News of SI

Projects show SI's HCI strengths

MichiPoster
Josh Palay (MSI '07), SI research staff
MichiPoster is an opt-in public display system to help build common ground within the School of Information community. Based on the work done by Les Nelson and Elizabeth Churchill at fxPal and later at PARC, MichiPoster presents a slideshow of different postings made by the SI community. These postings can consist of interesting Web sites, pictures of SI events, or questions for the community at large. SI faculty, students, and staff have the option to comment on the postings or to make new postings themselves.

Under the direction of SI research intern Joshua Palay (MSI '07), and with the support of Research Professor Tom Finholt, MichiPoster hopes to provide an environment for communal discussion without clogging e-mail boxes.

MichiPoster can be accessed at www.michiposter.com, but also appears at SI North on a public touch-screen interface.


• Research and Collaboration using the Sakai Portal
  Beth Kirschner, SI research staff
  The Sakai Project is a community development platform providing capabilities that span teaching, learning and collaboration. The architecture divides the software into modular components, which can be selectively installed, replaced, or expanded. The framework, tools, and services are all written in Java for platform independence. Web Services allows integration with tools and applications on other platforms as well.
  
  The challenge of creating a research and collaboration portal for the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics was to address three separate focus areas:
  1. a source for outreach and dissemination
  2. a forum for collaborative activities
  3. a framework for an integrated suite of bioinformatics tools.
  Each by itself serves an individual need, but if brought together, these three goals provide a solution that is greater than the sum of each in isolation.
  


• High Definition Video Conferencing
  Erik Hofer (MSI '01), SI research staff
  The SI North 3rd Floor Conference Room is connected to the Shirley Culliton Conference Room at West Hall by a high-definition video conferencing system. These two rooms provide students, faculty, and staff with a way to easily conduct meetings across the two campuses using U-M's high performance campus network and video conferencing systems made by Lifesize Communications. In addition to the 720p high-definition plasma displays at each site, the systems also provide a way to integrate phone calls and the sharing of a laptop screen as part of the conference. HD conferencing is one of the ways that SI uses advanced technology to successfully span the UM Central and North campuses.
  
  
• Title: Virtual Space Interactive Testbed (VISIT) Laboratory
  David Lee, SI doctoral student
  The VISIT Laboratory at SI North features a demonstration of an OptiPortal -- an ultra-resolution display driven by advanced networking and a computing cluster. This type of display will be the primary system platform for VISIT, which will launch this year at the School of Information as a U-M Provost-funded initiative to use cyberinfrastructure to more effectively span the gap between the U-M North and Central campuses. The lab features a prototype 50-megapixel display that is used by SI and its partners for a wide range of visualization and collaboration projects involving digital archive collections, scientific data, and persistent high-definition video links to partner laboratories.
  
  


• Visualizing Course Paths
  Assistant Professors Lada Adamic and Mick McQuaid
  If you're an MSI student, how can you learn which courses other MSI students take? You can look at lists of courses. You can even look at lists of paths through the curriculum (e.g., how popular a given course was having taken another given course in the previous semester). You can even look at lists broken out by specialization. This project lets you see all three of these things at a glance!
  
  The project explores different ways to visualize the course paths so you can make sense of the paths taken by your peers.
  
  Next steps for researchers and developers on this project is figuring out how to get this same functionality on a display as small as the iPhone, and with only a few interaction gestures, so that when someone sees a course they like, they can instantly place it in the context of before and after, and of popularity by specialization.
  
  Visualization of course paths followed by winter 2007 graduates
  
  
• The Use of Aesthetics in HCI Systems
  Jina Huh (SI doctoral student), Associate Professor Mark S. Ackerman, and Robert Douglas
  As computing expands its domain from workplace to pervasive and domestic environments, interest in aesthetics for designing is increasing in HCI. The HCI literature in aesthetics provides a wide variety of theoretical foundations for how they might be interpreted and potentially used for design. But in the field of HCI design, aesthetics have been mainly studied as a source for decoration or visualizing information.
  
  Researchers have investigated a qualitative study with an awareness information system prototype to explore what decorative art can bring to HCI systems beyond decoration and effective communication.
  
  
• Network Structure and Dynamics in Large Online Expertise Sharing Communities
  Jun Zhang, SI doctoral student
  This research examines the complex network structure and dynamics in large, online expertise sharing communities. Researchers propose new designs based on this analysis, such as using graph-based algorithms to identify expertise.
  
  
• Pedro: A system for harvesting and maintaining catalogs of bioinformatics tools for scientists
  Kevin K. Nam (SI doctoral student) and Associate Professor Mark S. Ackerman
  In the world of bioinformatics, hundreds of tools have been developed by scientists, research groups, and universities to support the processing, manipulating, and maintaining of biomedical data. But these tools are scattered all around the Web, making it hard for the scientists to search for and identify the tools they need.
  
  Some in the field have attempted to alleviate the problem by maintaining simple Web pages listing links to some of the tools, but these pages are often incomplete and not maintained over time.
  
  Pedro automatically harvests and catalogs bioinformatics tools on the Web. It also classifies them according to a user-specified ontology and associates each tool with its usage statistics in publications. Goals include creating the most comprehensive catalog of bioinformatics tools, augmenting the maintenance process with different techniques, and helping scientists choose the right tools for their job.
  
  
• OSCAR: Providing an Integrated User Experience of Multiple Devices in the Networked Home
  Assistant Professor Mark Newman
  Existing approaches to home media control won't do for the new capabilities offered by digitally networked media devices and the proliferation of media-on-demand services. OSCAR is an application that supports flexible and generic control of devices and services in near-future home media networks. It allows monitoring and manipulation of connections between devices, and it allows users to construct reusable configurations to streamline frequently-performed activities.
  
  OSCAR is built atop the Obje Framework, a mobile, code-based infrastructure that supports robust interoperability among devices that have little or no previous knowledge of one another. A two-phase user study with 18 users of varied backgrounds showed that people could use OSCAR to configure and control a realistic and fully operational home media network, but that they made a number of errors constructing reusable configurations that could prevent them from having an optimal experience with their networks over a longer period of time.
  
  


• Social Computing Tools
  Professor Paul Resnick
  These are a number of social computing tools and applications that students and faculty at SI are nurturing.
  • SlashDot MessagePlus: An experimental, AJAX user interface for browsing comments at the SlashDot Web site. Developed by MSI student Nate Oostendorp.
  • Conversation Pivots. When users view a Web page about a software module (such as Drupal), this tool gives them a sidebar with links to recent conversation items discussing the same module. Developed by student Daniel Zhou and Nate Oostendorp, and alum Michael Hess.
  • SI Thank Yous: An application conceived one Friday last winter at an SI "Hacker Jam," this tool simply allows members of a community to post and display public messages of "thank you" to each other. At SI, public displays on the 3rd floor landing of West Hall and in the lobby at SI North cycle through these thank-yous. SI students, faculty, and staff can view these thank-yous and add their own.
  • SI RideNow: A web-based ride share coordination application tested at SI over the past two years but not currently in service. Developers are planning for a University-wide relaunch in 2008, with many new features including FaceBook integration. SI RideNow was developed by several SI MSI students (now SI alumni).