Yea-Seul Kim

Generating Personalized Spatial Analogies for Distances and Areas

Distances and areas frequently appear in text articles. However, people struggle to understand these measurements when they cannot relate them to measurements of locations that they are personally familiar with. We contribute tools for generating personalized spatial analogies: re-expressions that contextualize spatial measurements in terms of locations with similar measurements that are more familiar to the user. Our automated approach takes a users location and generates a personalized spatial analogy for a target distance or area using landmarks. We present an interactive application that tags distances, areas, and locations in a text article and presents personalized spatial analogies using interactive maps. We find that users who view a personalized spatial analogy map generated by our system rate the helpfulness of the information for understanding a distance or area 1.9 points higher (on a 7 pt scale) than when they see the article with no spatial analogy and 0.7 points higher than when they see generic spatial analogy.

Traffigram: distortion for clarification via isochronal cartography

Most geographic maps visually represent physical distance; however, travel time can in some cases be more important than distance because it directly indicates availability. The technique of creating maps from temporal data is known as isochronal cartography, and is a form of distortion for clarification. In an isochronal map, congestion expands areas, while ideal travel conditions make the map shrink in comparison to the actual distance scale of a traditional map. Although there have been many applications of this technique, detailed user studies of its efficacy remain scarce, and there are conflicting views on its practical value. To attempt to settle this issue, we utilized a user-centered design process to determine which features of isochronal cartography might be most usable in practice. We developed an interactive cartographic visualization system, Traffigram, that features a novel combination of efficient isochronal map algorithms and an interface designed to give map users a quick and seamless experience while preserving geospatial integrity and aesthetics. We validated our design choices with multiple usability studies. We present our results and discuss implications for design.

Improving Comprehension of Measurements Using Concrete Re-expression Strategies

It can be difficult to understand physical measurements (e.g., 28 lb, 600 gallons) that appear in news stories, data reports, and other documents. We develop tools that automatically re-express unfamiliar measurements using the measurements of familiar objects. Our work makes three contributions: (1) we identify effectiveness criteria for objects used in concrete measurement re-expressions; (2) we operationalize these criteria in a scalable method for mining a large dataset of concrete familiar objects with their physical dimensions from Amazon and Wikipedia; and (3) we develop automated concrete re-expression tools that implement three common re-expression strategies (adding familiar context, reunitization and proportional analogy) as energy minimization algorithms. Crowdsourced evaluations of our tools indicate that people find news articles with re-expressions more helpful and re- expressions help them to better estimate new measurements.

SimpleScience: Lexical Simplification of Scientific Terminology.

Lexical simplification of scientific terms represents a unique challenge due to the lack of a standard parallel corpora and fast rate at which vocabulary shift along with research. We introduce SimpleScience, a lexical simplification approach for scientific terminology. We use word embeddings to extract simplification rules from a parallel corpora containing scientific publications and Wikipedia. To evaluate our system we construct SimpleSciGold, a novel gold standard set for science-related simplifications. We find that our approach outperforms prior context-aware approaches at generating simplifications for scientific terms.

VIZMO Game Browser: Accessing Video Games by Visual Style and Mood

Despite the growing interests in video games as consumer products as well as objects of research, current methods for accessing video games are limited. We present Vizmo as a new way of browsing video games based on their visual style and mood. In order to test the usability and usefulness of Vizmo, we asked 19 video game experts to evaluate their interaction with the tool. The results show that experts perceived Vizmo as a novel and aesthetically pleasing game discovery tool which would be most useful for game research on historical and aesthetic aspects. We discuss five key points for improving the design of Vizmo as well as our future plan for the next iteration of this prototype game browser.

Toward the operationalization of visual metaphor

Many successful digital interfaces employ visual metaphors to convey features or data properties to users, but the characteristics that make a visual metaphor effective are not well understood. We used a theoretical conception of metaphor from cognitive linguistics to design an interactive system for viewing the citation network of the corpora of literature in the JSTOR database, a highly connected compound graph of 2 million papers linked by 8 million citations. We created 4 variants of this system, manipulating 2 distinct properties of metaphor. We conducted a between‐subjects experimental study with 80 participants to compare understanding and engagement when working with each version. We found that building on known image schemas improved response time on look‐up tasks, while contextual detail predicted increases in persistence and the number of inferences drawn from the data. Schema‐congruency combined with contextual detail produced the highest gains in comprehension. These findings provide concrete mechanisms by which designers presenting large data sets through metaphorical interfaces may improve their effectiveness and appeal with users.