Existing commercial Web browsers provide various utilities and functions, e.g., Web bookmarks and a browsing history list. Since the bookmark and history functions only the title and URL of the Web page, users who cannot remember the contents of each Web page have difficulty retracing their steps. In this paper, we propose a bookmark system based on a 3D interface. Additionally, our system offers three main functions; a 3D browsing history function, a marker function, and a look-ahead loading function. These functions enable users to browse Web pages more effectively.

\

The computer desktop has always had an inner desire to be three-dimensional. Desktops once featured black and white icons and now routinely use photorealistic, three- dimensional-looking icons. Yet the desktop itself has always remained two-dimensional. There have been many attempts at creating three-dimensional interfaces such as SGI’s FSN (as seen in Jurassic Park) and Microsoft Research’s three- dimensional task gallery. However, none has yet to become widely successful. People still foresee a three-dimensional interface as being the next great advance in user interface design. As a response to this challenge, MacWarriors, an ACM SIG at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, created the 3DOSX project, a project to create a three- dimensional file system browser, in the hopes of creating a free and viable alternative to the age-old desktop.

\

Mobile devices have become an intrinsic part of people’s everyday life. They are multifunctional devices providing ubiquitous access to many different sources of information. Together with traditional personal computers, these devices form a device ecology that provides access to an overlapping information space. Previous studies have shown that users encounter a number of fundamental problems when interacting with these device ecologies, such as lack of transparency, control, intelligibility and context. To mitigate these problems, we introduce ActivitySpace: an activity-centric configuration space that enables the user to integrate and work across several devices by utilizing the space between the devices. This paper presents the conceptual background and design of ActivitySpace and reports on a study with nine participants. Our study shows thatActivitySpace helps users to easily manage devices and their allocated resources while also exposing a number of usage patterns.

\

Research has shown that computers are notoriously bad at supporting the management of parallel activities and interruptions, and that mobility increases the severity and scope of these problems. This paper presents activity-based computing (ABC) which supplements the prevalent data- and application-oriented computing paradigm with technologies for handling multiple, parallel and mobile work activities. We present the design and implementation of ABC support em- bedded in the Windows XP operating system. This includes replacing the Windows Taskbar with an Activity Bar, sup- port for handling Windows applications, a zoomable user interface, and support for moving activities across different computers. We report an evaluation of this Windows XP ABC system which is based on a multi-method approach, where perceived ease-of-use and usefulness was evaluated together with rich interview material. This evaluation showed that users found the ABC XP extension easy to use and likely to be useful in their own work.

\

This paper describes a new collaboration technology that is carefully poised between informal, ad hoc, easy-to-initiate collaborative tools, vs. more formal, structured, and high overhead collaborative applications. Our approach focuses on the support of lightweight, informally structured, opportunistic activities featuring heterogeneous threads of shared objects with dynamic membership. We introduce our design concepts, and we provide a detailed first look at data from the first 100 days of usage by 20 researchers and 13 interns, who both confirmed our hypotheses and surprised us by reinventing the technology in several ways.

\

Extracting semantics from everyday documents, intelligent agents, illustrated by Apple Data Detectors, infer high-level goals from simple user actions.

\

"Deep thinking is rare in this field where most companies are glad to copy designs that were great back in the 1970s. The Humane Interface is a gourmet dish from a master chef. Five mice!" --Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group Author of Designing Web Usability: The Practice of SimplicityThis unique guide to interactive system design reflects the experience and vision of Jef Raskin, the creator of the Apple Macintosh. Other books may show how to use today's widgets and interface ideas effectively. Raskin, however, demonstrates that many current interface paradigms are dead ends, and that to make computers significantly easier to use requires new approaches. He explains how to effect desperately needed changes, offering a wealth of innovative and specific interface ideas for software designers, developers, and product managers.The Apple Macintosh helped to introduce a previous revolution in computer interface design, drawing on the best available technology to establish many of the interface techniques and methods now universal in the computer industry. With this book, Raskin proves again both his farsightedness and his practicality. He also demonstrates how design ideas must be built on a scientific basis, presenting just enough cognitive psychology to link the interface of the future to the experimental evidence and to show why that interface will work.Raskin observes that our honeymoon with digital technology is over: We are tired of having to learn huge, arcane programs to do even the simplest of tasks; we have had our fill of crashing computers; and we are fatigued by the continual pressure to upgrade. The Humane Interface delivers a way for computers, information appliances, and other technology-driven products to continue to advance in power and expand their range of applicability, while becoming free of the hassles and obscurities that plague present products.

