James R. Eagan

Low-level components of analytic activity in information visualization

Existing system level taxonomies of visualization tasks are geared more towards the design of particular representations than the facilitation of user analytic activity. We present a set of ten low level analysis tasks that largely capture peoples activities while employing information visualization tools for understanding data. To help develop these tasks, we collected nearly 200 sample questions from students about how they would analyze five particular data sets from different domains. The questions, while not being totally comprehensive, illustrated the sheer variety of analytic questions typically posed by users when employing information visualization systems. We hope that the presented set of tasks is useful for information visualization system designers as a kind of common substrate to discuss the relative analytic capabilities of the systems. Further, the tasks may provide a form of checklist for system designers.

Watchit: simple gestures and eyes-free interaction for wristwatches and bracelets

We present WatchIt, a prototype device that extends interaction beyond the watch surface to the wristband, and two interaction techniques for command selection and execution. Because the small screen of wristwatch computers suffers from visual occlusion and the fat finger problem, we investigated the use of the wristband as an available interaction resource. Not only does WatchIt use a cheap, energy efficient and invisible technology, but it involves simple, basic gestures that allow good performance after little training, as suggested by the results of a pilot study. We propose a novel gesture technique and an adaptation of an existing menu technique suitable for wristband interaction. In a user study, we investigated their usage in eyes-free contexts, finding that they perform well. Finally, we present techniques where the bracelet is used in addition to the screen to provide precise continuous control over list scrolling. We also report on a preliminary survey of traditional and digital jewelry that points to the high frequency of watches and bracelets in both genders and gives a sense of the tasks people feel like performing on such devices.

Multisurface Interaction in the WILD Room

The WILD (wall-sized interaction with large datasets) room serves as a testbed for exploring the next generation of interactive systems by distributing interaction across diverse computing devices, enabling multiple users to easily and seamlessly create, share, and manipulate digital content. The featured Web extra is a video of Michel Beaudouin-Lafon and his colleagues demonstrating how the WILD (wall-sized interaction with large datasets) room lets users view, explore, manipulate large amounts of digital content.

Shared substance: developing flexible multi-surface applications

This paper presents a novel middleware for developing flexible interactive multi-surface applications. Using a scenario-based approach, we identify the requirements for this type of applications. We then introduce Substance, a data-oriented framework that decouples functionality from data, and Shared Substance, a middleware implemented in Substance that provides powerful sharing abstractions. We describe our implementation of two applications with Shared Substance and discuss the insights gained from these experiments. Our finding is that the combination of a data-oriented programming model with middleware support for sharing data and functionality provides a flexible, robust solution with low viscosity at both design-time and run-time.

Cracking the cocoa nut: user interface programming at runtime

This article introduces runtime toolkit overloading, a novel approach to help third-party developers modify the interaction and behavior of existing software applications without access to their underlying source code. We describe the abstractions provided by this approach as well as the mechanisms for implementing them in existing environments. We describe Scotty, a prototype implementation for Mac OS X Cocoa that enables developers to modify existing applications at runtime, and we demonstrate a collection of interaction and functional transformations on existing off-the-shelf applications. We show how Scotty helps a developer make sense of unfamiliar software, even without access to its source code. We further discuss what features of future environments would facilitate this kind of runtime software development.

Webstrates : Shareable Dynamic Media

We revisit Alan Kays early vision of dynamic media that blurs the distinction between documents and applications. We introduce shareable dynamic media that are malleable by users, who may appropriate them in idiosyncratic ways; shareable among users, who collaborate on multiple aspects of the media; and distributable across diverse devices and platforms. We present Webstrates, an environment for exploring shareable dynamic media. Webstrates augment web technology with real-time sharing. They turn web pages into substrates, i.e. software entities that act as applications or documents depending upon use. We illustrate Webstrates with two implemented case studies: users collaboratively author an article with functionally and visually different editors that they can personalize and extend at run-time; and they orchestrate its presentation and audience participation with multiple devices. We demonstrate the simplicity and generative power of Webstrates with three additional prototypes and evaluate it from a systems perspective.

Dynamic visualization of graphs with extended labels

The paper describes a novel technique to visualize graphs with extended node and link labels. The lengths of these labels range from a short phrase to a full sentence to an entire paragraph and beyond. Our solution is different from all the existing approaches that almost always rely on intensive computational effort to optimize the label placement problem. Instead, we share the visualization resources with the graph and present the label information in static, interactive, and dynamic modes without the requirement for tackling the intractability issues. This allows us to reallocate the computational resources for dynamic presentation of real time information. The paper includes a user study to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the visualization technique.

Extending and enhancing GT-ITM

GT-ITM is a collection of software tools for creation, manipulation, and analysis of graph models of internet topology. It has been used by networking researchers in a variety of ways, most often to create topologies for use in simulation studies. This paper describes the features of a new release of GT-ITM, including enhanced visualization capabilities; a routing and forwarding module for use with large graphs; and support for modeling of interdomain routing policies.

Augmented letters: mnemonic gesture-based shortcuts

We propose Augmented Letters, a new technique aimed at augmenting gesture-based techniques such as Marking Menus [9] by giving them natural, mnemonic associations. Augmented Letters gestures consist of the initial of command names, sketched by hand in the Unistroke style, and affixed with a straight tail. We designed a tentative touch device interaction technique that supports fast interactions with large sets of commands, is easily discoverable, improves users recall at no speed cost, and supports fluid transition from novice to expert mode. An experiment suggests that Augmented Letters outperform Marking Menu in terms of user recall.

Technical note: visually encoding program test information to find faults in software

Large test suites are frequently used to evaluate software systems and to locate errors. Unfortunately, this process can generate a huge amount of data that is difficult to interpret manually. We have created a system, Tarantula, that visually encodes test data to help find program errors. The system uses a principled color mapping to represent source lines in passed and failed tests. It also provides a flexible user interface for examining different perspectives that show the behavior of the source code on test sets, ranging from individual tests, to important subsets such as the set of failed tests, to the entire test suite.