Karl Gyllstrom

Effects of popularity and quality on the usage of query suggestions during information search

Many search systems provide users with recommended queries during online information seeking. Although usage statistics are often used to recommend queries, this information is usually not displayed to the user. In this study, we investigate how the presentation of this information impacts use of query suggestions. Twenty-three subjects used an experimental search system to find documents about four topics. Eight query suggestions were provided for each topic: four were high quality queries and four were low quality queries. Fake usage information indicating how many other people used the queries was also provided. For half the queries this information was high and for the other half this information was low. Results showed that subjects could distinguish between high and low quality queries and were not influenced by the usage information. Qualitative data revealed that subjects felt favorable about the suggestions, but the usage information was less important for the search task used in this study.

FaceSpace: endo- and exo-spatial hypermedia in the transparent video facetop

The Transparent Video Facetop is a novel user interface concept that supports not only single-user interactions with a PC, but also close pair collaborations, such as that found in collaborative Web browsing, in distributed pair programming and in remote medicine. We recently demonstrated the Vis-a-Vid Facetop prototype as a single-user GUI for manipulating the elements of a traditional WIMP desktop [21]. In this paper we introduce FaceSpace, a Facetop-based hypermedia system that combines structure and functionality of both spatial and ubiquitous hypertext. FaceSpace eliminates camera registration errors due to dynamic object tracking and user self-image feedback. FaceSpace had two forms of linking that combine spatial hypermedia with ubiquitous hypermedia: Like an exo-skeleton provides an organism with structure from without, exo-spatial hypertext has the spatial structure applied over the ubiquity of the users real-world environment. Endo-spatial hypertext has the spatial structure derived from and attached to the elements of the users domain. Endo-spatial hypertext is an integral concept in systems that have been classified as ubiquitous hypertext; exo-spatial is unique to FaceSpace in current hypertext systems.

Support for Distributed Pair Programming in the Transparent Video Facetop

The Transparent Video Facetop is a novel user interface concept that supports not only single-user interactions with a PC, but also close pair collaborations, such as that found in collaborative Web browsing, remote medicine, and in distributed pair programming. In this paper we discuss the use of a novel video-based UI called the Facetop [16] for solving several problems reported to us by teams doing distributed pair programming. Specifically, the Facetop allows a distributed pair to recapture some the facial expressions and face-to-face communications contact lost in earlier distributed sessions. It also allows members of a distributed pair to point conveniently, quickly, and naturally to their shared work, in the same manner (manually) that they do when seated side-by-side. Our results enhance the ability of organizations to do effective XP-style agile development with distributed teams.

Seeing is retrieving: building information context from what the user sees

As the users document and application workspace grows more diverse, supporting personal information management becomes increasingly important. This trend toward diversity renders it difficult to implement systems which are tailored to specific applications, file types, or other information sources. We developed SeeTrieve, a personal document retrieval and classification system which abstracts applications by considering only the text they present to the user through the user interface. Associating the visible text which surrounds a document in time, SeeTrieve is able to identify important information about the task within which a document is used. This context enables novel, useful ways for users to retrieve their personal documents. When compared to content based systems, this context based retrieval achieved substantial improvements in document recall.

Activity put in context : identifying implicit task context within the user's document interaction

Modern desktop search is ill-fitted to our personal document workspace. On one hand, many of the methods which render web search effective cannot be applied on the desktop. On the other, desktop search does not take full advantage of attributes that are unique to our personal documents. In this work, we present Confluence, a desktop search system that addresses this problem by capturing the task context within which a user interacts with their documents. This context is then integrated with traditional desktop search techniques to enable task-based document retrieval. Building upon Connections, a system that identifies task context by passively monitoring the users interaction with their documents within the file system. Confluence also traces user activity within the user interface and incorporates methods to analyze and integrate this new stream of information. We show that this approach significantly improves the accuracy of task identification, achieving 25% to 30% better recall.

Confluence : enhancing contextual desktop search

We present Confluence, an enhancement to a desktop file search tool called Confluence which extracts conceptual relationships between files by their temporal access patterns in the file system. A limitation of a purely file-based approach is that as file operations are increasingly abstracted by applications, their correlation to a users activity weakens and thereby reduces the applicability of their temporal patterns. To deal with this problem, we augment the file event stream with a stream of window focus events from the UI layer. We present 3 algorithms that analyze this new stream, extracting the users task information which informs the existing Confluence algorithms. We present results and conclusions from a preliminary user study on Confluence.

Next-generation DPP with Sangam and Facetop

This paper describes a state-of-the-art environment for distributed Extreme Programming that results from combining the Sangam editor, developed at NCSU and the Facetop user interface, developed at UNC-Chapel Hill. Sangam facilitates distributed Extreme Programming by sending events back and forth between a driver and a navigator working under the Eclipse development environment. Concurrently, Facetop allows the distributed pair to recapture some of the face-to-face communications that are lost in no-video distributed pairing sessions. The integrated tool is a quantum leap forward for distributed Extreme Programming as well as distributed agile development.

EmSe: initial evaluation of a child-friendly medical search system

When undergoing medical treatment in combination with extended stays in hospitals, children have been frequently found to develop an interest in their condition and the course of treatment. A natural means of searching for related information would be to use a web search engine. The medical domain, however, imposes several key challenges on young and inexperienced searchers, such as difficult terminology, potentially frightening topics or non-objective information offered by lobbyists or pharmaceutical companies. To address these problems, we present the design and usability study of EmSe, a search service for children in a hospital environment.

Semi-transparent video interfaces to assist deaf persons in meetings

Meetings are a vital part of participation in social activities. For a deaf person who does not understand spoken language, following a discourse at meetings can become confusing if there are too many simultaneous sources of information. When the person focuses on one source of information, he misses information from another source; for example, while looking at a presenters slides, the person misses information from the signing interpreter. Using semi-transparent video technology we have developed two applications to assist the deaf in local group meetings and remote personal meetings. The features of the applications were iteratively designed, as we incorporated feedback from the Deaf community. This research is an extension of our Facetop research project, which applies semi-transparent video for people without sensory disabilities.

Techniques for improving the visibility and "sharability" of semi-transparent video in shared workspaces

Semi-transparency increases the amount of information that interfaces can expose in a given screen space by allowing content from a window to remain partially visible while other windows overlap it. We have previously explored the application of a full screen, semi-transparent video window in a collaborative, distributed software environment in an effort to more seamlessly incorporate face-to-face communication into group software development. Our experience with the system suggests that, while semi-transparent video can improve aspects of distributed collaborations, two problems emerge. First, the alpha blending of pixels from video overlays can obfuscate certain types of visual data, making either the video or the underlying content diffcult to see. Second, video overlays complicate the ability to provide application sharing at the framebuffer - the most general sharing layer. In this paper, we present methods to overcome these problems.