Craig Prince’s research while affiliated with University of Mary Washington and other places

Understanding large amounts of multimedia information is a challenge in many domains – as technology makes its way into the classroom, the classroom becomes one such domain. An instructor has little attention to focus on the technology and is instead focused on teaching. We examine several techniques for clustering digital ink diagrams drawn by students during in-class activities. These diagrams are submitted electronically to the instructor in real-time. The goal of clustering is to allow the instructor to gain an overview of the responses submitted, to quickly assess the level of understanding of the students, and to select "interesting" responses to display and discuss further. We have found that an instructor has difficult achieving these goals even in small classes of size 15 to 20. As the class size increases this task becomes impossible. We find that for some exercises our clustering works surprisingly well and should help to reduce the cognitive load on an instructor.

In this paper, we describe preliminary work on an ink editing application that allows an instructor to correct mistakes to digital ink written during a presentation that is to be archived. These corrections are then seamlessly reintegrated into the digital archive so that when the presentation is replayed the corrected ink is displayed instead of the original incorrect ink. We base our results on a system we have developed and prototype the work flow from initial presentation, through correction, updating the archive and playback. We show that a simple mechanism for correction is effective and low effort for the instructor. A key technical challenge that is addressed is the substitution of strokes by matching of the original and corrected ink.

We believe it is unreasonable to assume that all students will own a laptop. One potential solution is to depend on the students to bring whatever computing devices (cell phones, portable gaming devices, etc.) that they already own to class. This leaves a unique challenge for teachers both in creating activities that work across a wide set of devices with different input modalities and in interpreting the responses to these activities. We seek to explore an end-user programming solution for teachers to abstractly define an activity for use over a diverse set of devices - allowing for easy distribution and aggregation of the resulting responses.

The Web provides nearly ubiquitous access to information, but access for blind Web users requires the use of expensive, specialized software programs called screen readers unlikely to be installed on most computers. WebAnywhere is a self-voicing, Web-browsing Web application that makes the Web accessible for blind Web users from most devices with Web access. WebAnywhere requires no special permissions or additional software to be installed on the host machine, enabling it provide a self-voicing interface on almost any Web-enabled device. WebAnywherepsilas interface is written in Javascript, speech is retrieved from a remote server, and sounds are played using either Flash or existing embedded sound players. This paper describes the performance and security implications of the systempsilas unique design and how it has been engineered to provide usable access anywhere. Specifically, we present prefetching and caching strategies developed to make the system responsive even on low-bandwidth connections and security considerations that replicate existing browser security policies.

People often use computers other than their own to access web content, but blind users are restricted to using only computers equipped with expensive, special-purpose screen reading programs that they use to access the web. Web-Anywhere is a web-based, self-voicing web browser that enables blind web users to access the web from almost any computer that can produce sound without installing new software. The system could serve as a convenient, low-cost solution for blind users on-the-go, for blind users unable to afford a full screen reader and for web developers targeting accessible design. This paper overviews existing solutions for mobile web access for blind users and presents the design of the WebAnywhere system. WebAnywhere generates speech remotely and uses prefetching strategies designed to reduce perceived latency. A user evaluation of the system is presented showing that blind users can use Web-Anywhere to complete tasks representative of what users might want to complete on computers that are not their own. A survey of public computer terminals shows that WebAnywhere can run on most.

A wealth of structured, publicly-available information ex- ists in the deep web but is only accessible by querying web forms. As a result, users are restricted by the interfaces pro- vided and lack a convenient mechanism to express novel and independent extractions and queries on the underlying data. Transcendence enables personalized access to the deep web by enabling users to partially reconstruct web databases in order to perform new types of queries. From just a few ex- amples, Transcendence helps users produce a large number of values for form input fields by using unsupervised infor- mation extraction and collaborative filtering of user sugges- tions. Structural and semantic analysis of returned pages finds individual results and identifies relevant fields. Users may revise automated decisions, balancing the power of au- tomation with the errors it can introduce. In a user evalua- tion, both programmers and non-programmers found Tran- scendence to be a powerful way to explore deep web re- sources and wanted to use it in the future.

People often use computers other than their own to access web content, but blind users are restricted to using comput- ers equipped with expensive, special-purpose screen reading programs that they use to access the web. WebAnywhere is a web-based, self-voicing web application that enables blind web users to access the web from almost any computer that can produce sound without installing new software. Web- Anywhere could serve as a convenient, low-cost solution for blind users on-the-go, for blind users unable to aord an- other screen reader and for web developers targeting accessi- ble design. This paper describes the implementation of Web- Anywhere, overviews an evaluation of it by blind web users, and summarizes a survey of public terminals that shows it can run on most public computers.

People often use computers other than their own to browse the web, but blind web users are limited in where they ac- cess the web because they require specialized, expensive pro- grams for access. WebAnywhere is a web-based, self-voicing browser that enables blind web users to access the web from almost any computer that can produce sound. The system runs entirely in standard web browsers and requires no ad- ditional software to be installed. The system could serve as a convenient, low-cost solution for both web developers targeting accessible design and end users unable to aord a full screen reader. This demonstration will oer visitors the opportunity to try WebAnywhere and learn more about it.

Fulfilling the promise of a web-enabled global community means enabling blind web users to access their information and collaborative web services wherever they happen to be on whatever computer to which they happen to have access. Whether they're checking their email at a local internet café, using an airport kiosk to connect with a new business contact on a social networking site, or collaboratively editing a document in a hotel business center, blind web users need to stay connected to be successful. While web-enabled computers are everywhere, screen readers are installed on very few. Downloading and installing new software can take a long time and is difficult without a screen reading interface, and many will not allow users to download and install new software at all. Accessible mobile devices are prohibitively expensive. WebAnywhere is a free screen-reading web application capable of making the web accessible to blind users on any web-enabled computer or device, regardless of platform or browser used, without installing new software.

Classroom Presenter is a Tablet PC-based interaction system that supports the sharing of digital ink on slides between instructors and students. Initial deployments show that using the technology can achieve a wide range of educational goals and foster a more participatory classroom environment.