Nathaniel Good

Towards automatic extraction of event and place semantics from flickr tags

We describe an approach for extracting semantics of tags, unstructured text-labels assigned to resources on the Web, based on each tags usage patterns. In particular, we focus on the problem of extracting place and event semantics for tags that are assigned to photos on Flickr, a popular photo sharing website that supports time and location (latitude/longitude) metadata. We analyze two methods inspired by well-known burst-analysis techniques and one novel method: Scale-structure Identification. We evaluate the methods on a subset of Flickr data, and show that our Scale-structure Identification method outperforms the existing techniques. The approach and methods described in this work can be used in other domains such as geo-annotated web pages, where text terms can be extracted and associated with usage patterns.

Over-exposed?: privacy patterns and considerations in online and mobile photo sharing

As sharing personal media online becomes easier and widely spread, new privacy concerns emerge - especially when the persistent nature of the media and associated context reveals details about the physical and social context in which the media items were created. In a first-of-its-kind study, we use context-aware camerephone devices to examine privacy decisions in mobile and online photo sharing. Through data analysis on a corpus of privacy decisions and associated context data from a real-world system, we identify relationships between location of photo capture and photo privacy settings. Our data analysis leads to further questions which we investigate through a set of interviews with 15 users. The interviews reveal common themes in privacy considerations: security, social disclosure, identity and convenience. Finally, we highlight several implications and opportunities for design of media sharing applications, including using past privacy patterns to prevent oversights and errors.

Keeping things in context: a comparative evaluation of focus plus context screens, overviews, and zooming

Users working with documents that are too large and detailed to fit on the users screen (e.g. chip designs) have the choice between zooming or applying appropriate visualization techniques. In this paper, we present a comparison of three such techniques. The first, focus plus context screens, are wall-size low-resolution displays with an embedded high-resolution display region. This technique is compared with overview plus detail and zooming/panning. We interviewed fourteen visual surveillance and design professionals from different areas (graphic design, chip design, air traffic control, etc.) in order to create a repre sentative sample of tasks to be used in two experimental comparison studies. In the first experiment, subjects using focus plus context screens to extract information from large static documents completed the two experimental tasks on average 21% and 36% faster than when they used the other interfaces. In the second experiment, focus plus context screens allowed subjects to reduce their error rate in a driving simulation to less than one third of the error rate of the competing overview plus detail setup

What a to-do: studies of task management towards the design of a personal task list manager

This paper reports on the results of studies of task management to support the design of a task list manager. We examined the media used to record and organize to-dos and tracked how tasks are completed over time. Our work shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, people are not poor at prioritizing. Rather, they have well-honed strategies for tackling particular task management challenges. By illustrating what factors influence task completion and how representations function to support task management, we hope to provide a strong foundation for the design of a personal to-do list manager. We also present some preliminary efforts in this direction.

Usability and privacy: a study of Kazaa P2P file-sharing

P2P file sharing systems such as Gnutella, Freenet, and KaZaA, while primarily intended for sharing multimedia files, frequently allow other types of information to be shared. This raises serious concerns about the extent to which users may unknowingly be sharing private or personal information.In this paper, we report on a cognitive walkthrough and a laboratory user study of the KaZaA file sharing user interface. The majority of the users in our study were unable to tell what files they were sharing, and sometimes incorrectly assumed they were not sharing any files when in fact they were sharing all files on their hard drive. An analysis of the KaZaA network suggested that a large number of users appeared to be unwittingly sharing personal and private files, and that some users were indeed taking advantage of this and downloading files containing ostensibly private information.

Focus plus context screens: displays for users working with large visual documents

Users working with documents that are too large and detailed to fit the users screen (e.g. chip designs) have the choice of zooming or applying appropriate visualization techniques. In this demonstration, we will present focus plus context screens-wall-size low-resolution displays with an embedded high-resolution display region. They allow users to view details of a document up close, while simultaneously seeing peripheral parts of the document in lower resolution. Unlike overview plus detail, focus plus context screens do not require users to visually switch between multiple views. Unlike fisheye views, focus plus context screens do not introduce distortion.

Online pharmacies and technology crime

Online pharmacies are businesses that sell prescription-controlled drugs over the internet. Some online pharmacies operate illegally in the United States, by providing controlled pharmaceuticals without a prescription, and some pharmacies sell controlled substances. Online pharmacies are also a major driver of other kinds of computer crime because in order to gain consumers’ attention, pharmacies and their marketers send tremendous volumes of spam email and engage in other tactics that involve computer intrusions, such as the creation of botnets. Online pharmacies are both an enduring technology crime challenge, and a lens for understanding cybercrime. This chapter introduces the problem of illegal online pharmacies and the intense law enforcement efforts to end their operation. To provide background for the cybercrime challenge presented by online pharmacies, the chapter explains the methods that such businesses use to promote their visibility in organic search engine results. The methods used to promote online pharmacies show that they have dynamics similar to retail-style businesses, where a firm needs to reach a large number of customers. This chapter also presents data from an empirical experiment examining how pharmacies achieve top-ranked status in U.S.-based, English-language search engine results. In our sample, over a third of the inbound links to pharmacies in top search results appear to be from hacked websites. In analyzing links among the pharmacies, we find that online pharmacies are highly concentrated, often employing shared infrastructure (such as phone numbers). We conclude with a discussion of opportunities for U.S. law enforcement to address pharmacies directly instead of pursuing intermediaries, and consider whether pharmacies can be liable for illegal search engine optimization techniques used to promote their sites. Because online pharmacies’ infrastructure is so interdependent, minor, targeted law enforcement interventions could disrupt a large number of the most successful online pharmacies. Online pharmacies’ operation thus contradicts popular libertarian narratives that the internet is an ungovernable medium.