaction design.

Supporting collaboration through passing informal notes to peripheral displays

DropNotes is a note-passing system for informal sharing of information within a small group or for posting notes to oneself. Its goal is to improve collaboration by increasing awareness through peripheral displays. DropNotes typically appear on peripheral displays placed in the work environment, such as a door panel, a peripheral display near the phone, a group board in a break room or a PDA. The design of DropNotes focuses both on making note creation easy and on minimizing interruptions. As such, DropNotes supports informal information sharing and peripheral awareness rather than messaging.