Towards effective video annotation: An approach to automatically link notes with video content

The characteristics of annotations, such as highlighting, context-based notes, and organization are difficult to translate from the traditional paper-based medium to the digital format. An added challenge is how to facilitate annotations on a digital video in a collaborative distance learning environment. To explore issues in video annotation, we developed a tool called Interactive Shared Education Environment (ISEE). ISEE automatically generates hyperlinked timestamps, which we called Smartlinks, to associate the notes with their video contents. A usability study with 59 participants, following up by a small-scale eye-tracking study, was conducted to explore users’ video note-taking behaviors and to examine the effect of the new Smartlink design. Our results showed that participants with Smartlink took fewer notes, focused less on video controls and more on video content than those without Smartlink. We believe the main benefit of Smartlink is that it may offload non-learning related cognitive loads and allow users to take better notes. Findings from this study on users’ video annotation behaviors shed light on the future design of video annotation systems in both individual and collaborative environments.     

Evaluation of a traceability approach for informal freehand sketches

Most engineers and designers prefer to use large drawing boards such as whiteboards or flip charts for the initial collaborative sketching of a system’s models. Large interactive displays have recently begun to replace these physical drawing boards, blurring the line between freehand sketching and toolkit-aided modeling. While digital boards offer more flexibility in drawing and navigating models, they must also provide appropriate cognitive support for frequent shifts of focus and navigation between related artifacts. Furthermore, automated assistance in uncovering potential inconsistencies and contradictions between model sketches would be beneficial so that users do not get lost amid their sketches. In this paper, we discuss an approach to create relationships between the elements of informal hand-drawn sketches on large interactive displays by combining fuzzy search with classic information retrieval techniques. The identification and maintenance of relationships is particularly challenging because we are working with hand-drawn and hand-lettered model sketches rather than the syntactically clean models created with digital modeling toolkits. We evaluated our approach by analyzing 89 model sketches from 16 industry projects and found that it identifies relations between sketched model elements with high precision and recall.     

Online class size, note reading, note writing and collaborative discourse

Researchers have long recognized class size as affecting students?? performance in face-to-face contexts. However, few studies have examined the effects of class size on exact reading and writing loads in online graduate-level courses. This mixed-methods study examined relationships among class size, note reading, note writing, and collaborative discourse by analyzing tracking logs from 25 graduate-level online courses (25 instructors and 341 students) and interviews with 10 instructors and 12 graduate students. The quantitative and qualitative data analyses were designed to complement each other. The findings from this study point to class size as a major factor affecting note reading and writing loads in online graduate-level courses. Class size was found positively correlated with total number of notes students and instructors read and wrote, but negatively correlated with the percentage of notes students read, their note size and note grade level score. In larger classes, participants were more likely to experience information overload and students were more selective in reading notes. The data also suggest that the overload effects of large classes can be minimized by dividing students into small groups for discussion purposes. Interviewees felt that the use of small groups in large classes benefited their collaborative discussions. Findings suggested 13 to 15 as an optimal class size. The paper concludes with a list of pedagogical recommendations and suggestions for new multimedia software features to enhance collaborative learning in online classes.     

Creativity Bento Box: A Physical Resource Pack to Support Interaction in Virtual Space

The Creativity Bento Box is a physical resource pack, designed to support casual social interaction and break taking in an intensive, computer-mediated social activity. It was developed within the Creativity Greenhouse project, which piloted a mechanism to create research proposals and distribute funding at a distance. This involved facilitated phases of collaboration and competition over multiple days of computer-mediated work, where participants communicate and interact through a virtual world. During the iterative development process, the lack of time for socializing, the intense focus on virtual resources, and a lack of time spent away from the screen were reported as negative issues in feedback from participants. This article reports on the development of the Creativity Bento Box and how it helped to address these issues. By providing physical resources that contrasted with the properties of the virtual world, it supported people to socialize and take breaks from their primary activity, allowed them to include physical space and artifacts in their interactions, and provoked moves away from the otherwise intense focus on the computer. The article reflects on the roles of the Bento Box as a gift, in bridging between physical and virtual contexts, its higher suitability during the earlier phases of ideation and group development, and its perception by participants as something “framed.” Through this, we highlight the underexplored potential of using physical, offline resources as a means to solve difficulties in distanced social interactions.     