\

My thesis proposes a new paradigm for file management called Arium. Arium is a file management system. The data structure of Arium is social ontological. Files are networked through their social relationships. These social relationships are created based on their owner’s activities. Each file points to other files, and in turn, is pointed to by others. When a file is newly modified or updated with a new message,itbroadcastsitsupdatesoitsowneriseasilynotified.InsteadofaFolder,Ariumhasa“Keepr”.A Keepr is a collection of files. In Arium, a file is able to belong to multiple collections—as opposed to the current paradigm, where a file can belong only to one folder in a user’s desktop. For instance, the personal resume in Word format will be pointed to by the user’s contact info, profile photo, or educational certifications. This file will point to the final resume in PDF format. The collection of contact info, a photo and certifications can be kept by “Resume” Keepr. Also, the final PDF file can be tied to ”Resume” , “Job’”and “May 2012”. When a file is tied to Keeprs its owner chooses, Arium regards it as “collected.”

\

We describe Athena: a system for creating, exploiting, and maintaining a hierarchy of textual documents through interactive miningbased operations. Requirements of any such system include speed and minimal end-user effort. Athena satisfies these requirements through linear-time classification and clustering engines which are applied interactively to speed the development of accurate models. Naive Bayes classifiers are recognized to be among the best for classifying text. We show that our specialization of the Naive Bayes classifier is considerably more accurate (7 to 29% absolute increase in accuracy) than a standard implementation. Our enhancements include using Lidstone's law of succession instead of Laplace's law, under-weighting long documents, and over-weighting author and subject. We also present a new interactive clustering algorithm, C-Evolve, for topic discovery. C-Evolve first finds highly accurate cluster digests (partial clusters), gets user feedback to merge and correct these digests, and then uses the classification algorithm to complete the partitioning of the data. By allowing this interactivity in the clustering process, C-Evolve achieves considerably higher clustering accuracy (10 to 20% absolute increase in our experiments) than the popular K-Means and agglomerative clustering methods.

\

\

Whether you are interested in improving the usability of Linux, Macintosh or Windows, there is one restriction you cannot escape the hierarchical file storage system. The notion of files and folders has been with us for so long that it almost seems axiomatic. In this paper we look at the effects on users of forcing a hierarchical classification of files. We also consider how some of the resultant problems can be tackled with a new piece of file browsing software based on the ideas of relational database systems.

\

Beamtrees are a new method for the visualization of large hierarchical data sets. Nodes are shown as stacked circular beams, such that both the hierarchical structure as well as the size of nodes are depicted. The dimensions of beams are calculated using a variation of the treemap algorithm. A small user study indicated that beamtrees are significantly more effective than nested treemaps and cushion treemaps for the extraction of global hierarchical information

\

Many email users, especially managers, receive too many email messages to read in the time available to them. The solutions available today often require programming skills on the part of the user to define rules for prioritizing messages or moving messages to folders. We propose a different approach: categorize messages in the inbox with predefined rules that do not require maintenance and are scalable to handle anything from 50 to thousands of messages.

\

The World Wide Web is increasingly becoming the preferred repository of information. The strength of this information infrastructure is also its weakness. Faced with the chaos of millions of places to go and thousands of places to remember having been, the thousands of new Web users who join every day, need a helping hand. The aim of this paper is, to highlight possible components of technologies supporting web navigation and the maintenance of indexes to web resources. The BASE framework is suggested as a means of understanding the pragmatic technological choices, and six experimental prototypes are presented and discussed. The prototypes support various aspects of bookmark maintenance and information filtering.

We propose a new method for visualizing the strength of associations based on a fluid metaphor and cell structure. This enables users to place gathered information visually in relation, while solving complex information tasks. Both, vague and precise relations can be visualized. We applied our approach to a scenario of information retrieval during web browsing sessions. In this paper we describe our novel visual information-gathering system called BrainDump. To support the user's sensemaking process, this system provides the possibility to change the initial associations, follow links back to the source of information, annotate content and hierarchically group collected items. A preliminary user test was designed and conducted.

