Carolyn Watters

• Dalhousie University

In this paper, we explore how user-generated content, such as links (web page URLs) shared on social media can be used to recommend relevant and popular web pages to the website visitors. Based on our preliminary findings [8, 9], we have developed a set of guidelines and a prototype called the Social Media Panel (SMP). The SMP displays popular web...

The goal of this research is to explore how social media data can be used to help users find information on websites. This paper presents the first stage in this line of research and focuses on the characteristics of links (i.e. website URLs) shared on social media to recommend relevant and popular web pages within the website to others. Specifical...

This paper presents a study that investigated three features to improve how users perform information gathering tasks on the web. These features were based on recommendations that were developed in a previous work. The results of the previous study indicated that tools supporting information gathering could be improved by: 1) keeping track of refer...

The Advances in Teaching and Learning Technologies Mini-track has a history at HICSS that spans more than seventeen years. Various incarnations of this mini-track have served as an outlet for researchers who investigate the collaborative aspects of teaching, ...

Despite the growing demand of complex multimedia contents and the evolution of the authoring tools, many home computer users face significant obstacles in an attempt to familiarize themselves with multimedia authoring tasks. Many authoring tools have evolved to accommodate advanced skills typically performed by professionals and to introduce new au...

Headaches are a major concern for which psychosocial interventions are recommended. However, headache sufferers do not always have ready access to these interventions. Technology has been used to improve access, especially in young people. To examine user preferences to inform the development of an Internet-based psychosocial intervention including...

Background: Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) is characterized by angry and noncompliant behaviour. It is the most common disruptive behaviour disorder (DBD), with prevalence estimates of 6-9% for preschoolers and is closely linked to several long-term difficulties, including disorders of conduct, mood, anxiety, impulse-control, and substance ab...

The amount of news now available electronically makes it imperative that sophisticated filtering tools be developed. The creation of personalized electronic newspapers based on fine-grained filtering is difficult to achieve and attempts have met with poor results. These results may be explained by the ludenic or play theory of news reading which pr...

Taken in isolation, algorithmic "data sciences" approaches and human-centred "visual analytics" methods hold great promise for operationalizing archival datasets and streaming real-time data in support of strategic and operational decision-making across a broad range of human activities.

This paper presents a part of a larger research study that concerned investigating the task of information gathering on the Web. The study took several subtasks of the information gathering task for investigations in order to develop recommendations for improving the design of tools intended for this type of task. Since information gathering is a h...

Today, people perform many types of tasks on the web, including those that require multiple web sessions. In this article, we build on research about web tasks and present an in-depth evaluation of the types of tasks people perform on the web over multiple web sessions. Multisession web tasks are goal-based tasks that often contain subtasks requiri...

This paper presents Web Gad, a tool intended to improve how users perform information gathering tasks on the Web. Web Gad is meant to assist users with several subtasks under the information gathering task with specific emphasis on managing, organizing, keeping, and re-finding information during the task. The prototype system was designed based on...

This is the introduction.

Web information gathering includes tasks in which users attempt to locate, organize, and use information from different sources on the web to satisfy an information need, often over multiple sessions. An example is the case of writing a report or beginning an investigation. This paper presents the results of a research study to explore the difficul...

The purpose of this study is to compare two variations of tag clouds, one where the tags are created by a single author and the other where the tags are created by a community of authors. Using mixed methodologies, data was captured and analyzed for efficiency and enjoyment. The results show that tag clouds, where the tags are created by a single a...

In this paper, we describe the preliminary results of a study investigating subtasks of the information gathering task on the Web. Those subtasks are: managing information, handling multiple sessions, and re-finding information. The study compared features in a prototype, WIGI (Web Information Gathering Interface), to the current state of Web infor...

In this paper, we describe the preliminary results of a study investigating subtasks of the information gathering task on the Web. Those subtasks are: managing information, handling multiple sessions, and re-finding information. The study compared features in a prototype, WIGI (Web Information Gathering Interface), to the current state of Web infor...

The purpose of this study is to compare how users perceive and use three navigation tools (search, menus and tag clouds) on websites to find information. Furthermore, the study compares two variations of tag clouds, one where the tags are created by a single author and the other where the tags are created by a community of authors. Using mixed meth...

