This paper presents a visual interface developed on the basis of control and transparency to elic... more This paper presents a visual interface developed on the basis of control and transparency to elicit preferences in the scientific and cultural domain. Preference elicitation is a recognized challenge in user modeling for personalized recommender systems. The amount of feedback the user is willing to provide depends on how trustworthy the system seems to be and how invasive the elicitation process is. Our approach ranks a collection of items with a controllable text analytics model. It integrates control with the ranking and uses it as implicit preference for content based recommendations.
23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2018
Information-seeking tasks with learning or investigative purposes are usually referred to as expl... more Information-seeking tasks with learning or investigative purposes are usually referred to as exploratory search. Exploratory search unfolds as a dynamic process where the user, amidst navigation, trial-and-error and on-the-fly selections, gathers and organizes information (resources). A range of innovative interfaces with increased user control have been developed to support exploratory search process. In this work we present our attempt to increase the power of exploratory search interfaces by using ideas of social search, i.e., leveraging information left by past users of information systems. Social search technologies are highly popular nowadays, especially for improving ranking. However, current approaches to social ranking do not allow users to decide to what extent social information should be taken into account for result ranking. This paper presents an interface that integrates social search functionality into an exploratory search system in a user-controlled way that is consistent with the nature of exploratory search. The interface incorporates control features that allow the user to (i) express information needs by selecting keywords and (ii) to express preferences for incorporating social wisdom based on tag matching and user similarity. The interface promotes search transparency through color-coded stacked bars and rich tooltips. In an online study investigating system accuracy and subjective aspects with a structural model we found that, when users actively interacted with all its control features, the hybrid system outperformed a baseline content-based-only tool and users were more satisfied.
Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2020
In this paper, we analyze the benefits of adopting user interfaces that offer control and transpa... more In this paper, we analyze the benefits of adopting user interfaces that offer control and transparency for searching in contexts of learning activities. Concretely, we conducted a user study with pharmacy students performing a problem-solving task in the course of a university lecture. The task involved finding scientific papers containing relevant information to solve a clinical case. Students were split into two independent groups and assigned one search tool to perform the task. The baseline group worked with PubMed, a popular search engine in the life sciences domain, whereas the second half of the class was assigned an exploratory search system (ESS) designed for control and transparency. In the analysis, we cover the objective and subjective dimensions of the task outcomes. Firstly, the objective analysis addresses the inherent difficulty of the search task in a learning scenario and identifies certain improvements in performance for those students using the ESS, most notably when searching for primary-source content. The subjective analysis investigates the human factors side, providing evidence that the ESS effectively increases the perception of control and transparency and is able to produce a better user experience. Lastly, we report on perceived learning as a subjective dimension measured separately from user experience. CCS CONCEPTS • Information systems → Web searching and information discovery; Search interfaces; • Applied computing → Interactive learning environments.
Wikipedia has become a major source of information in the web [54]. It consists of user-generated... more Wikipedia has become a major source of information in the web [54]. It consists of user-generated content and has about 12 million edits/contributions per month. One of the keys to its success being the user-generated content, is also a hindrance to its growth and quality: in the context of user-generated content contributions can be of poor quality because everyone, even anonymous users, can participate. Therefore, the Wikipedia community defined criteria for high-quality articles also based on community review, called featured articles [73]. However, reviewing all contributions and identifying featured articles is a long-winded process [16]. In 2014, 269000 new articles were created, however, only 602 peer-reviews were performed and thus only 581 new featured article candidates were nominated. The amount of new featured articles in the year 2014 was 298 [15]. Thus, a lot of non-featured articles are yet to be reviewed, because the amount of data is far too large to review all edits/contributions only with human power. Related work [5, 55] has shown that it is possible to automatically measure the quality of Wikipedia articles, in order to detect non-featured articles that would likely to meet these high-quality standards. Yet, despite all these quality measures, it is difficult to identify what would improve an article. Therefore this master thesis is about an interactive graphic tool made for ranking and editing Wikipedia articles with support from quality measures. The contribution of this work is twofold: i) The Quality Analyzer that allows for creating new quality metrics and comparing them with state-of-the-art ones. ii) A Quality Assisted Editor to view which parts of the article should be improved in order to reach a higher overall article quality. Additionally, a case study-for the Quality Analyzer-and an office user study-for the Quality Assisted Editor-were conducted. The case study mainly describes how domain experts used the Quality Analyzer to create quality metrics. Furthermore, usability aspects and workload were analyzed. The user study for the Quality Assisted Editor was conducted v vi with 24 participants, that had to perform tasks either with the Quality Assisted Editor or a benchmark tool. Three aspects were examined: Detecting (potential) featured and non-featured articles, the workload of the participants and the usability of the Quality Assisted Editor.