\

The BubbleFish uses Augmented Reality to let its users maintain digital documents spatially in the physical environment as an alternative to the currently dominating file/folder approach in desktop based computer systems. The style of interaction provided by the document manager follows the principles of direct manipulation, but takes the issue of directness at the interface further by providing an interaction space that blends the virtual and the physical world.

\

We explore making virtual desktops behave in a more physically realistic manner by adding physics simulation and using piling instead of filing as the fundamental organizational structure. Objects can be casually dragged and tossed around, influenced by physical characteristics such as friction and mass, much like we would manipulate lightweight objects in the real world. We present a prototype, called BumpTop, that coherently integrates a variety of interaction and visualization techniques optimized for pen input we have developed to support this new style of desktop organization.

\

Recent HCI research shows a strong interest in task man- agement systems (e.g. [19, 27]) that support the multi- tasked nature of information work [13]. These systems ei- ther require manual creation and maintenance of task repre- sentations, or they depend on explicit user cues to guide the creation and maintenance process. Furthermore, to access and use the task representations in these systems users must specify their current task. This interaction overhead inhibits the adoption of these systems. In this paper, we present a novel approach to task management that automates the creation and maintenance of task representations. Our sys- tem supports the user by making commonly used informa- tion more “ready-at-hand” through an intuitive visualization of their task representations. Users can correct and organize their task representations by directly manipulating the visu- alization; however, this interaction is not required. We de- scribe a feasibility study that demonstrates the actual utility (in terms of overhead reduction) and perceived utility of our system.

\

The design and implementation of a conceptual model, CAFE (a Categorization Assistant For E-mail), is described. The model supports the organization, searching, and retrieval of information in e-mail. Three modes are available for satisfying the users ’ needs in various situations: the Busy mode for intermittent use at times of high stress, the Cool mode for continuous use at the computer, and the Curious mode for sporadic use when exploring and (re-)organizing messages when more time is at hand. The design of the model is motivated partly by the results of a case study of categorization on the computer screen, and partly by a survey of e-mail clients. The case study was inspired by cognitive science theories. The model is related to information seeking theories in electronic environments. In the implementation each mode required using a different technique. The Busy mode uses the textbased Naive Bayesian algorithm, the Cool mode uses email filtering rules, and the Curious mode uses a combination of clustering techniques known as Scatter/Gather

\

Personal software assistants that help users with tasks like finding information, scheduling calendars, or managing work-flow will require significant customization to each individual user. For example, an assistant that helps schedule a particular user’s calendar will have to know that user’s scheduling preferences. This paper explores the potential of machine learning methods to automatically create and maintain such customized knowledge for personal software assistants. We describe the design of one particular learning assistant: a calendar manager, called CAP (Calendar APprentice), that learns user scheduling preferences from experience. Results are summarized from approximately five user-years of experience, during which CAP has learned an evolving set of several thousand rules that characterize the scheduling preferences of its users. Based on this experience, we suggest that machine learning methods may play an important role in future personal software assistants.

\

Our lives are full of memorable and important moments, as well as important items of information. The last few years have seen the proliferation of digital devices intended to support prosthetic memory (PM), to help users recall experiences, conversations and retrieve personal information. We nevertheless have little systematic understanding of when and why people might use such devices, in preference to their own organic memory (OM). Although OM is fallible, it may be more efficient than accessing information from a complex PM device. We report a controlled lab study which investigates when and why people use PM and OM. We found that PM use depended on users?’ evaluation of the quality of their OM, as well as PM device properties. In particular, we found that users trade-off Accuracy and Efficiency, preferring rapid access to potentially inaccurate information over laborious access to accurate information. We discuss the implications of these results for future PM design and theory. Rather than replacing OM, future PM designs need to focus on allowing OM and PM to work in synergy.

\

Activity-Based Computing (ABC) has been proposed as an organ- isational structure for local desktop management and knowledge work. Knowledge work, however, typically occurs in partially over- lapping subgroups and involves the use of multiple devices. We in- troduce co-Activity Manager, an ABC approach that (i) supports activity sharing for multiple collaborative contexts, (ii) includes collaborative tools into the activity abstraction and (iii) supports multiple devices by seamlessly integrated cloud support for doc- uments and activity storage. Our 14 day field deployment in a multidisciplinary software development team showed that activity sharing is used as a starting point for long-term collaboration while integrated communication tools and cloud support are used exten- sively during the collaborative activities. The study also showed that activities are used in different ways ranging from project de- scriptions to to-do lists, thereby confirming that a document-driven activity roaming model seems to be a good match for collaborative knowledge work

