This dissertation describes research in the application and evaluation of a Kohonen Self-Organizing Map (SOM) to the problem of classification of Electronic Brainstorming output. Electronic Brainstorming is one of the most productive tools in the Electronic Meeting System called GroupSystems. A major step in group problem solving involves the classification of Electronic Brainstorming output into a manageable list of concepts, topics, or issues that can be further evaluated by the group. This step is problematic due to the information overload and cognitive load of the large quantity of data. This research builds upon previous work in automating the classification process using a Hopfield Neural Network. Evaluation of the Kohonen output in comparison with the Hopfield and human expert output over the same set of data found that the Kohonen SOM performed as well as a human expert in the recollection of associated term pairs and outperformed the Hopfield Neural Network algorithm. Using information retrieval measures, recall of concepts using the Kohonen algorithm was equivalent to the human expert. However, precision was poor. The graphical representation of textual data produced by the Kohonen SOM suggests many opportunities for improving information management of textual electronic information. Increasing uses of electronic mail, computer-based bulletin board systems, and world-wide web textual data suggest an overwhelming amount of textual information to manage. This research suggests that the Kohonen SOM may be used to automatically create "a picture that can represent a thousand (or more) words."

With the increasing demand for online learning, well-designed computer online learning resources are indispensable. User interfaces evaluation has become a critical quality attribute of interactive software intended to meet the requirements of the user groups. It is this aspect of adaptations that make them critical for the study of evaluation of user interfaces. This study describes a preliminary evaluation of the user interface design of a new online learning resource (Open Learning System). The main objectives of the study are to investigate the effect of the interaction on the user (usability, efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction), to assess the extent of the system (resource) functionality and to identify specific problems in the design (aspects of design that cause unexpected results or confusion). This will form part of iterative design and testing process of the new interface, which seeks to evaluate the success of the interface within the framework of the fundamental HCI principles under guidelines of the constructivists learning approach. The Open Learning System (OLS) is grounded on the constructivist-based learning approach. The underlying philosophy of the system assumes when learners are engaged in a social learning context, they actively construct knowledge, therefore the resource is considered as a tool to support learning and not an end in itself. By so doing it is geared to provide greater access to information, support Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) using tools such as e-mail, chat and discussion foruI? and creating context for learners' work and peer review. A theoretical framework for evaluating the OLS was developed and proposed which comprised of the constructivist epistemology, Rich Environment for Active Learning (REAL), the User Centred Design (UCD) approach and the Human Computer Interface (HCI) design principles. This integrated theoretical framework has been referred to as 'Designing-by-Constructivism' model. The study investigates the use of the OLS by two sets of users: staff members (module creators) and learners (module consumers). In view of the fact that the data collected is qualitative, the approach assumes the use of semi-structured questionnaires, evaluation matrix and interviews. The information/feedback gathered will assist the developers to do preliminary reviews. The study will also be useful to academics pursuing more HCI issues or those with an interest in developing learning resources. The main elements of the 'Designing-by-Constructivism' model were present in the resource. The results analysis indicates that the resource supports collaborative learning and the use of authentic activities in learning. This serves as an intrinsic motivation to most of the users. The results also show a high degree of user satisfaction and appreciation of OLS resource. Largely, the participants are satisfied that the overall OLS design met their needs. The major contribution being, "OLS is interactive and user friendly". However, some users have expressed the desire to have more tools incorporated into the resource, while others have expressed concern about difficulties in logging into the system. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / This work adds new functionality to an existing visual programming environment. It applies software maintenance techniques for use with the Java Language in a Microsoft Windows operating system environment. The previously undocumented application is intended to support programming with executable diagrams. This application has the potential to expand programming access to non-programmers, provide better software documentation and improve software maintainability. It is currently capable of supporting meta-programming tasks such as parsing and compiler building. The 11,184 legacy lines of code(LOC) were corrected, extended and documented to support future maintenance using an additional 957 LOC and changes to 45 LOC. / Major, United States Marine Corps

This study examined the differences between a 3-D, VRML search interface, similar to Cone Trees, as a front-end to Yahoo on the World Wide Web and a conventional text-based, 1-Dinterface to the same database. The study sought to determine how quickly users could find information using both interfaces, their degree of satisfaction with both search interfaces, and which interface they preferred.

Some researchers are saying that natural language is probably one of the most promising interfaces for use in the long term for simplicity of learning. If this is true, then it follows that speech recognition would be ideal as the interface for computer-based training (CBT). While many speech recognition applications are being used as a means for a computer interface, these are usually confined to controlling the computer or causing the computer to control other devices. The user input or interface has been the recipient of a strong effort to improve the quality of the communication between man and machine and is proposed to be a dominant factor in determining user productivity, performance, and satisfaction. However, other researchers note that full natural interfaces with computers are still a long way from being the state-of-the art with technology. The focus of this study was to determine if the technology of speech recognition is an effective interface for an academic lesson presented via CBT. How does one determine if learning has been affected and how is this measured? Previous research has attempted quantify a learning effect when using a variety of interfaces. This dissertation summarizes previous studies using other interfaces and those using speech recognition. It attempted to apply a framework used to measure learning effectiveness in some of these studies to quantify the measurement of learning when speech recognition is used as the sole interface. The focus of the study was on cognitive processing which affects short-term memory and in-turn, the effect on original learning (OL). The methods and procedures applied in an experimental study were presented.