Proceedings of the Twelfth International ISKO Conference 6-9 August 2012 Mysore, India

Most children with mental health disorders do not receive timely care because of access barriers. These initial trials aimed to determine whether distance interventions provided by nonprofessionals could significantly decrease the proportion of children diagnosed with disruptive behavior or anxiety disorders compared with usual care. In three pract...

This paper presents a Visual Information Management System (VIMS) for the Web. In this prototype system, the task of Web information gathering was taken into consideration with respect to how users locate information for the task, organize task information, preserve and re-find task information, and compare information for effective reasoning and d...

This paper presents the results of a questionnaire on user behaviour during searching the Web as part of information gathering tasks. In this study, users' Web activities related to finding information, comparing information, managing information, and re-finding information, using different Web search and navigation tools, used for information gath...

The fundamental model for Web navigation has not changed much since the beginning of the development of Hypertext and Web search engines. Current browsing allows users to search by formulating queries, entering known URLs, and by navigation by following links embedded in webpages. Considerable research has focused on navigation mechanisms to improv...

The paper explores research concerned with improving aspects of the Web information gathering task. This type of task involves finding source of information on the Web, comparing different types of information, and re-finding information for reasoning and decision making. Research in Web information retrieval has explored visualization, clustering,...

Improving the relevancy of Web search results has been of increasing interest in recent years. The nature of the Web implies heterogeneity, large volumes, and varied structures. Hence, finding results that best suit the needs of every individual is a very challenging problem. Accordingly, interactive graphical and visualization techniques are sugge...

This paper proposes a conceptual model of the key factors that drive employees' effective participation with social tagging systems within the corporate environment. The proposed model is based on integrating and applying existing findings from various disciplines in a novel conceptualization to explain the motivations of participants in organizati...

This paper provides in-depth analysis of Web information gathering tasks. Research has focused on categorizing Web tasks by creating a high-level framework of user goals and activities on the Web. Yet, there has been very limited emphasis on improving the effectiveness of Web search for information gathering under the concept of a complete task. Th...

The extraordinary growth in both the size and popularity of the World Wide Web has created a growing interest not only in identifying Web page genres, but also in using these genres to classify Web pages. The hypothesis of this research is that an n-gram representation of a Web page can be used effectively to automatically classify that Web page by...

Games are designed to generate a high level of motivation and engagement in their players. Game players often display intensity in their interaction with and devotion (compulsion) to a game and play the game over and over. In this chapter, the authors present a framework of motivational constructs found in games that are applicable to the design of...

Reading is a common everyday activity for most of us. In this article, we examine the potential for using Wikipedia to fill in the gaps in one's own knowledge that may be encountered while reading. If gaps are encountered frequently while reading, then this may detract from the reader's final understanding of the given document. Our goal is to incr...

We present results from a study examining how visual selection feedback and map layout impact interaction when expressing spatial queries on paper maps using handheld devices. A sequence analysis of gaze patterns indicates that efficient queries involved a progression of visual attention from the paper map to the handheld device for a city street m...

Search engines provide an effective means of retrieving a document in which a piece of text occurs when the query contains infrequently occurring terms or the query is known to be an exact phrase. However, phrase queries usually contain common terms including determiners and users may not remember phrases exactly. Search engines discard common term...

We explore how users manage multi-session web tasks (tasks that require more than a single web session to complete). When users are performing multi-session web tasks, they must ‘make sense’ of information that they gather during each of the Web sessions and they must also ‘keep a sense’ of the information between the sessions. We present the resul...

Shared use of mobile devices is increasingly prevalent in both research prototypes and in practice, however, little is known as to how to support best this interaction paradigm. In this paper, we present a study examining how pairs share a single mobile phone during a collaborative wayfinding activity. We provide a classifi- cation of strategies, r...

In two previous studies, we explored how users perform multi-session web tasks using the currently available tools. We also proposed three guidelines to help developers design browser support for these types of tasks. In this paper, we describe three prototypes that we designed using these guidelines and present the results of a preliminary evaluat...

When reading online, users sometimes need auxiliary information to complement or fill in their own background knowledge in order to better understand a document that they are reading. We believe that delivering this information in the least intrusive fashion possible will improve their understanding. We have prototyped a system that selects a singl...

