Caslon Chua

Visualising melbourne pedestrian count

We present a visualisation of Melbourne pedestrian count data and a visual metaphor for representing hour-level temporal dimension in this context. The pedestrian count data is captured from sensors located around the city. A visualisation web application is implemented that incorporates a thematic map of these sensor locations with a 24-hour clocklike polygon that shows pedestrian counts at every hour, and alongside a display of daily temperature. Our visualisation allows users to analyse how the city is used by pedestrians. Moreover, the design of our visualisation was driven by the type of analysis tasks carried out by city planners. The visualisation would help city planners better understand the dynamics of pedestrian activity within the city and aid them in urban management and design policy recommendation.

A user interface guide for web search systems

The amount of information available on the internet has grown unabated over the years. With internet users using web search systems as a starting point into the internet, understanding the tasks involved in a web search is important to designing appropriate interfaces. This paper investigates existing studies on search interfaces. It identifies important task interactions and reports key points that need to be considered in interface design. In defining a design guide for web search interfaces, it argues the need to address specific key points in order to promote a positive user search experience with the potential to achieve better search results.

PedaViz: Visualising Hour-Level Pedestrian Activity

Effective visualisation plays a vital role in generating insights from data. The selection of graph types however, is highly dependent on the analysis tasks and data types at hand. For example, spatio-temporal visualisations encode changes in data over time and space. Although they have the potential of revealing overall tendencies and movement patterns, building effective spatio-temporal visualisations is challenging because it requires encoding all three attributes of spatio-temporal data i.e. thematic (values of attributes), temporal and spatial in a single visualisation. In this application design study, we present PedaViz for representing hour-level spatio-temporal attributes within a single visualisation; a 24-hour radial visual metaphor that encodes hour-level temporal and daily temperature attributes while utilising a thematic map display to present spatial attributes. The design was applied on city planning domain using Melbournes pedestrian count and temperature data. Results of our preliminary user evaluation suggest that our visualisation is easily understandable by users; and supports users in carrying out selected analysis tasks.

Requirements Engineering Tools for Global Software Engineering - A Feature Analysis Study.

The demand in Global Software Engineering (GSE) is increasing every year. GSE helps the software development industry reduce development cost and provide access to resources pool; however, GSE practitioners also need to deal with numerous challenges. This impacts Requirements Engineering (RE) process in terms of teamwork, collaboration, knowledge management, time and cultural differences. RE is considered to be one of the important processes in the software development, and several studies have pointed out the need of a new RE process that supports GSE environment. We acknowledged the importance of RE tools in supporting RE process and conducted a study to discover the best way to use RE tools to solve the challenges in GSE. The study used the Feature Analysis Screening Mode approach and generated a list of features with four categories that would address these challenges, namely: (1) Shared Knowledge Management, (2) Workflow and Change Management, (3) Traceability, and (4) System and Data Integration. Four RE tools on the market are selected for investigation. We found out how these tools best support three of the categories, but have limited capability for the first category. Some suggestions were given for future development to provide the support for RE process in GSE environment.

App characteristics guide for ICT integration in early childhood education: an experience analysis

In the early childhood setting, introducing appropriate technologies and providing the skills, knowledge and techniques to enhance childrens learning is very important. This paper proposes an application (app) characteristics guide in the design and development of apps that support ICT integration in early childhood teaching. It also presents the experiences of using existing apps that satisfy the identified app characteristics that enable children to communicate, play and learn. Finally, it presents observations on how well these apps are integrated into early childhood teaching.

Preprocessing Code Example For Searching

Students who start learning to program often find it difficult to acquire programming concepts. Among all teaching materials, code example is favoured most by both teachers and students. A number of code examples can be found in on-line resources, such as TutorialsPoint and W3School, however, there is not much work on standardising good code examples. This paper proposed a process to prepare good code example for searching. First, we will define characteristics for good code example, followed by a set of preprocessing methods for extracting and processing these characteristics for searching. To evaluate the perceived usefulness of the extracted and processed characteristics for searching, we devised a questionnaire to evaluate the perceived usefulness of the extracted and processed characteristics that will be used in the development of the code example search engine. The positive outcome of this preliminary work enabled us to start work on the code example search system to be used by novice programmers to learn programming.

A logical error detector for novice PHP programmers

Currently PHP is the most widely used web programming language for websites [1]; however there seems to be a limited availability of debugging tools that a novice programmer can use. In this work, we propose a framework to identify logic errors committed by novice PHP programmers and prototype application to automate the process of detecting such errors. The aim is to develop a tool that may be used to assist novice programmers in their learning process, and contribute to computer science education research.

Interactive interface for query formulation

Query formulation interface remained unchanged over the years. It is still mainly an input box for the user to enter the search query and a search button to initiate the search process. This paper explores and implements an interface design that incorporates dynamic and interactive properties during query formulation. It attempts to match users search strategies rather than force users to accommodate to the current search interface. It proposes interaction elements to support functionalities that assists user during query formulation. These functionalities include domain filter suggestion, query suggestion, and spelling correction functions.

Presenting search results of meeting documents

Information plays an important role in organisations, allowing management to make sound decisions. Many organisations keep documents in electronic format, and as the number and volume of documents increases, search and retrieval become tedious and difficult. Effective presentation of search results is an important user interface issue for any search tool in this context. Search results can be composed of a number of different elements, including file details, text extracts and thumbnail images. This study considered the effectiveness of several search result presentation elements in the context of a desktop search tool used to search for relevant meeting minute documents. Participants were presented with search results from two existing desktop search applications and one test application developed by the authors. The participants were then asked to evaluate the quality of different elements of the result presentation. Responses indicated that domain-specific presentation elements are valuable to users, allowing them to effectively determine the relevance of individual search result items. The results also suggest that other domain specific search tools would benefit from customised search result presentation.