Ontology-driven collaborative annotation in shared workspaces

In the last decade, collaboration and sharing on the Web have become mainstream. Digital, remote interaction happens on a daily basis, not only to share digital resources, but also to create, manage and discuss them, in every possible situation where collaboration is required: from work teams to groups of friends, from community committees to no-profit organizations. In this paper we address the task of collaborative management of digital resources within a team, with a special focus on the task of semantic annotation, where team members, possibly supported by automated reasoning, enrich resources with properties that help in organizing, retrieving and creating connections between contents of different types. We focus in particular on the problem of reaching an agreement on the annotation itself among the participants. The paper presents a qualitative user study aimed at observing users behavior when faced with this task. The results of the study are then analyzed in order to draw guidelines, which are then implemented in a tool for collaborative annotation. This study is carried out in the context of the Semantic Table Plus Plus (Sem T++) Project, a framework supporting collaboration over thematic workspaces, whose goal is to enhance cooperation through awareness, enhanced communication and easy sharing of digital content.     

Value co-creation for digital innovation: An interorganizational boundary-spanning perspective

Despite the enthusiasm for engaging in interorganizational collaboration to enable digital product innovation, firms often face challenges in integrating knowledge across organizational boundaries. Our research examines how collaborating firms use Interorganizational Systems (IOS) tools and project coordinators to overcome knowledge boundaries in different types of ideation tasks. Drawing on boundary-spanning theory, we conceptualize IOS tools as boundary objects, project coordinators as boundary spanners, and the interdependence of ideation tasks as moderators of the impacts of boundary objects and spanners on knowledge integration. Our findings suggest that IOS tools help overcome syntax and semantic knowledge boundaries by transferring and sharing information when the interdependence of idea implementation tasks is high, and project coordinators help overcome pragmatic knowledge boundaries by building reciprocity of innovation participants when the interdependence of idea generation tasks is high. Our research contributes to value co-creation literature by developing a boundary-spanning mechanism to explain the roles of boundary objects and boundary spanners in overcoming different knowledge boundaries to enable digital product innovation at the inter-firm level.     

Effectiveness of collaborative map-based decision support tools: Results of an experiment

This article reports on the results of an empirical analysis of the effectiveness of a set of collaborative spatial decision support tools developed to support a land use allocation problem in a peat-meadow polder in the Netherlands. The tools feature spatial multicriteria analysis as the means to make spatially explicit trade-offs between stakeholder objectives in three different ways: as colors on multiple printed maps, qualitatively on a single digital map and quantitatively on a single digital map. An interactive mapping device is used as the interface between spatial information and participants. A series of controlled experiments was conducted with 30 participants, who were asked to use the tools and perform specific individual and group allocation tasks. Data on the responses of the participants were collected through questionnaires, observer notes, video film and multicriteria scores. The analysis focused on three aspects of effectiveness: usefulness of the tools; clarity of tool information; and impact on decisions. The findings of this analysis are discussed within the context of the information offered by the tools, individual and collaborative work of participants and the spatial and numerical quality of the resulting land use plans. From the experiments, it is clear that the cognitive effort related to the volume and format of information is a critical issue in spatial decision support. This holds true for both the level of detail per item of information and the amount of information to be supplied to the participants. Although the quantitative tool provided the most information, the participants did not consider this tool the most useful and it did not produce the best results.     

Terahertz free‐space dielectric property measurements using time‐ and frequency‐domain setups

Based on a simple and effective calculation method, two free‐space measurement setups are employed to investigate the dielectric properties of various materials at terahertz (THz) frequencies. One setup involves THZ time‐domain spectroscopy (THz‐TDS) at a frequency range of 0.4 to 1 THz. The other setup comprises a vector network analyzer (VNA) with pairs of VAN extenders (VNAXs) and diagonal standard gain horns (SGHs) at a frequency range of 0.22 to 1.1 THz. The calculation method is verified for the THz‐TDS system and employed in the VNA system for the first time. Dielectric properties, including refractive indices, power absorption coefficients, relative permittivities, and loss tangents, are calculated from measured transmission data. Several materials, including printed circuit boards and 3D printing materials, are characterized to verify the calculation method and compare the measurement setups.     

