Joseph W. Sullivan

Web Page Filtering and Re-Authoring for Mobile Users

The Digestor system automatically converts web-based documents designed for desktop viewinginto formats appropriate for handheld devices with small display screens, such as Palm-PCs, PDAs,and cellular phones. Digestor employs a heuristic planning algorithm and a set of structural pagetransformations to produce the ‘best’ looking document for a given display size. Digestor can also beinstructed, via a scripting language, to render portions of documents, thereby avoiding navigationthrough many screens of information. Two versions of Digestor have been deployed, one that re-authors HTML into HTML for conventional browsers and one that converts HTML into HDML forPhone.com’s micro-browsers. Digestor provides a crucial technology for rapidly accessing, scanningand processing information from arbitrary web-based documents from any location reachable bywired or unwired communication.

Animated autonomous personal representatives

1. ABSTRACT We describe the research goals and issues in constructing autonomous personal representatives, and the desirability of using synthetic characters as the user interface for such artifacts. An application of these autonomous representatives is then described in which characters can be attached to a document to express a user’s point of view or give guided tours or presentations of the document’s contents. 1.1

The rise of personal Web pages at work

A series of 20 interviews in four organizations explores the ways in which employees take advantage of personal web pages to support their work and to reflect who they are. Both interviewee comments and web page examples suggest the importance of individual personalization of information managcmcnt and dissemination, prcscntation and pcrccption of personality, and usage from the reader’s perspective. These results can inform the development of future web technologies for use in organititions. Furthermore, this self representation on web pages is a way of making individual knowledge more available in the workplace.

Multimodal response planning: an adaptive rule based approach

This paper describes the architecture and prototype of a system which dynamically determines how to present information to a user. The system utilizes a rule based approach to select one or more modalities for presenting information. Next the system determines one or more techniques to present the information within each of the previously selected modalities. This system also adapts to individual users providing flexibility not found in traditional presentation systems. Finally, models are used for storing knowledge about the user resulting in a system which can be easily enhanced as new data is obtained and can adapt to the needs of its users.

Collaborative and co-operative information seeking: CSCW'98 workshop report

Collaborative and cooperative aspects of information storage, seeking and retrieval have become a hot topic in recent years e.g. [1,2,4]. The acknowledgement that information seeking is a collaborative activity is part of a trend toward foregrounding the social in system design [5].The goal of this workshop was to discuss current conceptions of collaborative and cooperative information seeking activities, and to identify future research issues in the design and use of digital information spaces and information seeking tools. Our starting point was that information seeking is much more than the transmission of information from a system to a solitary user on the basis of queries issued by that user. Therefore, models of information seeking that underpin system design must move away from thinking of information seeking as single-user problem solving. Rather, such models need to explicitly address social aspects of information seeking activities.

CSCW '98 workshop report: collaborative and co-operative information seeking

The goal of this workshop was to discuss current conceptions of collaborative and co-operative information seeking activities, and to identify future research issues in the design and use of digital information spaces and information seeking tools. Our starting point was that information seeking is much more than the transmission of information from a system to a solitary user on the basis of queries issued by that user. Therefore, models of information seeking that underpin system design must move away from thinking of information seeking as single-user problem solving. Rather, such models need to explicitly address social aspects of information seeking activities.