An empirical evaluation of four data visualization techniques for displaying short news text similarities

An experiment was conducted comparing user performance on four data visualization techniques—an unstructured display condition consisting of a random one-dimensional (1D) list and three proximity-based representations including a 1D list ranked by a greedy nearest-neighbor algorithm and two 2D spatial visualizations using the ISOMAP layout algorithm and multidimensional scaling (MDS). Eighty-one participants completed an information retrieval task where the visualization techniques were used to display a corpus consisting of 50 short news texts. Human pairwise similarity judgments for this corpus were used to create the three proximity-based displays. Results demonstrated an advantage in accuracy, the number of documents accessed, and, to a lesser extent, subjective confidence in these displays over the Random List condition and in the 2D over the 1D displays. Similar, but smaller, advantages were observed in the MDS display over ISOMAP however none of these pairwise comparisons were statistically significant. A sequential analysis of participant actions in terms of the proximity of document representations accessed provided some explanation for variations in performance between the displays as well as indicating strategic differences in interactions particularly between visualizations of different dimensionality.     

Optimal Orientation of Text Documents for Reading and Writing

To facilitate interaction with documents in interactive tabletop applications, we explore how the orientation of documents supports efficient reading and writing. In this paper, the orientation of paper documents is systematically investigated in five different experiments. In the first three experiments, 36 Japanese participants, 18 left- and 18 right-handed, explored preferred document orientation for reading horizontal Japanese texts. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the participants preferred to rotate text documents clockwise if left-handed and counter-clockwise if right-handed relative to their median line. On average, they rotated text documents more when annotating (about 10°) than when reading (about 5°). The difference in document rotation can be explained by the fact that text documents are rotated to facilitate hand manipulation, because they are rotated more when finer hand motions are required. No difference in document angle was found between Japanese horizontal texts and English texts (Experiment 3). In the fourth experiment, we found that right-handed people read text documents faster when they were rotated between –10° and 20° counter-clockwise. Finally, the last experiment explored the effect of document orientation on the performance of transcribing texts. The participants transcribed texts faster when documents were rotated 10° counter-clockwise. In light of the results from these paper-based experiments, we give guidelines for how to present text documents in tabletop applications depending on tasks, documents, and users.     

Interactive 3D/2D visualization for geophysical data processing and interpretation

A new 3D/2D interactive display server was developed for the IGeoS geophysical data processing framework presented earlier. With introduction of this major component, the framework becomes conceptually complete and potentially bridges the gap between traditional processing and interpretation geophysical software.The display server utilizes Qt toolkit and OpenGL graphics libraries while taking advantage of the object-oriented design of the core data processing system. It operates by creating image object trees that are automatically propagated to the server(s) residing on the same or remote hosts and producing complex, structured, and interactive data displays. The displays support custom interactive graphical user interfaces, which are constructed entirely by the user and do not require computer coding. With over 200 specialized processing tools available, this approach allows creating 3D visualizations and building custom interactive data analysis, interpretation, and modeling tools in many areas of application. In particular, we show examples of integration of seismic ray tracing, gravity, and receiver function modeling and inversion in deep crustal studies.     

Efficient model sharing for scalable collaborative classification

We propose a novel collaborative approach for document classification, combining the knowledge of multiple users for improved organization of data such as individual document repositories or emails. To this end, we distribute locally built classification models in a network of participating users, and combine the shared classifiers into more powerful meta models. In order to increase the propagation efficiency, we apply a method for selecting the most discriminative model components and transmitting them to other participants. In our experiments on four large standard collections for text classification we study the resulting tradeoffs between network cost and classification accuracy. The experimental results show that the proposed model propagation has negligible communication costs and substantially outperforms current approaches with respect to efficiency and classification quality.     