Consumer interpretations of digital ownership in the book market

Technological advances in electronic markets, particularly product digitization, have transformed customer-product interactions. For example, altered ownership perceptions in the digital domain affect product acquisition, usage and disposition. This study’s goal is to explore how consumers conceptualize ownership of digital possessions in order to help marketers develop tailored positioning and commercialization strategies. Comparing physical books and e-books, we contribute to the literature on electronic markets, which neglects a consumer-focused perspective on digital possessions. Using focus groups with U.S. consumers, we identify six themes surrounding perceptions of psychological digital ownership, which mainly portray a constricted sense of ownership, limiting usage experience, and value perceptions. However, we also find that ease of disposition favors e-book usage. Typical assumptions about younger consumers’ preference for digital products were not supported. Based on our findings, we offer two managerial approaches: (1) enhancing the digital product experience or (2) emancipating digital products from their physical correlates.     

Mobile Geotagging: Reexamining Our Interactions with Urban Space

Mobile geotagging services offer people new ways to interact with and through urban space. In this paper, we focus on a mobile geotagging service called Socialight and the social practices associated with it. In‐depth interviews and participant observation were conducted in order to explore how Socialight's virtual “sticky notes” were used in everyday life. Findings indicated how users communicate about place to help build social familiarity with urban places and communicate through place to allow users to create place‐based narratives and engage in identity management. Such findings deepen our understanding of the social production of space and have implications for future location‐based mobile services.     

Extensible block-level storage virtualization in cluster-based systems

High-performance storage systems are evolving towards decentralized commodity clusters that can scale in capacity, processing power, and network throughput. Building such systems requires: (a) Sharing physical resources among applications; (b) Sharing data among applications; (c) Allowing customized data views. Current solutions typically satisfy the first two requirements through a cluster file-system, resulting in monolithic, hard-to-manage systems. In this paper we present a storage system that addresses all three requirements by extending the block layer below the file-system. First, we discuss how our system provides customized (virtualized) storage views within a single node. Then, we discuss how it scales in clustered setups. To achieve efficient resource and data sharing we support block-level allocation and locking as in-band mechanisms. We implement a prototype under Linux and use it to build a shared cluster file-system. Our evaluation in a 24-node cluster setup concludes that our approach offers flexibility, scalability and reduced effort to implement new functionality.     

Deferring to resources: collaborations around traditional vs computer-based notes

Abstract Undergraduate students were observed engaged in a species of collaboration rarely studied and yet which is grounded in an authentic form of normal study practice: namely, revising a course in preparation for an exam. Pairs of undergraduates were convened for recorded sessions in which they did this around either their own personal lecture notes or around a set of notes authored by the lecturer and made available as web-readable computer documents. Although the goals, motives and orientations of these pairings were similar, the nature of the collaborative resource effected the character and rhythm of the joint conversation. The computer-based documents led to less on-task collaborative talk. Moreover, these documents sustained conversation that was more fragmented around successive short topics. Observations are made regarding how certain discursive openings are more readily afforded when revision talk is mediated by a less singular, authorised, and directive form of document.     

Some notes on maximal arc intersection of spherical polygons: its \mathcal{NP} -hardness and approximation algorithms

Finding a sequence of workpiece orientations such that the number of setups is minimized is an important optimization problem in manufacturing industry. In this paper we present some interesting notes on this optimal workpiece setup problem. These notes show that (1) The greedy algorithm proposed in Comput. Aided Des. 35 (2003), pp. 1269–1285 for the optimal workpiece setup problem has the performance ratio bounded by O(ln n−ln ln n+0.78), where n is the number of spherical polygons in the ground set; (2) In addition to greedy heuristic, linear programming can also be used as a near-optimal approximation solution; (3) The performance ratio by linear programming is shown to be tighter than that of greedy heuristic in some cases.     

Gamification of Creativity: Exploring the Usefulness of Serious Games for Ideation

Organizing for idea generation is a recurring challenge in intensive innovation contexts. The literature on ideation has reached a compelling consensus on the features that such organizational devices must possess to support sufficient creativity: learning processes and a creative climate of confidence to promote collaboration. However, current practical methodologies struggle to simultaneously realize these two features. In this paper, we explore the potential of Serious Games, a collaborative tool that has been used since the 1960s to facilitate learning processes through the simulation of reality and a role‐playing game, to induce an immersive experience and, more recently, to support the ideation process. To do so, we conducted an exploratory case study using a Serious Game to support ideation in a French medium‐sized business. We then assess the strengths and areas for improvement of this Serious Game with respect to an ideation performance framework based on the existing literature. Our findings show that Serious Games are efficient tools for supporting existing knowledge exchange between participants and collaboration by providing a creative climate, but they may not sufficiently support learning of the external knowledge required to attain high levels of originality. Accordingly, we discuss some crucial parameters to be further explored to allow for the effective managerial use of such methodologies, such as the fine‐tuning of the knowledge content that serves as a basis for the game.     

