Eser Kandogan

Visualizing multi-dimensional clusters, trends, and outliers using star coordinates

Interactive visualizations are effective tools in mining scientific, engineering, and business data to support decision-making activities. Star Coordinates is proposed as a new multi-dimensional visualization technique, which supports various interactions to stimulate visual thinking in early stages of knowledge discovery process. In Star Coordinates, coordinate axes are arranged on a two-dimensional surface, where each axis shares the same origin point. Each multi-dimensional data element is represented by a point, where each attribute of the data contributes to its location through uniform encoding. Interaction features of Star Coordinates provide users the ability to apply various transformations dynamically, integrate and separate dimensions, analyze correlations of multiple dimensions, view clusters, trends, and outliers in the distribution of data, and query points based on data ranges. Our experience with Star Coordinates shows that it is particularly useful for the discovery of hierarchical clusters, and analysis of multiple factors providing insight in various real datasets including telecommunications churn.

Field studies of computer system administrators: analysis of system management tools and practices

Computer system administrators are the unsung heroes of the information age, working behind the scenes to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot the computer infrastructure that underlies much of modern life. However, little can be found in the literature about the practices and problems of these highly specialized computer users. We conducted a series of field studies in large corporate data centers, observing organizations, work practices, tools, and problem-solving strategies of system administrators. We found system administrators operate within large-scale, complex environments that present significant technical, social, cognitive, and business challenges. In this paper, we describe system administrator tool use in critical, high-cost, labor-intensive work through observational, survey, and interview data. We discuss our findings concerning administrator needs for coordinating work, maintaining situation awareness, planning and rehearsing complex procedures, building tools, and supporting complicated interleaved workflows.

Avatar semantic search: a database approach to information retrieval

We present Avatar Semantic Search, a prototype search engine that exploits annotations in the context of classical keyword search. The process of annotations is accomplished offline by using high-precision information extraction techniques to extract facts, con-cepts, and relationships from text. These facts and concepts are represented and indexed in a structured data store. At runtime, keyword queries are interpreted in the context of these extracted facts and converted into one or more precise queries over the structured store. In this demonstration we describe the overall architecture of the Avatar Semantic Search engine. We also demonstrate the superiority of the AVATAR approach over traditional keyword search engines using Enron email data set and a blog corpus.

Usable autonomic computing systems: the administrator's perspective

One of the primary motivations behind autonomic computing (AC) is the problem of administrating highly complex systems. AC seeks to solve this problem through increased automation, relieving system administrators of many burdensome activities. However, the AC strategy of managing complexity through automation runs the risk of making management harder. We performed field studies of current administrator work practices to inform the design of AC in order to ensure that it simplifies system management. In this paper, we analyze what system administrators do in terms of three important activities: rehearsal and planning, maintaining situation awareness, and managing multitasking, interruptions and diversions. We provide guidelines for constructing AC environments that support these activities.

Just-in-time annotation of clusters, outliers, and trends in point-based data visualizations

We introduce the concept of just-in-time descriptive analytics as a novel application of computational and statistical techniques performed at interaction-time to help users easily understand the structure of data as seen in visualizations. Fundamental to just-intime descriptive analytics is (a) identifying visual features, such as clusters, outliers, and trends, user might observe in visualizations automatically, (b) determining the semantics of such features by performing statistical analysis as the user is interacting, and (c) enriching visualizations with annotations that not only describe semantics of visual features but also facilitate interaction to support high-level understanding of data. In this paper, we demonstrate just-in-time descriptive analytics applied to a point-based multi-dimensional visualization technique to identify and describe clusters, outliers, and trends. We argue that it provides a novel user experience of computational techniques working alongside of users allowing them to build faster qualitative mental models of data by demonstrating its application on a few use-cases. Techniques used to facilitate just-in-time descriptive analytics are described in detail along with their runtime performance characteristics. We believe this is just a starting point and much remains to be researched, as we discuss open issues and opportunities in improving accessibility and collaboration.

A1: end-user programming for web-based system administration

System administrators work with many different tools to manage and fix complex hardware and software infrastructure in a rapidly paced work environment. Through extensive field studies, we observed that they often build and share custom tools for specific tasks that are not supported by vendor tools. Recent trends toward web-based management consoles offer many advantages but put an extra burden on system administrators, as customization requires web programming, which is beyond the skills of many system administrators. To meet their needs, we developed A1, a spreadsheet-based environment with a task-specific system-administration language for quickly creating small tools or migrating existing scripts to run as web portlets. Using A1, system administrators can build spreadsheets to access remote and heterogeneous systems, gather and integrate status data, and orchestrate control of disparate systems in a uniform way. A preliminary user study showed that in just a few hours, system administrators can learn to use A1 to build relatively complex tools from scratch.

In Search of the ‘Magic Carpet’: Design and Experimentation of a Bimanual 3D Navigation Interface

Abstract Hardware and software advances are making real-time 3D graphics part of all mainstream computers. World Wide Web sites encoded in Virtual Reality Modeling Language or other formats allow users across the Internet to share virtual 3D ‘worlds’. As the supporting software and hardware become increasingly powerful, the usability of the current 3D navigation interfaces becomes the limiting factor to the wide-spread application of 3D technologies. In this paper, we analyze the human factors issues in designing a usable navigation interface, including interface metaphor, integration and separation of multiple degrees of freedom, mode switching, isotonic versus isometric control, seamless merger of the 3D navigation devices with the GUI pointing and scrolling devices, and two-handed input. We propose a dual joystick navigation interface design based on a real-world metaphor (bulldozer), and present an experimental evaluation. The results show that the proposed bulldozer interface outperformed the status quo mouse-mapping interface in maze travelling and free flying tasks by 25–50%. Limitations of and possible future improvements to the bulldozer interface are also presented.

Activity-based management of IT service delivery

Growth, adaptability, innovation, and cost control are leading concerns of businesses, especially with respect to use of information technology (IT). Though standards such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) offer the potential for cost savings through the use of formal processes and best practices, such top-down approaches tend to be either highlevel - often far removed from the actual work - or low-level - often inflexible given the rapid pace of technology and market change. We conducted field studies to examine work practices in IT service delivery. Our results suggest that unstructured work activities comprise a significant and vital portion of the overall work done by people in IT service delivery. These activities include negotiating work items and schedules, seeking and providing information and expertise, and using and sharing custom tools and practices. Unstructured activities are conducted in parallel to formal, structured IT service processes, but are not well supported by existing integrated tooling. Thus, they are not easily accounted for and rarely result in reusable assets or feedback to improve the formal IT processes. Based on these findings, we propose an administrator workspace aimed specifically at blending structured and unstructured work activities to support effective, reusable, and quantifiable IT service delivery.

Collaboration in system administration

For sysadmins, solving problems usually involves collaborating with others. How can we make it more effective?

Trust as an underlying factor of system administrator interface choice

System administrators are the unsung heroes of the information age, working behind the scenes to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot the computer infrastructure that underlies much of modern life. While Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are being offered as system administration tools, they mostly continue to use Command-Line Interfaces (CLIs). Based on an extensive survey of system administrators, we provide insights regarding this preference, analyze why many of these power users perceive CLIs as more effective than GUIs, and discuss findings as supported by observations from our parallel field studies. Our analysis indicates that cognition-based trust and monitoring play major roles in the interface preference for CLIs vs. GUIs. We also propose next steps for further exploration of trust in human-computer interfaces.