Colour cues as location aids in lengthy texts on screen and paper

Readers of documents on CRT displays report difficulties in remembering whereabouts in a lengthy text they previously read something. Four experiments explore whether subdividing such texts, at appropriate thematic boundaries, into five successive coloured sections can aid readers' retrieval of information. Experiment 1, using texts presented on coloured paper, showed that this use of colour helped readers relocate information. Experiment 2 presented the same texts on a CRT, but variation in the colour of the characters on the screen did not help readers relocate information. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of experiment 2, with texts differing in both content and structure from those used previously. Experiment 4, again using coloured text on a CRT display, showed that giving readers a visible guide to the ordering of the coloured sections was not sufficient to restore the advantage that coloured pages had for texts presented on paper. The implications of these findings for variation in the background and foreground colouring of multi-window displays are discussed, but the main conclusion concerns the caution needed when transferring information design solutions across media.     

Visualization and Computer Graphics on Isotropically Emissive Volumetric Displays

The availability of commodity volumetric displays provides ordinary users with a new means of visualizing 3D data. Many of these displays are in the class of isotropically emissive light devices, which are designed to directly illuminate voxels in a 3D frame buffer, producing x-ray-like visualizations. While this technology can offer intuitive insight into a 3D object, the visualizations are perceptually different from what a computer graphics or visualization system would render on a 2D screen. This paper formalizes rendering on isotropically emissive displays and introduces a novel technique that emulates traditional rendering effects on isotropically emissive volumetric displays, delivering results that are much closer to what is traditionally rendered on regular 2D screens. Such a technique can significantly broaden the capability and usage of isotropically emissive volumetric displays. Our method takes a 3D data set or object as the input, creates an intermediate light field, and outputs a special 3D volume data set called a lumi-volume. This lumi-volume encodes approximated rendering effects in a form suitable for display with accumulative integrals along unobtrusive rays. When a lumi-volume is fed directly into an isotropically emissive volumetric display, it creates a 3D visualization with surface shading effects that are familiar to the users. The key to this technique is an algorithm for creating a 3D lumi-volume from a 4D light field. In this paper, we discuss a number of technical issues, including transparency effects due to the dimension reduction and sampling rates for light fields and lumi-volumes. We show the effectiveness and usability of this technique with a selection of experimental results captured from an isotropically emissive volumetric display, and we demonstrate its potential capability and scalability with computer-simulated high-resolution results.     

浅谈VB文件系统控件

文件是指存储在磁盘上的数据集合,每个文件必须有唯一的文件名,应用程序通过文件名对文件进行访问。VB的文件系统控件具有强大的对文件系统操作的能力。用户可以很方便地访问文件系统。VB包含三种文件系统控件：驱动器列表框、泪录列表框、文件列表框,利用这些控件,可以组成文件操作对话框,对计算机上的文件信息进行浏览和处理。     

Extracting relevance and affect information from physiological text annotation

We present physiological text annotation, which refers to the practice of associating physiological responses to text content in order to infer characteristics of the user information needs and affective responses. Text annotation is a laborious task, and implicit feedback has been studied as a way to collect annotations without requiring any explicit action from the user. Previous work has explored behavioral signals, such as clicks or dwell time to automatically infer annotations, and physiological signals have mostly been explored for image or video content. We report on two experiments in which physiological text annotation is studied first to (1) indicate perceived relevance and then to (2) indicate affective responses of the users. The first experiment tackles the user’s perception of relevance of an information item, which is fundamental towards revealing the user’s information needs. The second experiment is then aimed at revealing the user’s affective responses towards a -relevant- text document. Results show that physiological user signals are associated with relevance and affect. In particular, electrodermal activity was found to be different when users read relevant content than when they read irrelevant content and was found to be lower when reading texts with negative emotional content than when reading texts with neutral content. Together, the experiments show that physiological text annotation can provide valuable implicit inputs for personalized systems. We discuss how our findings help design personalized systems that can annotate digital content using human physiology without the need for any explicit user interaction.     

