Many web - based information - seeking tasks are set in a social context where other people’s knowledge and advi ce improves success in finding information. However, when tightly - knit contacts (friends, family, colleagues) are not available, information seeking becomes more difficult. Inspired b...

Pointing at displays from a distance is becoming a common method of interacting with computer applications and entertainment systems, using devices such as the Wii Remote, the PlayStation Move controller, or the Microsoft Kinect. These systems often implement relative forms of ray-cast pointing,...

Information seeking on the Web has become a central part of many daily activities. Even though information seeking is extremely common, there are many times when these tasks are unsuccessful, because the information found is less than ideal or the task could have been completed more efficiently. In...

Most searchers do not know how to use Web search engines as effectively as possible. This is due, in part, to search engines not providing feedback about how search behavior can be improved. Because feedback is an essential part of learning, we created the Search Dashboard, which provides an int...

Crisis command centres often gather data from disparate locations and collect it for visualization on a large, shared screen. However, the resulting visualization often lacks expressiveness: it fails to express nuanced mediating characteristics about the information, such as speci...

Petri net modeling enables us to verify the protocol of interest formally. However, aside from formal verification, a new protocol really needs to be tested in a relatively realistic environment in which it interworks (or at least co-exists) with earlier or different versions of the same or similar ...

Steering and driving tasks – where the user controls a vehicle or other object along a path – are common in many simulations and games. Racing video games have provided users with different views of the visual environment – e.g., overhead, first-person, and third-person views. Although researc...

When searching for information, people often seek help from others. However, while people can benefit from communicating with others, they can usually satisfy their information needs, to some degree, without help. Because establishing explicit collaborations...

In games where skills such as targeting are critical to winning, it is difficult for players with different skill levels to have a competitive and engaging experience. Although several mechanisms for accommodating different skill levels have been proposed, traditional approaches can be too obvio...

Interactive systems often require calibration to ensure that input and output are optimally configured. Without calibration, user performance can degrade (e.g., if an input device is not adjusted for the user's abilities), errors can increase (e.g., if color spaces are not matched), and som...

Guidelines for designing information charts (such as bar charts) often state that the presentation should reduce or remove 'chart junk' - visual embellishments that are not essential to understanding the data. In contrast, some popular chart designers wrap the presented data in detaile...

Inspired by theories of how professionals enter into a reflective conversation with their work materials, the research area of interaction history seeks to make use of the accumulated actions of many people in working with digital objects. Despite compelling system designs and empirical results in l...

Usage data logged from user interactions can be extremely valuable for evaluating software usability. However, instrumenting software to collect usage data is a time-intensive task that often requires technical expertise as well as an understanding of the usability issues to be explored. We have...

Users of social bookmarking systems take advantage of pivot browsing, an interaction technique allowing them to easily refine lists of bookmarks through the selection of filter terms. However, social bookmarking systems use one-size-fits-all ranking metrics to order refined lists. These generic ...

This paper describes work we have done over the past five years in developing e-
learning applications and tools using Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies. It does not
provide a comprehensive description of these tools; instead, we focus on the pitfalls we have
encountered and attemp...

Pointing at displays from a distance is becoming a common scenario for controlling computers and entertainment systems. Several devices use direct-pointing methods, where the user points a hand-held device at targets on a screen, but these often suffer from accuracy probl...

Today's technology-enhanced learning practices cater to students and teachers who use many different learning tools and environments and are used to a paradigm of interaction derived from open, ubiquitous, and socially oriented services. In this context, a crucial issue for education system...

Tag clouds are a popular method for visualizing and linking socially-organized information on websites. Tag clouds represent variables of interest (such as popularity) in the visual appearance of the keywords themselves - using text properties such as font size, weight, or colour. Although tag c...

One of the main obstacles for wider adoption of semantic rich e-learning systems is the difficulty in creating and maintaining domain ontologies describing courses. Annotations, such as those resulting from collaborative tagging, provide a new source of information which can be used to ease the ...

he social semantic Web has recently emerged as a paradigm in which ontologies (aimed at defining, structuring and sharing information) and collaborative software (used for creating and sharing knowledge) have been merged together. Ontologies provide an effective means of capturing and integratin...

Today’s technology enhanced learning practices cater to students and teachers who use many different learning tools and environments and are used to a paradigm of interaction derived from open, ubiquitous, and socially-oriented services. In this context, a crucial issue for education systems in ge...