Understanding the interplay between technology and urban life is the basic question of urban computing research. In addition to using context to achieve realism in evaluation, urban computing studies often need to consider context of use outright as an element under study. Doing so requires new ways of thinking about context that may not fit neatly...

In two previous studies, we explored how users perform multi-session web tasks (those tasks that require more than one web session to complete). Using the results of these studies, we proposed three guidelines to help developers design browser support for these types of tasks. In this paper, we describe three prototypes that we designed and develop...

It can be difficult to properly understand aspects of user behavior on the Web without examining the behaviors in a realistic setting, such as through field studies. In this article, an overview of the experiences in augmenting logged data with contextual information over the course of two separate research projects conducted in the field is presen...

Users are now performing more sophisticated web tasks. In this work, we explore web tasks that require multiple web sessions to complete (multi-session tasks) to satisfy a goal. We conducted a web-based diary study and a field study that used a customized version of Firefox which logged the participants' interactions for multi-session tasks and all...

We present results from a study examining the sensitivity of group navigation strategies to changes in route presentation on a shared mobile device. Two content-equivalent interfaces are compared. An interface providing textual instructions linked to regions on a route map yields reliance on text primarily, encouraging route planning and a divide-...

In this paper, we describe a set of experiments to examine the effect of various attributes of web genre on the automatic identification of the genre of web pages. Four different genres are used in the data set, namely, FAQ, News, E-Shopping and Personal Home Pages. The effects of the number of features used to represent the web pages (5, 20, or 10...

Exact phrase matching is a powerful tool to quickly retrieve results when a sufficient section of the text is accurately provided as the query. If the section of the text is not completely accurate, phrase searching will fail. A method must be used which will enforce strict enough conditions to achieve high accuracy while allowing for mistakes in t...

Technology could lead to significant improvements in pediatric pain care. Increasing access and effectiveness of treatment and improving measurement are possible, but this potential has not yet been met. In this chapter, we review the use of videoconferencing, telephone- or Web-enabled systems of treatment, private computer networks, computer kiosk...

A prototype system for the filtering and ranking of news items has been developed and a pilot test has been conducted. The user's interests are modeled by a user interest hierarchy based on explicit user feedback with adaptive learning after each session. The system learned very quickly, reaching normalized recall values of over 0.9 within three se...

With the growth of information on the Web, users can perform more complex information seeking tasks. Users may finish tasks during one single session using their web browser, while other tasks may require the user to complete the task over many sessions.

While previous work has shown that monitoring is an emerging web activity, we have very little understanding of how users actually engage in monitoring on the Web. That is, how users complete their monitoring activities and the types of information being monitored. In this poster, we discuss the role of monitoring and present a study currently unde...

While researchers have been studying user activity on the Web since its inception, there remains a lack of understanding of the high level tasks in which users engage on the Web. We have recently conducted a field study in which participants were asked to annotate all web usage with a task description and categorization. Based on our analysis of pa...

Previous studies have examined various aspects of user behavior on the Web, including general information-seeking patterns, search engine use, and revisitation habits. Little research has been conducted to study how users navigate and interact with their Web browser across different information-seeking tasks. We have conducted a field study of 21 p...

Monitoring occurs when users return to previously viewed web pages to view new or updated information. While tools exist to support web-based monitoring, we know little about the monitoring activities users engage in and the nature of the support needed. We have conducted 40 semi-structured interviews in order to better understand the types of info...

The Measuring Web Effectiveness: The User Perspective minitrack is a multidisciplinary forum for considering issues related to the effectiveness of Web searching from the user¿s perspective. The minitrack examines the behavior of users seeking information on the Web. This is allows us to bring into the discussion, considerations of the impact that...

In this study, we conducted an investigation on automatic genre classification for three common types of Web pages addressing the effect of three theoretic feature selection measures, a range of feature set size, and three machine classifiers on the accuracy of the Web page classification in the context of a set of controlled experiments. Our resul...

In this paper, we explore how factors such as task and individual differences influence the usage of different web browser navigation mechanisms (e.g., clicked links, bookmarks, auto- complete). We conducted a field study of 21 participants and logged detailed web browser usage. Participants were asked to categorize their web usage according to the...