\

Connections is a file system search tool that combines traditional content-based search with context information gathered from user activity. By tracing file system calls, Connections can identify temporal relationships between files and use them to expand and reorder traditional content search results. Doing so improves both recall (reducing false- positives) and precision (reducing false-negatives). For example, Connections improves the average recall (from 13% to 22%) and precision (from 23% to 29%) on the first ten results. When averaged across all recall levels, Connections improves precision from 17% to 28%. Connections provides these benefits with only modest increases in average query time (2 seconds), indexing time (23 seconds daily), and index size (under 1% of the user’s data set).

\

Modern work is a highly social process, offering many cues for people to organize communication and access information. Shared physical workplaces provide natural support for tasks such as (a) social reminding about communication commitments and keeping track of collaborators and friends, and (b) social data mining of local expertise for advice and information. However, many people now collaborate remotely using tools such as email and voicemail. Our field studies show that these tools do not provide the social cues needed for group work processes. In part, this is because the tools are organized around messages, rather than people. In response to this problem, we created ContactMap, a system that makes people the primary unit of interaction. ContactMap provides a structured social desktop representation of users ’ important contacts that directly supports social reminding and social data mining. We conducted an empirical evaluation of ContactMap, comparing it with traditional email systems on tasks motivated by our fieldwork. Users performed better with ContactMap and preferred ContactMap for the majority of these tasks. We discuss future enhancements of our system and the implications of these results for future communication interfaces and for theories of mediated communication.

\

Many of the employees of today’s corporations are knowledge workers, people who create, read, analyze and act upon information. Information that is stored in different places, in different file formats and accessed by different software. PIM (Personal Information Management) literature expresses a lot of challenges for our tools to overcome. We have compiled these into an evaluation framework that could be used to evaluate future PIM solutions. We have also created a software prototype with the purpose of addressing the challenges in the evaluation framework, which we conduct a theoretical evaluation of.

\

The web browser is a central workspace for knowledge workers, where they use cloud-based applications to access their information. While this solution fits nicely within our diverse ecosystem of devices, it may reintroduce and proliferate faults of the desktop, particularly information fragmentation. Information fragmentation is an increasingly important issue on the cloud as information is typically siloed within different applications. This results in users replicating storage and organization due to the lack of a unifying structure. As cloud applications become more rich, the need to investigate whether these faults of the past are still problematic becomes more important. To probe this question we created Contextinator , a tool for the web browser that assists in coordinating data for projects. Contextinator enables knowledge workers to manage cloud-based information and project artifacts in a centralized place, providing a unifying structure. In this paper, we discuss the design of our system, and the results of our mixed-method evaluation. Our findings contribute insight into the need for, and appropriateness of, projects as unifying structures for the web. Our results point to two types of projects we call ‘preparatory’ and ‘opportunistic’ based on when and why users create them.

\

A new method is presented for the visualization of hiearchical information, such as directory structures and organization structures. Cushion treemaps inherit the elegance of standard treemaps: compact, space-filling displays of hierarchical information, based on recursive subdivision of a rectangular image space. Intuitive shading is used to provide insight in the hierarchical structure. During the subdivision ridges are added per rectangle, which are rendered with a simple shading model. The result is a surface that consists of recursive cushions. The method is efficient, effective, easy to use and implement, and has a wide applicability.

\

Applications are often designed to take advantage of the potential for integration with each other via shared information. Current approaches for integration are limited, affecting both the programmer and end-user. In this paper, we present CyberDesk, a framework for self-integrating software in which integration is driven by user context. It relieves the burden on programmers by removing the necessity to predict how software should be integrated. It also relieves the burden from users by removing the need to understand how to make different software components work together.

\

Effective management of documents on computers has been a central user interface problem for many years. One common approach involves using 2D spatial layouts of icons representing the documents, particularly for information workspace tasks. This approach takes advantage of human 2D spatial cognition. More recently, several 3D spatial layouts have engaged 3D spatial cognition capabilities. Some have attempted to use spatial memory in 3D virtual environments. However, there has been no proof to date that spatial memory works the same way in 3D virtual environments as it does in the real world. We describe a new technique for document management called the Data Mountain, which allows users to place documents at arbitrary positions on an inclined plane in a 3D desktop virtual environment using a simple 2D interaction technique. We discuss how the design evolved in response to user feedback. We also describe a user study that shows that the Data Mountain does take advantage of spatial memory. Our study shows that the Data Mountain has statistically reliable advantages over the Microsoft Internet Explorer Favorites mechanism for managing documents of interest in an information workspace.

