Manas Tungare

Towards a syllabus repository for computer science courses

A syllabus defines the contents of a course, as well as other information such as resources and assignments. In this paper, we report on our work towards creating a syllabus repository of Computer Science courses across universities in the USA. We present some statistics from our initial collection of 8000+ syllabi. We show a syllabus creator that is integrated with Moodle [5] moodle_2006_moodle, an open-source course management system, which allows for the creation of a syllabus for a particular course. Among other information, it includes knowledge units from the Computing Curricula 2001 body of knowledge. The goal of the syllabus repository is to provide added value to the Computer Science Education community, and we present some such offerings. We conclude by presenting our future plans for the syllabus repository. These include using automated techniques to collect and classify syllabi, providing recommendations to instructors when creating a syllabus, and allowing the community to share their syllabi automatically. The syllabus collection will be part of the Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (CITIDEL), a collection of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL).

Continuous User Interfaces for Seamless Task Migration

In this paper, we propose the Task Migration framework that provides a vocabulary and constructs to decompose a task into its components, and to examine issues that arise when it is performed using multiple devices. In a world of mobile devices and multiple computing devices, users are often forced to interrupt their tasks, move their data and information back and forth among the various devices manually, recreate the interaction context, and then resume the task on another device. We refer to this break from the task at hand as a task disconnect . Our objective is to study how software can bridge this task disconnect, enabling users to seamlessly transition a task across devices using continuous user interface . The framework is intended to help designers of interactive systems understand where breaks in task continuity may occur, and to proactively incorporate features and capabilities to mitigate their impact or avoid such Task Disconnects altogether.

Understanding the evolution of users' personal information management practices

Information is being disseminated much faster than we can assimilate it, leading to information overload. In addition to desktop computers, users use a vast array of other devices to manage their information, which leads to information fragmentation. It has not yet been studied how users adapt their information management practices in response to the introduction of new devices into their personal information ecosystem. As part of my doctoral research, I plan to study this evolution, which is important for the design of next-generation devices and to establish future research directions in personal information management.

Mental workload in multi-device personal information management

Knowledge workers increasingly use multiple devices such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones, and PDAs for personal information management (PIM) tasks. The use of several of these devices together creates higher task difficulty for users than when used individually (as reported in a recent survey we conducted). Prompted by this, we are conducting an experiment to study mental workload in multi-device scenarios. While mental workload has been shown to decrease at sub-task boundaries, it has not been studied if this still holds for sub-tasks performed on different devices. We hypothesize that the level of support provided by the system for task migration affects mental workload. Mental workload measurements can enable designers to isolate critical sub-tasks and redesign or optimize the user experience selectively. In addition, we believe that mental workload shows promise as a cross-tool, cross-task method of evaluating PIM tools, services and strategies, thus fulfilling a need expressed by several researchers in the area of personal information management. In this paper, we describe our ongoing experiment of measuring mental workload (via physiological as well as subjective measures) and its implications for users, designers and researchers in PIM.

Using automatic metadata extraction to build a structured syllabus repository

Syllabi are important documents created by instructors for students. Gathering syllabi that are freely available, and creating useful services on top of the collection, will yield a digital library of value for the educational community. However, gathering and building a repository of syllabi is complicated by the unstructured nature of syllabus representation and the lack of a unified vocabulary for syllabus construction. In this paper, we propose an intelligent approach to automatically annotate freely-available syllabi from the Web to benefit the educational community through supporting services such as semantic search. We discuss our detailed process for converting unstructured syllabi to structured representations through entity recognition, segmentation, and association. Our evaluation results demonstrate the effiectiveness of our extractor and also suggest improvements. We hope our work will benefit not only users of our services but also people who are interested in building other genre-specific repositories.

Automatic syllabus classification

Syllabi are important educational resources. However, searching for a syllabus on the Web using a generic search engine is an error-prone process and often yields too many non-relevant links. In this paper, we present a syllabus classifier to filter noise out from search results. We discuss various steps in the classification process, including class definition, training data preparation, feature selection, and classifier building using SVM and Naïve Bayes. Empirical results indicate that the best version of our method achieves a high classification accuracy, i.e., an F1 value of 83% on average.

Embodied data objects: tangible interfaces to information appliances

This paper describes the idea of embodied data objects. Using this concept, everyday objects can be used to represent bits and bytes of active information. These data objects can be used to interact with information-appliance-like devices that provide specific services as dictated by the context of interaction. The inherent affordances of physical artifacts are leveraged to make the interaction with these service-oriented devices intuitive and natural. We describe the idea of embodied data objects, followed by the design and implementation of two such service-oriented devices: a presentation projector and a printer.