Currently in document retrieval there are many algorithms each with different strengths and weakness. There is some difficulty, however, in evaluating the impact of the test query set on retrieval results. The traditional evaluation process, the Cranfield evaluation paradigm, which uses a corpus and a set of user queries, focuses on making the quer...

The automatic identification of a user's task has the potential to improve information filtering systems that rely on implicit measures of interest and whose effectiveness may be dependant upon the task at hand. Knowledge of a user's current task type would allow information filtering systems to apply the most useful measures of user interest. We r...

Digital games have the ability to engage both children and adults alike. We are exploring the use of games for children with long term treatment regimes, where motivation for compliance is a key factor in the success of the treatment. In this paper, we describe the game framework we are building for this purpose. This framework is meant to support...

Users increasingly expect access to data from a wide range of devices, both wired and wireless. The long term goal of our research is to inform the design of applications that support data access by providing reasonably seamless migration of data among internet-compatible devices with minimal loss of effectiveness and efficiency. In this paper we f...

In this paper we describe recent work toprovide a filtering service for readers interested in medically related news articles from online news sources. The first task is to filter out the nonmedical news articles. The remaining articles, the medically related ones, are then assigned MeSH headings for context and then categorized further by intended...

The design and improvement of existing web browser navigation tools is often motivated by reports of high tool usage in the literature. However, general usage data alone is not enough to understand the utility of a given navigation tool. In this paper, we explore how factors such as task and individual differences influence the usage of different w...

Current search engines build indices based on keyword occurrence and frequency and use this information along with link and usage analysis to rank the results of Boolean query negotiation. This approach is fast, robust, and generic but produces the same ranked order of the results no matter the intent of the user. Some queries are related to physic...

Information Filtering systems learn user preferences either through explicit or implicit feedback. However, requiring users to explicitly rate items as part of the interface interaction can place a large burden on the user. Implicit feedback removes the burden of explicit user ratings by transparently monitoring user behavior such as time spent rea...

Re-finding information on the Web is a common yet often time consuming and challenging task. Even with the use of traditional bookmarks, which allow users to return to a previously visited page, it can be hard to re-find facts within that page. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for users to have long and unmanageable lists of bookmarks, making it dif...

Users expect access to Web data from a wide range of devices, both wired and wireless. Many users switch back and forth between devices, including laptops and Personal Data Assistants (PDAs), and expect to be able to continue working with that data. The goal of this research is to inform the design of applications that support the user by providing...

A web based system is described for the delivery of evidence-based behavioral interventions in the home for a variety of mental health problems in children. The goal of the interventions is to teach parents and/or children new skills to enable them to better manage their problems without having to drive into the clinic for face-to-face therapy sess...

In this paper, we present a field study comparing software-based navigation techniques (scrollbars, tap-and-drag, and touch-n-go) on mobile devices. In particular, we were interested in exploring the efficiency and user preference of these navigation techniques for different levels of mobility (sitting, walking, and standing) in a naturalistic envi...

Users of mobile devices often need to use those devices in contexts which leave only one hand available for manipulating the device, such as holding another device or manual, walking or operating some machinery.In this paper we discuss the results of a comparison of the effectiveness, efficiency and preference users have for map navigation tasks on...

Users increasingly expect access to Web data from a wide range of devices, both wired and wireless. The goal of our research is to inform the design of applications that support data access by providing reasonably seamless migration of Web data among internet-compatible devices with minimal loss of effectiveness and efficiency. This study focuses o...

Motivation is one of the driving forces behind the recent interest in games with educational goals. People willingly play complex games and we would like to channel that willingness to participate in complex challenges into the educational context. In this paper, we report on a survey administered to computer science and business students, two dist...

With network and small screen device improvements, such as wireless abilities, increased memory and CPU speeds, users are no longer limited by location when accessing on-line information. We are interested in studying the effect of users switching from a large screen device, such as a desktop or laptop to use the same web page on a small device, in...

Contextual retrieval supports differences amongst users in their in- formation seeking requests. The Web, which is very dynamic and nearly uni- versally accessible, is an environment in which it is increasingly difficult for users to find documents that satisfy their specific information needs. This prob- lem is amplified as users tend to use short...