Suen Tow Sunny. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-67). / Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1. --- ACCESS with an Extendible User-friendly X/Chinese Interface --- p.4 / Chapter 1.1. --- System requirement --- p.4 / Chapter 1.1.1. --- User interface issue --- p.4 / Chapter 1.1.2. --- Development issue --- p.5 / Chapter 1.2. --- Development decision --- p.6 / Chapter 1.2.1. --- X window system --- p.6 / Chapter 1.2.2. --- X/Chinese toolkit --- p.7 / Chapter 1.2.3. --- C language --- p.8 / Chapter 1.2.4. --- Source code control system --- p.8 / Chapter 1.3. --- System architecture --- p.9 / Chapter 1.4. --- User interface --- p.10 / Chapter 1.5. --- Sample screen --- p.13 / Chapter 1.6. --- System extension --- p.14 / Chapter 1.7. --- System portability --- p.18 / Chapter 2. --- Study on Algorithms for Automatically Correcting Characters in Chinese Cangjie-typed Text --- p.19 / Chapter 2.1. --- Chinese character input --- p.19 / Chapter 2.1.1. --- Chinese keyboards --- p.20 / Chapter 2.1.2. --- Keyboard redefinition scheme --- p.21 / Chapter 2.2. --- Cangjie input method --- p.24 / Chapter 2.3. --- Review on existing techniques for automatically correcting words in English text --- p.26 / Chapter 2.3.1. --- Nonword error detection --- p.27 / Chapter 2.3.2. --- Isolated-word error correction --- p.28 / Chapter 2.3.2.1. --- Spelling error patterns --- p.29 / Chapter 2.3.2.2. --- Correction techniques --- p.31 / Chapter 2.3.3. --- Context-dependent word correction research --- p.32 / Chapter 2.3.3.1. --- Natural language processing approach --- p.33 / Chapter 2.3.3.2. --- Statistical language model --- p.35 / Chapter 2.4. --- Research on error rates and patterns in Cangjie input method --- p.37 / Chapter 2.5. --- Similarities and differences between Chinese and English typed text --- p.41 / Chapter 2.5.1. --- Similarities --- p.41 / Chapter 2.5.2. --- Differences --- p.42 / Chapter 2.6. --- Proposed algorithm for automatic Chinese text correction --- p.44 / Chapter 2.6.1. --- Sentence level --- p.44 / Chapter 2.6.2. --- Part-of-speech level --- p.45 / Chapter 2.6.3. --- Character level --- p.47 / Conclusion --- p.50 / Appendix A Cangjie Radix Table --- p.51 / Appendix B Sample Text --- p.52 / Article 1 --- p.52 / Article 2 --- p.53 / Article 3 --- p.56 / Article 4 --- p.58 / Appendix C Error Statistics --- p.61 / References --- p.65

Smartphones and tablets are increasingly ubiquitous, and many users rely on multiple mobile devices to accommodate work, personal, and geographic mobility needs. Pervasive access to always-on mobile computing has created new security and privacy concerns for mobile devices that often force users to carry multiple devices to meet those needs. The volume and popularity of mobile devices has commingled hardware and software design, and created tightly vertically integrated platforms that lock users into a single, vendor controlled ecosystem. My thesis is that lightweight mechanisms can be added to commodity operating systems to enable multiple virtual phones or tablets to run at the same time on a physical smartphone or tablet device, and to enable apps from multiple mobile platforms, such as iOS and Android, to run together on the same physical device, all while maintaining the low-latency and responsiveness expected of modern mobile devices. This dissertation presents two lightweight operating systems mechanisms, virtualization and binary compatibility, that enable multi-persona mobile computing. First, we present Cells, a mobile virtualization architecture enabling multiple virtual phones, or personas, to run simultaneously on the same physical cellphone in a secure and isolated manner. Cells introduces device namespaces that allow apps to run in a virtualized environment while still leveraging native devices such as GPUs to provide accelerated graphics. Second, we present Cycada, an operating system compatibility architecture that runs applications built for different mobile ecosystems, iOS and Android, together on a single Android device. Cycada introduces kernel-level code adaptation and diplomats to simplify binary compatibility support by reusing existing operating system code and unmodified frameworks and libraries. Both Cells and Cycada have been implemented in Android, and can run multiple Android virtual phones, and a mix of iOS and Android apps on the same device with good performance. Because mobile computing has become increasingly important, we also present a new way to teach operating systems in a mobile-centric way that incorporates the concepts of geographic mobility, sensor data acquisition, and resource-constrained design considerations.

