Summary: People accumulate huge assortments of virtual possessions, but it is not yet clear how systems and system designers can help people make meaning from these large archives. Early research in HCI has suggested that people generally appear to value their virtual things less than their material things, but theory on material possessions does not entirely explain this difference. To investigate if changes to the form and behavior of virtual things may surface valued elements of a virtual archive, we designed a technology probe that selected snippets from old emails and mailed them as physical postcards to participating households. The probe uncovered features of emails that trigger meaningful reflection, and how contextual information can help people engage in reminiscence. Our study revealed insights about how materializing virtual possessions influences factors shaping how people draw on, understand, and value those possessions. We conclude with implication and strategies for aimed at supporting people in having more meaningful interactions and experiences with their virtual possessions.

Summary: Our goal is to provide insight into the human experience of light modulation to help achieve the specific application goals of indirect office lighting. This paper explains experimental development and design, and results from a human factors experiment for an indirect office lighting application. 18 subjects experienced working for a day in a 4x4 meter office equipped with an extended cove, housing LED light modules, providing indirect lighting that varied at 2 light modulation levels and a no modulation control condition. The light modulated at a frequency of 100 Hz due to the electronic design of the rectification of the AC line voltage. The results show that subjects had little to no response for the 29% light modulation level and the 0% control. Considerable undesirable response was measured with 100% modulation. In addition we see considerable variation from subject to subject. The type of information contained in this paper is used in making decisions on design trade-offs by product development teams.

Summary: A working understanding of fractions is critical to student success in high school and college math. Therefore, an understanding of the learning pathways that lead students to this working understanding is important for educators to provide optimal learning environments for their students. We propose the use of microgenetic analysis techniques including data mining and visualizations to inform our understanding of the process by which students learn fractions in an online game environment. These techniques help identify important variables and classification algorithms to group students by their learning trajectories.

Keywords: access control, home computing, privacy, security

Summary: As digital content becomes more prevalent in the home, non-technical users are increasingly interested in sharing that content with others and accessing it from multiple devices. Not much is known about how these users think about controlling access to this data. To better understand this, we conducted semi-structured, in-situ interviews with 33 users in 15 households. We found that users create ad-hoc access-control mechanisms that do not always work; that their ideal policies are complex and multi-dimensional; that a priori policy specification is often insufficient; and that people's mental models of access control and security are often misaligned with current systems. We detail these findings and present a set of associated guidelines for designing usable access-control systems for the home environment.

Keywords: embedded dictation, low complexity, low footprint, mobile dictation UI, speech recognition

Summary: Dictation of natural language text on embedded mobile devices is a challenging task. First, it involves memory and CPU-efficient implementation of robust speech recognition algorithms that are generally resource demanding. Secondly, the acoustic and language models employed in the recognizer require the availability of suitable text and speech language resources, typically for a wide set of languages. Thirdly, a proper design of the UI is also essential. The UI has to provide intuitive and easy means for dictation and error correction, and must be suitable for a mobile usage scenario. In this demonstrator, an embedded speech recognition system for short message (SMS) dictation in US English is presented. The system is running on Nokia Series 60 mobile phones (e.g., N70, E60). The system's vocabulary is 23 thousand words. Its Flash and RAM memory footprints are small, 2 and 2.5 megabytes, respectively. After a short enrollment session, most native speakers can achieve a word accuracy of over 90% when dictating short messages in quiet or moderately noisy environments.

Keywords: Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Human factors, Image segmentation, H.3.2 Information storage and retrieval, Information storage, H.3.6 Information storage and retrieval, Library automation, Large text archives, H.5.2 Information interfaces and presentation, User interfaces, Interaction styles, I.4.5 Image processing, Reconstruction

Summary: The CORE (Chemical Online Retrieval Experiment) project is a library of primary journal articles in chemistry. Any library has an inside and an outside; in this article we describe the inside of the library and the methods for building the system and accumulating the database. A later article will describe the outside (user experiences). Among electronic-library projects, the CORE project is unusual in that it has both ASCII derived from typesetting and image data for all its pages, and among experimental electronic-library projects, it is unusually large. We describe here (a) the processes of scanning and analyzing about 400,000 pages of primary journal material, (b) the conversion of a similar amount of textual database material, (c) the linking of these two data sources, and (d) the indexing of the text material.