浅谈VB文件系统控件

文件是指存储在磁盘上的数据集合,每个文件必须有唯一的文件名,应用程序通过文件名对文件进行访问。VB的文件系统控件具有强大的对文件系统操作的能力,用户可以很方便地访问文件系统。VB包含三种文件系统控件:驱动器列表框、目录列表框、文件列表框,利用这些控件,可以组成文件操作对话框,对计算机上的文件信息进行浏览和处理。     

A multi-user perspective for personalized email communities

Email classification and prioritization expert systems have the potential to automatically group emails and users as communities based on their communication patterns, which is one of the most tedious tasks. The exchange of emails among users along with the time and content information determine the pattern of communication. The intelligent systems extract these patterns from an email corpus of single or all users and are limited to statistical analysis. However, the email information revealed in those methods is either constricted or widespread, i.e. single or all users respectively, which limits the usability of the resultant communities. In contrast to extreme views of the email information, we relax the aforementioned restrictions by considering a subset of all users as multi-user information in an incremental way to extend the personalization concept. Accordingly, we propose a multi-user personalized email community detection method to discover the groupings of email users based on their structural and semantic intimacy. We construct a social graph using multi-user personalized emails. Subsequently, the social graph is uniquely leveraged with expedient attributes, such as semantics, to identify user communities through collaborative similarity measure. The multi-user personalized communities, which are evaluated through different quality measures, enable the email systems to filter spam or malicious emails and suggest contacts while composing emails. The experimental results over two randomly selected users from email network, as constrained information, unveil partial interaction among 80% email users with 14% search space reduction where we notice 25% improvement in the clustering coefficient.     

树形控件和列表控件在"新闻稿处理编程"中的应用

树形控件和列表控件都是基于对话框使用的控件.列表控件显示一个项目列表供用户浏览和选择,而树形控件用来以树形格式显示有层次的信息.本文以基于对话框的新闻稿处理程序为例,编写了自己的列表控件类和树形控件类,并说明了它们在对话框编程中的应用.     

Data visualization optimization via computational modeling of perception

We present a method for automatically evaluating and optimizing visualizations using a computational model of human vision. The method relies on a neural network simulation of early perceptual processing in the retina and primary visual cortex. The neural activity resulting from viewing flow visualizations is simulated and evaluated to produce a metric of visualization effectiveness. Visualization optimization is achieved by applying this effectiveness metric as the utility function in a hill-climbing algorithm. We apply this method to the evaluation and optimization of 2D flow visualizations, using two visualization parameterizations: streaklet-based and pixel-based. An emergent property of the streaklet-based optimization is head-to-tail streaklet alignment. It had been previously hypothesized the effectiveness of head-to-tail alignment results from the perceptual processing of the visual system, but this theory had not been computationally modeled. A second optimization using a pixel-based parameterization resulted in a LIC-like result. The implications in terms of the selection of primitives is discussed. We argue that computational models can be used for optimizing complex visualizations. In addition, we argue that they can provide a means of computationally evaluating perceptual theories of visualization, and as a method for quality control of display methods.     

A Comparison of Dialog Strategies for Call Routing

Advances in commercially-available ASR technology have enabled the deployment of “How-may-I-help-you?” interactions to automate call routing. While often preferred to menu-based or directed dialog strategies, there is little quantitative research into the relationships among prompt style, task completion, user preference/satisfaction, and domain. This work applies several dialog strategies to two domains, drawing on both real callers and usability subjects. We find that longer greetings produce higher levels of first-utterance routability. Further, we show that a menu-based dialog strategy produces a uniformly high level of routability at the first utterance in two domains, whereas an open-dialog approach varies significantly with domain. In a domain where users lack an expectation of task structure, users are most successful with a directed strategy, for which preference scores are highest, even though it does not result in the shortest dialogs. Callers rarely provide more than one piece of information in their responses to all types of dialog strategies. Finally, a structured dialog repair prompt is most helpful to callers who were greeted with an open prompt, and least helpful to callers who were greeted with a structured prompt.     

A Semi-Structured Document Model for Text Mining

A semi-structured document has more structured information compared to an ordinary document,and the relation among semi-structured documents can be fully utilized.In order to take advantage of the structure and link information in a semi-structured document for better mining,a structured link vector model (SLVM) is presented in this paper,where a vector represents a document,and vectors‘ elements are determined by terms,document structure and neighboring documents.Text mining based on SLVM is described in the procedure of K-means for briefness and clarity:calculating document similarity and calculating cluster center.The clustering based on SLVM performs significantly better than that based on a conventional vector space model in the experiments,and its F value increases from 0.65-0.73 to 0.82-0.86.     