\

Computer Graphics has been a vector oriented high technology for interaction and its images have been those of a silent movie. Current trends toward raster scan in general are bringing together the previously disjoint communities of image processing, broadcast television and computer graphics. Present implementations in video format are making computer graphics ubiquitous. Jointly, these events are leading to broader definitions of man-machine interaction and more generalized applications of computer resources. The user community is growing to include people like: presidents of companies, housewives, six year old children.In this light, this paper is about not throwing away the message with the medium while offering new technological opportunities for communication. In many regards the old fashioned book remains the best random access information resource we have, but new opportunities include: personalization, sound synchronization, spatial data access.

\

DeepaMehta is an open source semantic desktop application based on the topic maps standard. It’s conceptualisation and especially the innovative graph-based user interface have been guided by findings in cognitive psychology in order to provide a cognitively adequate work- ing environment for knowledge workers of all kind. DeepaMehta aims to evolve nowadays’ separated desktop applications into an integrated workspace enabling the user to organize, describe and relate information objects like text notes, external documents and media, browse the web, search databases and create semantic networks—all this in one seamless, semantics-enabled desktop environment.

\

Before the advent of the personal workstation, office work practice revolved around the paper document. Today the electronic medium offers a number of advantages over paper, but it has not eradicated paper from the office. A growing problem for those who work primarily with paper is lack of direct access to the wide variety of interactive functions available on personal workstations. This paper describes a desk with a computer-controlled projector and camera above it. The result is a system that enables people to interact with ordinary paper documents in ways normally possible only with electronic documents on workstation screens. After discussing the motivation for this work, this paper describes the system and two sample applications that can benefit from this style of interaction: a desk calculator and a French to English translation system. We describe the design and implementation of the system, report on some user tests, and conclude with some general reflections on interacting with computers in this way.

\

When performing tasks using computers, multiple documents are used with multiple applications. During working with computers, multiple tasks, perhaps involving multiple documents, are switched. This paper presents the Docking Window Framework: an extended multi-window system supporting such multitasking situations. It enables construction of workspaces comprising multiple windows with simple switching of workspaces. Although previous systems emphasized the support of task-switching after workspace construction, the proposed system characteristically supports construction of workspaces through a docking user interface. It also supports operation of multiple windows simultaneously, provides a tile layout of windows to reduce the overhead of window operations, and supports saving and restoration of workspaces. We conducted two experiments to evaluate the system. In window arrangement tasks, participants performed tasks faster using the proposed system than when using a popular window system (Windows XP). Moreover, in task-switching tasks, participants using our system performed multiple tasks in parallel more efficiently.

\

We designed, implemented, and evaluated an innovative concept for dynamic queries which involves the direct manipulation of small databases. Our domain was directories in a Unix file system. Dynamic queries allow users to formulate queries and explore the databases with graphical widgets, such as sliders and buttons, without requiring them to have any knowledge about the underlying structure of the database query languages, or command language syntax. Three interfaces for presenting directories were developed and tested with eighteen subjects in a within-subject design. The results of the formative evaluation yielded some useful guidelines for software designers.

\

Dynapad is a development environment designed to sup- port research prototyping of multiscale workspaces. In this paper we describe applications designed to facilitate visual access to and spatial organization of digital photo collec- tions and personal libraries of PDF documents. The re- search objective is to explore a generalization of the no- tion of a “pile” as a foundation for a versatile suite of tools to provide unobtrusive assistance for organizing collections and other sensemaking activities. We detail the architecture underlying the applications, explain how it supports diverse functionality and interaction styles, and abstract a set of principles for designing spatial tools.

\

We introduce a semantically zoomable interface that displays e- mails as interactive objects rather than files containing lines of text, as in traditional e-mail interfaces. In this system, e-mails are displayed as node objects called e-mail nodes within a 2.5- dimensional world. The e-mail nodes are semantically zoomable and each may be rearranged to different locations within the plane to organize threads, topics, or projects. The prototype for this system was built using the Piccolo toolkit, the successor of Pad++ and Jazz.

