di Sciascio Maria Cecilia, Sabol Vedran, Veas Eduardo Enrique
2017
Whenever users engage in gathering and organizing new information, searching and browsing activities emerge at the core of the exploration process. As the process unfolds and new knowledge is acquired, interest drifts occur inevitably and need to be accounted for. Despite the advances in retrieval and recommender algorithms, real-world interfaces have remained largely unchanged: results are delivered in a relevance-ranked list. However, it quickly becomes cumbersome to reorganize resources along new interests, as any new search brings new results. We introduce an interactive user-driven tool that aims at supporting users in understanding, refining, and reorganizing documents on the fly as information needs evolve. Decisions regarding visual and interactive design aspects are tightly grounded on a conceptual model for exploratory search. In other words, the different views in the user interface address stages of awareness, exploration, and explanation unfolding along the discovery process, supported by a set of text-mining methods. A formal evaluation showed that gathering items relevant to a particular topic of interest with our tool incurs in a lower cognitive load compared to a traditional ranked list. A second study reports on usage patterns and usability of the various interaction techniques within a free, unsupervised setting.
di Sciascio Maria Cecilia, Sabol Vedran, Veas Eduardo Enrique
2017
Whenever we gather or organize knowledge, the task of search-ing inevitably takes precedence. As exploration unfolds, it be-comes cumbersome to reorganize resources along new interests,as any new search brings new results. Despite huge advances inretrieval and recommender systems from the algorithmic point ofview, many real-world interfaces have remained largely unchanged:results appear in an infinite list ordered by relevance with respect tothe current query. We introduceuRank, a user-driven visual tool forexploration and discovery of textual document recommendations.It includes a view summarizing the content of the recommenda-tion set, combined with interactive methods for understanding, re-fining and reorganizing documents on-the-fly as information needsevolve. We provide a formal experiment showing thatuRankuserscan browse the document collection and efficiently gather items rel-evant to particular topics of interest with significantly lower cogni-tive load compared to traditional list-based representations.
Müller-Putz G. R., Ofner P., Schwarz Andreas, Pereira J., Luzhnica Granit, di Sciascio Maria Cecilia, Veas Eduardo Enrique, Stein Sebastian, Williamson John, Murray-Smith Roderick, Escolano C., Montesano L., Hessing B., Schneiders M., Rupp R.
2017
The aim of the MoreGrasp project is to develop a non-invasive, multimodal user interface including a brain-computer interface(BCI)for intuitive control of a grasp neuroprosthesisto supportindividuals with high spinal cord injury(SCI)in everyday activities. We describe the current state of the project, including the EEG system, preliminary results of natural movements decoding in people with SCI, the new electrode concept for the grasp neuroprosthesis, the shared control architecture behind the system and the implementation ofa user-centered design.
di Sciascio Maria Cecilia, Mayr Lukas, Veas Eduardo Enrique
2017
Knowledge work such as summarizing related research inpreparation for writing, typically requires the extraction ofuseful information from scientific literature. Nowadays theprimary source of information for researchers comes fromelectronic documents available on the Web, accessible throughgeneral and academic search engines such as Google Scholaror IEEE Xplore. Yet, the vast amount of resources makesretrieving only the most relevant results a difficult task. Asa consequence, researchers are often confronted with loadsof low-quality or irrelevant content. To address this issuewe introduce a novel system, which combines a rich, inter-active Web-based user interface and different visualizationapproaches. This system enables researchers to identify keyphrases matching current information needs and spot poten-tially relevant literature within hierarchical document collec-tions. The chosen context was the collection and summariza-tion of related work in preparation for scientific writing, thusthe system supports features such as bibliography and citationmanagement, document metadata extraction and a text editor.This paper introduces the design rationale and components ofthe PaperViz. Moreover, we report the insights gathered in aformative design study addressing usability
Strohmaier David, di Sciascio Maria Cecilia, Errecalde Marcelo, Veas Eduardo Enrique
2017
Innovations in digital libraries and services enable users to access large amounts of data on demand. Yet, quality assessment of information encountered on the Internet remains an elusive open issue. For example, Wikipedia, one of the most visited platforms on the Web, hosts thousands of user-generated articles and undergoes 12 million edits/contributions per month. User-generated content is undoubtedly one of the keys to its success, but also a hindrance to good quality: contributions can be of poor quality because everyone, even anonymous users, can participate. Though Wikipedia has defined guidelines as to what makes the perfect article, authors find it difficult to assert whether their contributions comply with them and reviewers cannot cope with the ever growing amount of articles pending review. Great efforts have been invested in algorith-mic methods for automatic classification of Wikipedia articles (as featured or non-featured) and for quality flaw detection. However, little has been done to support quality assessment of user-generated content through interactive tools that allow for combining automatic methods and human intelligence. We developed WikiLyzer, a toolkit comprising three Web-based interactive graphic tools designed to assist (i) knowledge discovery experts in creating and testing metrics for quality measurement , (ii) users searching for good articles, and (iii) users that need to identify weaknesses to improve a particular article. A case study suggests that experts are able to create complex quality metrics with our tool and a report in a user study on its usefulness to identify high-quality content.