Looking,Sequential Redundancy,Transfer, and Age in Early Keyboard Learning

Groups of older and younger subjects were given one-hour sessions on a simple keyboard task. In the first experiment the major variable was the extent to which subjects could see what they were doing while carrying out a 5- or 10-alternative task. In the second experiment subjects performed the task with a positional or an alphabet in-line display using either a completely random or a structured input sequence. In the third experiment, the effect of pre-training on a positional display on subsequent performance with an alphabet in-line display was examined. It was found that both older and younger subjects made more errors when they could not see either keyboard or their hands; that older subjects could take advantage of sequential redundancy only when using an alphabet in-line display; and that older subjects did not benefit from positional display pre-training.     

An adaptive web page layout structure for small devices

The limited display size of current small Internet devices is becoming a serious obstacle to information access. In this paper, we introduce a Document REpresentation for Scalable Structures (DRESS) to help information providers make composite documents, typically web pages, scalable in both logic and layout structure to support effective information acquisition in heterogeneous environments. Through this novel document representation structure based on binary slicing trees, the document can dynamically adapt its presentation according to display sizes by maximizing the information throughput to users. We discuss the details of this structure with its key attributes. An automatic approach for generating this structure for existing web pages is also presented. A branch-and-bound algorithm and a capacity ratio-based slicing method are proposed to select proper content representation and aesthetic document layouts respectively. A set of user study experiments have been carried out and the results show that compared with the thumbnail-based approach, the DRESS-based interface can reduce browsing time by 23.5%. This work was performed when the second and the third authors were visiting students at Microsoft Research Asia.     

XML DOM技术应用于网络课件点播的研究

网上教育课件以XML文档的形式存储在服务器端,服务器端采用ASP技术,调用DOM接口,对XML文档进行解析,管理.用户在客户端实时点播,通过浏览器得到所需的课件相关信息,达到学生按需学习和老师按需教学的目的.从学习XML的基本知识入手,通过对XML文档显示技术的比较分析,指出CSS和XSL在显示XML文档上存在着一些不足,然后详细研究了XMLDOM技术,利用XM DOM技术实现网上教育课件的点播和显示.     

Multi-window displays for readers of lengthy texts

Two experiments explore whether it would help readers re-locate information in an “electronic book” if different windows on the screen were used to display specific sections of the text. Experiment 1, using a within-subject design, showed that reading and question answering were faster with a single window than with a multi-window display. Experiment 2, in which procedural skills were developed before starting the experiment, and a between-subject design was used, showed that this advantage for the single window display would not generally be the case. The multi-window display was a significant help to readers relocating information once they were familiar with the procedures for manipulating the text. The studies suggest ways in which the display of lengthy electronic texts may be improved. They also illustrate the ease with which misleading results can be obtained in studies of human-computer interaction, and emphasize the need for establishing adequate levels of procedural skill before exploring display characteristics.     

VU-flow: a visualization tool for analyzing navigation in virtual environments

This paper presents a tool for the visual analysis of navigation patterns of moving entities, such as users, virtual characters or vehicles in 3D virtual environments (VEs). The tool, called VU-Flow, provides a set of interactive visualizations that highlight interesting navigation behaviors of single or groups of moving entities that were the VE together or separately. The visualizations help to improve the design of VEs and to study the navigation behavior of users, e.g., during controlled experiments. Besides VEs, the proposed techniques could also be applied to visualize real-world data recorded by positioning systems, allowing one to employ VU-Flow in domains such as urban planning, transportation, and emergency response     

ManyEyes: a site for visualization at internet scale

We describe the design and deployment of Many Eyes, a public web site where users may upload data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on discussions. The goal of the site is to support collaboration around visualizations at a large scale by fostering a social style of data analysis in which visualizations not only serve as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a medium to spur discussion among users. To support this goal, the site includes novel mechanisms for end-user creation of visualizations and asynchronous collaboration around those visualizations. In addition to describing these technologies, we provide a preliminary report on the activity of our users.