... Ernst Kruijff1, Erick Mendez1, Eduardo Veas1, Thomas Gruenewald2 1 TU Graz, Institute for Com... more ... Ernst Kruijff1, Erick Mendez1, Eduardo Veas1, Thomas Gruenewald2 1 TU Graz, Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision, Inffeldgasse 16, 8010, Graz, Austria 2 WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, Flüelastrasse 11, 7260 Davos Dorf, Switzerland {kruijff ...
1. INTRODUCTION HYDROSYS is geared towards analysing environmental processes where they truly hap... more 1. INTRODUCTION HYDROSYS is geared towards analysing environmental processes where they truly happen, in the field. Currently, there is a large gap between the work done in the field and that done in the office when analysing environmental processes. Environmental ...
With 30 partners distributed in 15 countries, the enviroGRIDS project is contributing to the Glob... more With 30 partners distributed in 15 countries, the enviroGRIDS project is contributing to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) by promoting the use of webbased services, according to the Open GIS Consortium standards (OGC), to share and process large amounts of key environmental information in the Black Sea catchment. The main aim of the project is to assess water resource in the past, the present and the future, according to different development scenarios. The objective is also to develop datasets that are compatible with the European INSPIRE Directive on spatial data sharing across Europe. The data and metadata gathered and produced on the Black Sea catchment will be distributed through the enviroGRIDS geoportal (www.envirogrids.cz).
Augmented reality (AR) enables users to retrieve additional information about the real world obje... more Augmented reality (AR) enables users to retrieve additional information about the real world objects and locations. Exploring such location-based information in AR requires physical movement to different viewpoints, which may be tiring and even infeasible when viewpoints are out of reach. In this paper, we present object-centric exploration techniques for handheld AR that allow users to access information freely using a virtual copy metaphor to explore large real world objects. We evaluated our interfaces in controlled conditions and collected first experiences in a real world pilot study. Based on our findings, we put forward design recommendations that should be considered by future generations of location-based AR browsers, 3D tourist guides, or in situated urban planning.
This paper presents a visual interface developed on the basis of control and transparency to elic... more This paper presents a visual interface developed on the basis of control and transparency to elicit preferences in the scientific and cultural domain. Preference elicitation is a recognized challenge in user modeling for personalized recommender systems. The amount of feedback the user is willing to provide depends on how trustworthy the system seems to be and how invasive the elicitation process is. Our approach ranks a collection of items with a controllable text analytics model. It integrates control with the ranking and uses it as implicit preference for content based recommendations.
23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2018
Information-seeking tasks with learning or investigative purposes are usually referred to as expl... more Information-seeking tasks with learning or investigative purposes are usually referred to as exploratory search. Exploratory search unfolds as a dynamic process where the user, amidst navigation, trial-and-error and on-the-fly selections, gathers and organizes information (resources). A range of innovative interfaces with increased user control have been developed to support exploratory search process. In this work we present our attempt to increase the power of exploratory search interfaces by using ideas of social search, i.e., leveraging information left by past users of information systems. Social search technologies are highly popular nowadays, especially for improving ranking. However, current approaches to social ranking do not allow users to decide to what extent social information should be taken into account for result ranking. This paper presents an interface that integrates social search functionality into an exploratory search system in a user-controlled way that is consistent with the nature of exploratory search. The interface incorporates control features that allow the user to (i) express information needs by selecting keywords and (ii) to express preferences for incorporating social wisdom based on tag matching and user similarity. The interface promotes search transparency through color-coded stacked bars and rich tooltips. In an online study investigating system accuracy and subjective aspects with a structural model we found that, when users actively interacted with all its control features, the hybrid system outperformed a baseline content-based-only tool and users were more satisfied.
Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2020
In this paper, we analyze the benefits of adopting user interfaces that offer control and transpa... more In this paper, we analyze the benefits of adopting user interfaces that offer control and transparency for searching in contexts of learning activities. Concretely, we conducted a user study with pharmacy students performing a problem-solving task in the course of a university lecture. The task involved finding scientific papers containing relevant information to solve a clinical case. Students were split into two independent groups and assigned one search tool to perform the task. The baseline group worked with PubMed, a popular search engine in the life sciences domain, whereas the second half of the class was assigned an exploratory search system (ESS) designed for control and transparency. In the analysis, we cover the objective and subjective dimensions of the task outcomes. Firstly, the objective analysis addresses the inherent difficulty of the search task in a learning scenario and identifies certain improvements in performance for those students using the ESS, most notably when searching for primary-source content. The subjective analysis investigates the human factors side, providing evidence that the ESS effectively increases the perception of control and transparency and is able to produce a better user experience. Lastly, we report on perceived learning as a subjective dimension measured separately from user experience. CCS CONCEPTS • Information systems → Web searching and information discovery; Search interfaces; • Applied computing → Interactive learning environments.
