Participation in contributing content to online communities remains heavily skewed. Yet little research has focused on lowering the contribution effort. I describe a general approach to facilitating user-generated content within the context of Wikipedia. I also present the IntelWiki prototype, a design and implementation of this approach, which aims to make it easier for users to create or enhance the free-form text in Wikipedia articles. The IntelWiki system i) recommends article-relevant reference materials, ii) draws the users' attention to key aspects of the recommendations, and iii) allows users to consult the recommended materials in context. A laboratory evaluation with 16 novice Wikipedia editors revealed that, in comparison to the default Wikipedia design, IntelWiki's approach has positive impacts on editing quantity and quality. Participants also reported experiencing significantly lower mental workload while editing with IntelWiki and preferred the new design.

The mobile era is well established and the number of smartphone users is showing exponential growth. The capability of smartphones and enabling technologies is also increasing and has opened many possibilities of personalized mobile services. The goal of personalization is to support the user by providing the right service at the rightmoment. Early focus of personalization was on content adaptations in different information systems. The new approaches of personalization are still needed for mobileservices as it is a compelling feature of mobile communication systems for both endusers and service providers.Personalization is providing a means of fulfilling users’ needs more effectively andefficiently and, consequently increasing users’ satisfaction. By providing successfulpersonalization, a high degree of user satisfaction and a pleasant user experience can beachieved. Some features of personalization can cause problems and may outweigh thebenefits of personalization.This thesis has focused on how to achieve scrutable mobile client-side personalizationwhile keeping the user’s privacy. The issue of privacy in personalization of mobileservices can be reduced by shifting the control of their personal information towards theusers. Our research goal is to understand and improve the personalization process anddevelop an architecture for scrutable mobile client-side personalization while keepingthe user s’ privacy. Moreover, there is a need to develop an evaluation framework tomeasure the effectiveness of mobile services personalization. A design science researchmethodology is adopted in this research work. More particular contributions of thethesis are as follows: C1: Identifications of the research issues and challenges in personalization of mobileservices. C2: An approach for delivering personalized mobile services. C3: Development of mobile client-side personalization architecture. C4: Development of mobile services Personalization Evaluation Model. C5: Identification of the prospects of scrutable personalization of mobile services.

Trust is a judgement of unquestionable utility - as humans we use it every day of our lives. However, trust has suffered from an imperfect understanding, a plethora of definitions, and informal use in the literature and in everyday life. It is common to say "I trust you, " but what does that mean? This thesis provides a clarification of trust. We present a formalism for trust which provides us with a tool for precise discussion. The formalism is implementable: it can be embedded in an artificial agent, enabling the agent to make trust-based decisions. Its applicability in the domain of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) is raised. The thesis presents a testbed populated by simple trusting agents which substantiates the utility of the formalism. The formalism provides a step in the direction of a proper understanding and definition of human trust. A contribution of the thesis is its detailed exploration of the possibilities of future work in the area.

As an understanding of users' tacit knowledge and latent needs embedded in user experience has played a critical role in product development, users’ direct involvement in design has become a necessary part of the design process. Various ways of accessing users' tacit knowledge and latent needs have been explored in the field of user-centred design, participatory design, and design for experiencing. User-designer collaboration has been used unconsciously by traditional designers to facilitate the transfer of users' tacit knowledge and to elicit new knowledge. However, what makes user-designer collaboration an effective strategy has rarely been reported on or explored. Therefore, interaction patterns between the users and the designers in three industry-supported user involvement cases were studied. In order to develop a coding system, collaboration was defined as a set of coordinated and joint problem solving activities, measured by the elicitation of new knowledge from collaboration. The analysis of interaction patterns in the user involvement cases revealed that allowing users to challenge or modify their contextual experiences facilitates the transfer of knowledge and new knowledge generation. It was concluded that users can be more effectively integrated into the product development process by employing collaboration strategies to intensify the depth of user involvement.

This research explores multiple geo-visualisations to enhance the comprehension of changing reality. It establishes a cognitive visualisation model as a framework and a multiple visualisation approach for implementation. Multiple visualisations of land cover changes including 2D and 3D, abstract and realistic simulations with static and dynamic components are created and tested through a formal user survey. It is concluded that although the real world cannot be perfectly represented, comprehension and interpretation can be improved and enhanced by providing effective multiple visualisations in accordance with users’ specific needs and tasks.

This thesis describes a new method of calculating data priority by using adaptive mobile user and device profiles which change with user location, time of the day, available networks and data access history. The profiles are used for data prefetching, selection of most suitable wireless network and cache management on the mobile device in order to optimally utilize the device�s storage capacity and available bandwidth. Some of the inherent characteristics of mobile devices due to user movements are �non-persistent connection, limited bandwidth and storage capacity, changes in mobile device�s geographical location and connection (eg. connection can be from GPRS to WLAN to Bluetooth). New research is being carried out in making mobile devices work more efficiently by reducing and/or eliminating their limitations. The focus of this research is to propose, evaluate and test a new user profiling technique which specifically caters to the needs of the mobile device users who are required to access large amounts of data, possibly more than the device storage capability during the course of the day or week. This work involves the development of an intelligent user profiling system along with mobile device caching system which will first allocate weight (priority) to the different sets and subsets of the total given data based on user�s location, user�s appointment information, user�s preferences, device capabilities and available networks. Then the profile will automatically change the data weights with user movements, history of cached data access and characteristics of available networks. The Adaptive User and Device Profiles were designed to handle broad range of the issues associated with: �Changing network types and conditions �Limited storage capacity and document type support of mobile devices �Changes in user data needs due to their movements at different times of the day Many research areas have been addressed through this research but the primary focus has remained on the following four core areas. The four core areas are : selecting the most suitable wireless network; allocating weights to different datasets & subsets by integrating user�s movements; previously accessed data; time of the day with user appointment information and device capabilities.

Formal methods are increasingly accepted for developing software systems, however their application to user-interface development is less common. In this thesis, we demonstrate the utility of formal object-oriented techniques for specifying, designing and implementing user-interfaces. The specification of a user-interface describes user-perceivable operations and information structures for an interactive system in an implementation-independent way. Operations of a user-interface specification define tasks. User-interfaces can be specified by a system of communicating agents where some agents are presented to users. An agent and its presentation together define an interactor. Defining the presentation of interactors is a design concern. Widgets are common re-usable interactors for which the presentation is usually well defined. Definitions of widgets may be stored in a library. We illustrate the characteristics of notations for interactor based specification using the Object-Z language and demonstrate using interactors from a widget library. Formal methods enable a "model-based" approach to be taken to the development of user-interface designs. A specification in terms of widgets is derivable from an abstract interactor-based specification. A corresponding user-interface design is usually easily identified from a widget-based specification. Interactor-based user-interface designs can be used to define an architecture for a corresponding system implementation. Derivation of a widget-based specification from an abstract specification corresponds to a task decomposition (i.e., the abstract and widget-based specifications enable the same tasks to be performed, although the operations involved differ). Task decomposition defines a compatibility relation between user-interface specifications. We give "specification patterns" to assist incrementally transforming an abstract user-interface specification to an equivalent specification in terms of widgets.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--York University, 2005. Graduate Programme in Computer Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-127). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR11829

Thesis (MA--Art and Design) -- Auckland University of Technology, 2005. / Also held in print (93 leaves, col. ill., 30 cm.) in Wellesley Theses Collection. (T 004.019 SOE)

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1992. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 74). Also available via the Internet.