Modern, technologically driven society is characterized by an increase in the rate of mobile device use and an increase in the extent to which these devices are used for more complex tasks than search for phone numbers. While direct consequences of screen-size reduction on task performance are well known, data are lacking on the impact of layout of...

The research reported in this paper is part of a larger project on the automatic classification of web pages by their genres. The long term goal is the incorporation of web page genre into the search process to improve the quality of the search results. In this phase, a neural net classifier was trained to distinguish home pages from non-home pages...

We are concerned with users who have already used data on a larger screen and have migrated to a smaller device and wish to continue working with that data. Earlier studies concentrated on the dynamic transformation of text content, lists, and forms embedded in web pages for access on a range of devices from desktop to handheld. In this paper, we f...

The increasing amount of data available on the Internet has made it more important to create efficient IR (Information Retrieval) systems than ever before. However, the execution efficiency of IR tasks under a given scheme is rarely discussed in research. This paper addresses this particular issue by proposing a method that reduces the complexity i...

Much of the academic literature available on the Web has never been adequately catalogued. Consequently, even using large-scale search engines, much of it remains inaccessible to researchers as indexing on this scale lacks the necessary detail to cope with discipline dependent terminologies and ontologies. Metadata has become a popular means to pro...

More people are using their smaller devices to access the Web. In this paper, we concentrate on the effect of migrating Web pages from large screened devices to small screened devices for users who use a Web site first on the larger screen and then use the same site on the small screen. We examine transformation volatility, including cognitive and...

In this paper we describe an information architecture that supports the dynamic composition of Web based lessons based on a database of fine grained components that can be tailored for communities of users. Our goal is to support Web accessible resources of pedagogical material that can be used and reused in a variety of contexts from teacher remed...

As the World Wide Web continues to grow exponentially, researchers and search engine companies continue to look for techniques that will improve the quality of search results. One method that has been suggested is to classify Web pages by their type of genre and use this information to focus a search more narrowly or to rank search results. However...

The banking industry has enjoyed excellent success in the application of sophisticated information technologies. It has the capital resources to make significant investments in technology infrastructure, and over the years this investment has paid major dividends in reduced costs and extended service offerings. Information technologies have actuall...

The banking industry has enjoyed excellent success in the application of sophisticated information technologies. It has the capital resources to make significant investments in technology infrastructure, and over the years this investment has paid major dividends in reduced costs and extended service offerings. Information technologies have actuall...

In this work we describe an architecture that supports the composition of web based lesson plans for math based on a database of fine grained mathematical components. Lessons can be tailored for different communities of users. For this research, the principal target community of users is middle school mathematics teachers. Our goal is to build a we...

The increased use and growing popularity of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) means users now have access to information on a variety of platforms. As people move or migrate between devices, from their desktops, to their laptops and to their PDAs, there is a need to maintain the integrity and context of information designed for the large screen wh...

The next evolutionary step in wireless Internet information management is to provide support for tasks, which may be collaborative and may include multiple target devices, from desktop to handheld. This means that the information architecture supports the processes of the task, recognizes group interaction, and lets users migrate seamlessly among i...

Many Web applications in business, personal finances, medicine, sales, and education, are ideal scenarios for the integrated use of different devices, both wired and wireless. From the user's perspective, accessing Web content using multiple devices is not enough, there needs to be continuity of task focus and recognition that each device has parti...

Many web queries have geospatial dimensions. While online shopping is built on the premise that distance and location are irrelevant (with the possible exception of shipping charges), tourism and onsite inspection of goods have a geospatial dimension and distance and location are relevant factors. Current search engines build indices based on keywo...

In this work we describe an architeture that supports the composition of web based lesson plans for math learning based on a database of fine grained mathematical components that can be tailored for communities of users. For this research, the principal target community of users is middle school mathematics teachers. Our goal is to build a web acce...

Text categorization is the process of sorting text documents into one or more predefined categories or classes of similar documents. Differences in the results of such categorization arise from the feature set chosen to base the association of a given document with a given category. Advocates of text categorization recognize that the sorting of tex...