Immersive Whiteboard Collaborative System

An immersive whiteboard system is presented where users at multiple locations can communicate with each other. The system features a virtual environment with vivid avatars, stroke compression and streaming technology to effectively deliver stroke data across meeting participants, friendly human interaction and navigation, virtual and physical whiteboard. The whiteboard is both a physical platform for our input/output interfaces and a virtual screen for sharing common multimedia. It is this whiteboard correspondence that allows the user to physically write on the virtual whiteboard. In addition to drawing on the shared virtual board, the immersive whiteboard in our setup permits users to control the application menus, insert multimedia objects into the world, and navigate around the virtual environment. By integrating multimedia objects and avatar representations into an immersive environment, we provide the users with a more transparent medium so that they feel as if they are communicating and interacting face-to-face. The whiteboard efficiently pulls all the collaboration technologies together. The goal of this collaborative system is to provide a convenient environment for participants to interact with each other and support collaborative applications such as instant messaging, distance learning and conferencing.     

Contrasting the use of tools for presentation and critique: Some cases from architectural education

This study investigates video recordings of design reviews in architectural education, focusing on how presentations and discussions of designs are contingent on the specific tools employed. In the analyzed recordings, three different setups are utilized: traditional posters, digital slide-show technologies, and combinations of the two. This range of different setups provides a set of contrasts that make visible the role of technologies in shaping the ways in which the reviews are conducted. The analysis is structured in three themes. First, we examine the sequential organization of digital presentations in relation to the spatial structure of poster-based presentations. Second, the different ways in which shared attention is established in digital, paper-based, and hybrid presentation practices are analyzed. Third, we address part-whole relations—how details in presented materials are put in relation to the overarching project or the presentation as a whole. Taken together, the analyses suggest that the detailed organization of the design review is transformed in subtle yet consequential ways through the introduction of digital slide-show technologies. These transformations are consequential not only locally, for the design review itself, but also for the instructive work that is accomplished through this practice. We conclude by discussing some implications for design, arguing that an increased awareness of how the practice is influenced by the different setups might be key for the proper adaptation of presentation technologies to particular purposes.     

Voluntary use of online lecture notes: correlates of note use and note use as an alternative to class attendance

Note taking and note reviewing are essential college student learning activities. A large number of carefully controlled studies have evaluated student effectiveness in implementing each of these skills and have found that both can be improved by providing instructor notes. While the Internet now offers a practical method for providing notes, some instructors are reluctant to offer notes because they fear that students will use these notes as an alternative to class attendance. This study used data collected by the server and questionnaires to describe voluntary use of online lecture notes, to search for correlates of individual patterns of note use, and to investigate student use of notes as an alternative to class attendance. Students primarily printed notes and used these notes during class presentations. There was some evidence that note users performed better on examinations than students who did not use notes. Some students did admit to using notes as an alternative to class attendance, but a comparison between the examination scores of those who admitted to this practice and those who claimed never to use notes for this purpose showed no significant differences in performance.     

LinesLab: A Flexible Low‐Cost Approach for the Generation of Physical Monochrome Art

The desire for the physical generation of computer art has seen a significant body of research that has resulted in sophisticated robots and painting machines, together with specialized algorithms mimicking particular artistic techniques. The resulting setups are often expensive and complex, making them unavailable for recreational and hobbyist use. In recent years, however, a new class of affordable low‐cost plotters and cutting machines has reached the market. In this paper, we present a novel system for the physical generation of line and cut‐out art based on digital images, targeted at such off‐the‐shelf devices. Our approach uses a meta‐optimization process to generate results that represent the tonal content of a digital image while conforming to the physical and mechanical constraints of home‐use devices. By flexibly combining basic sets of positional and shape encodings, we are able to recreate a wide range of artistic styles. Furthermore, our system optimizes the output in terms of visual perception based on the desired viewing distance, while remaining scalable with respect to the medium size.