Wikipedia has become a major source of information in the web [54]. It consists of user-generated... more Wikipedia has become a major source of information in the web [54]. It consists of user-generated content and has about 12 million edits/contributions per month. One of the keys to its success being the user-generated content, is also a hindrance to its growth and quality: in the context of user-generated content contributions can be of poor quality because everyone, even anonymous users, can participate. Therefore, the Wikipedia community defined criteria for high-quality articles also based on community review, called featured articles [73]. However, reviewing all contributions and identifying featured articles is a long-winded process [16]. In 2014, 269000 new articles were created, however, only 602 peer-reviews were performed and thus only 581 new featured article candidates were nominated. The amount of new featured articles in the year 2014 was 298 [15]. Thus, a lot of non-featured articles are yet to be reviewed, because the amount of data is far too large to review all edits/contributions only with human power. Related work [5, 55] has shown that it is possible to automatically measure the quality of Wikipedia articles, in order to detect non-featured articles that would likely to meet these high-quality standards. Yet, despite all these quality measures, it is difficult to identify what would improve an article. Therefore this master thesis is about an interactive graphic tool made for ranking and editing Wikipedia articles with support from quality measures. The contribution of this work is twofold: i) The Quality Analyzer that allows for creating new quality metrics and comparing them with state-of-the-art ones. ii) A Quality Assisted Editor to view which parts of the article should be improved in order to reach a higher overall article quality. Additionally, a case study-for the Quality Analyzer-and an office user study-for the Quality Assisted Editor-were conducted. The case study mainly describes how domain experts used the Quality Analyzer to create quality metrics. Furthermore, usability aspects and workload were analyzed. The user study for the Quality Assisted Editor was conducted v vi with 24 participants, that had to perform tasks either with the Quality Assisted Editor or a benchmark tool. Three aspects were examined: Detecting (potential) featured and non-featured articles, the workload of the participants and the usability of the Quality Assisted Editor.
... Ernst Kruijff1, Erick Mendez1, Eduardo Veas1, Thomas Gruenewald2 1 TU Graz, Institute for Com... more ... Ernst Kruijff1, Erick Mendez1, Eduardo Veas1, Thomas Gruenewald2 1 TU Graz, Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision, Inffeldgasse 16, 8010, Graz, Austria 2 WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, Flüelastrasse 11, 7260 Davos Dorf, Switzerland {kruijff ...
1. INTRODUCTION HYDROSYS is geared towards analysing environmental processes where they truly hap... more 1. INTRODUCTION HYDROSYS is geared towards analysing environmental processes where they truly happen, in the field. Currently, there is a large gap between the work done in the field and that done in the office when analysing environmental processes. Environmental ...
With 30 partners distributed in 15 countries, the enviroGRIDS project is contributing to the Glob... more With 30 partners distributed in 15 countries, the enviroGRIDS project is contributing to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) by promoting the use of webbased services, according to the Open GIS Consortium standards (OGC), to share and process large amounts of key environmental information in the Black Sea catchment. The main aim of the project is to assess water resource in the past, the present and the future, according to different development scenarios. The objective is also to develop datasets that are compatible with the European INSPIRE Directive on spatial data sharing across Europe. The data and metadata gathered and produced on the Black Sea catchment will be distributed through the enviroGRIDS geoportal (www.envirogrids.cz).
Augmented reality (AR) enables users to retrieve additional information about the real world obje... more Augmented reality (AR) enables users to retrieve additional information about the real world objects and locations. Exploring such location-based information in AR requires physical movement to different viewpoints, which may be tiring and even infeasible when viewpoints are out of reach. In this paper, we present object-centric exploration techniques for handheld AR that allow users to access information freely using a virtual copy metaphor to explore large real world objects. We evaluated our interfaces in controlled conditions and collected first experiences in a real world pilot study. Based on our findings, we put forward design recommendations that should be considered by future generations of location-based AR browsers, 3D tourist guides, or in situated urban planning.
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Papers by Eduardo Veas