A map is a big multi-scale information space. The size of a computer display, however, is limited. Users of digital maps often need to repeatedly resize and reposition the map to seek information. These repeated and excess interactions mar the user experience, and create bottlenecks for efficient information processing. We introduce personalized navigation instruments, a class of navigation instruments that leverage personal important spatial entities (e.g., landmarks and routes) to tackle navigation challenges in map user interfaces. Specifically, we contribute the following three instruments, each of which embodies a novel research idea: 1) Personalized Compass (P-Compass) is a multi-needle compass that extends the concept of a conventional compass to help users establish a reference frame. P-Compass localizes an unknown reference point by visualizing its relationship with respect to landmarks. P-Compass leverages what a user knows to help them figure out what they do not know. 2) SpaceTokens are interactive map widgets that represent locations, and help users see and link locations rapidly. With SpaceTokens, users can use locations directly as controls to manipulate a map, or building blocks to link with other locations. SpaceTokens make locations first-class citizens of map interaction. 3) SpaceBar associates a simple linear scrollbar with a complex nonlinear route, thus facilitates efficient route comprehension and interaction. SpaceBar is akin to a scrollbar for a route. We prototyped these three instruments in a custom smartphone application, used the application regularly in daily life, and validated our design in two formal studies. While maps are the focus in this dissertation, our ideas need not be limited to maps. For example, we have prototyped P-Compass with Google Street View and a 3D virtual earth tour application. We conclude this dissertation with several directions for future work, such as AR/VR and personalized spatial information user interfaces involving sound, gestures, and speech.

Multimodal systems can represent and manipulate semantics from different human communication modalities at different levels of abstraction, in which multimodal integration is required to integrate the semantics from two or more modalities and generate an interpretable output for further processing. In this work, we develop a framework pertaining to automatic cross-modality semantic integration of multimodal user interactions using speech and pen gestures. It begins by generating partial interpretations for each input event as a ranked list of hypothesized semantics. We devise a cross-modality semantic integration procedure to align the pair of hypothesis lists between every speech input event and every pen input event in a multimodal expression. This is achieved by the Viterbi alignment that enforces the temporal ordering and semantic compatibility constraints of aligned events. The alignment enables generation of a unimodal paraphrase that is semantically equivalent to the original multimodal expression. Our experiments are based on a multimodal corpus in the navigation domain. Application of the integration procedure to manual transcripts shows that correct unimodal paraphrases are generated for around 96% of the multimodal inquiries in the test set. However, if we replace this with automatic speech and pen recognition transcripts, the performance drops to around 53% of the test set. In order to address this issue, we devised the hypothesis rescoring procedure that evaluates all candidates of cross-modality integration derived from multiple recognition hypotheses from each modality. The rescoring function incorporates the integration score, N-best purity of recognized spoken locative references (SLRs), as well as distances between coordinates of recognized pen gestures and their interpreted icons on the map. Application of cross-modality hypothesis rescoring improved the performance to generate correct unimodal paraphrases for over 72% of the multimodal inquiries of the test set. / We have also performed a latent semantic modeling (LSM) for interpreting multimodal user input consisting of speech and pen gestures. Each modality of a multimodal input carries semantics related to a domain-specific task goal (TG). Each input is annotated manually with a TG based on the semantics. Multimodal input usually has a simpler syntactic structure and different order of semantic constituents from unimodal input. Therefore, we proposed to use LSM to derive the latent semantics from the multimodal inputs. In order to achieve this, we characterized the cross-modal integration pattern as 3-tuple multimodal terms taking into account SLR, pen gesture type and their temporal relation. The correlation term matrix is then decomposed using singular value decomposition (SVD) to derive the latent semantics automatically. TG inference on disjoint test set based on the latent semantics achieves accurate performance for 99% of the multimodal inquiries. / Hui, Pui Yu. / Adviser: Helen Meng. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-02, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 294-306). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

Citizen science is a collaboration between members of the public and scientific experts. Within the environmental realm – where citizen science is particularly well expressed – this collaboration often concerns members of the public involved in scientific data gathering and processing at a large-scale to generate data that can subsequently be used by the scientists to improve scientific knowledge, understanding and theories. As these collaborations are increasingly being mediated via digital technologies, the overall aim of this thesis was to explore the potential of user interface design for citizen science, within the context of environmental sciences while using an established citizen science platform, BeeWatch. Particular attention was paid to the potential of such interface development to foster a move from situations of 'expert-novice' to progressive forms of collaborations and participation in citizen science. The overall conclusion from this thesis is that interactive technologies can lead to the development of expertise for biological recording – and thus, narrowing the gap between expert and novice – as well as progressing the level of participation within and fostering behaviour changes for conservation action.