\

Due to email’s ubiquitous nature, millions of users are intimate with the technology. However, most users are only familiar with managing their own email, which is an inherently different task than exploring an email archive. Historians and social scientists believe that email archives are important artifacts for understanding the individuals and communities they represent. In order to understand the conversations evidenced in an archive, context is needed. In this paper, we present a new way to gain this necessary context: analyzing the temporal rhythms of social relationships. We provide methods for constructing meaningful rhythms from the email headers by identifying relationships and interpreting their attributes. With these visualization techniques, email archive explorers can uncover insights that may have been otherwise hidden in the archive. We apply our methods to an individual’s fifteen-year email archive, which consists of about 45,000 messages and over 4,000 relationships.

\

Over time, many people accumulate extensive email repositories that contain detailed information about their personal communication patterns and relationships. We present three visualizations that capture hierarchical, correlational, and temporal patterns present in user’s email repositories. These patterns are difficult to discover using traditional interfaces and are valuable for navigation and reflection on social relationships and communication history. We interviewed users with diverse email habits and found that they were able to interpret these images and could find interesting features that were not evident to them through their standard email interfaces. The images also capture a wide range of variation in email practices. These results suggest that information visualizations of personal communications have value for end-users and analysts alike.

\

Although Applied Natural Language Processing techniques have proven useful tools for processing and understanding massive document collections, they must often be taken with a grain of salt, many times suffering from limited reliability while generating results that may prove difficult for humans to make sense of. For example, analyzing the output of unsupervised clustering routines may result in huge cluster trees over unfamiliar data. Both verifying the qualitative robustness of the results and gaining new knowledge and insight about the data would could be facilitated by additional tools. Furthermore, completely automated processing can bring its own set of dangers. Machine learning techniques may prove inaccurate or obscure patterns, especially when trusted training data is not available. One possible solution to addressing these issues is to recast ANLP and data mining techniques as accountable tools within an exploratory data environment. This requires enabling users to directly visualize and analyze the results of processing, always providing access to the underlying source data. Users can then use these tools to further their analyses, simultaneously making their own decisions about the quality of processing results and even correcting algorithms as they go. This project attempts to take the first steps toward such an exploratory data environment for e-mail corpora, using the Enron e-mail corpus as a motivating data set. The interface--currently named "enronic"--unifi es information visualization techniques with various algorithms for processing the e-mail corpus, including social network inference, message categorization, and community analysis. Though still a preliminary design, enronic shows promise as a platform for more tightly coupling manual and automated data analysis.

\

A digital library of computer science literature, Envision provides powerful information visualization by displaying search results as a matrix of icons, with layout semantics under user control. Envision’s Graphic View interacts with an Item Summary Window giving users access to bibliographic information, and XMosaic provides access to complete bibliographic information, abstracts, and full content. While many visualization interfaces for information retrieval systems depict ranked query-document similarity, Envision graphically presents a variety of document characteristics and supports an extensive range of user tasks. Formative usability evaluation results show great user satisfaction with Envision’s style of presentation and the document characteristics visualized.

\

Originally designed as a messaging application, email is now used for a wide range of functions. Email clients however have not progressed correspondingly to support users with email management. This paper describes the design of EzMail, an email visualization tool that runs in conjunction with an email client and creates a multi-view interface to assist with email management. Our primary focus is to group and visualize messages as components of threads to provide contextual information and conversational history. We have developed visualizations for individual messages, message properties, and messages in a thread. Message annotation is incorporated, along with a capability for replying simultaneously to several messages. A small user survey and a user study provided information regarding users' management of their messages and threads, and a comparative evaluation of EzMail with respect to Microsoft Outlook.

\

Sometimes people cannot remember the names or locations of things on their computer, but they can remember what other things are associated with them. We created Feldspar, the first system that fully supports this associative retrieval of personal information on the computer. Feldspar’s contributions include (1) an intuitive user interface that allows users to find information by interactively and incrementally specifying multiple levels of associations as retrieval queries, such as: “find the file from the person who I met at an event in May”; and (2) algorithms for collecting the association information and for providing answers to associative queries in real-time. A user study showed that Feldspar is easy to use, and suggested that it might be faster than conventional browsing and searching for these kinds of retrieval tasks. Feldspar could be an important addition to search and browsing tools.

\

Navigating to files through a hierarchy is often a slow, laborious, and repetitive task. Recent lab studies showed that file browser interface augmentations, such as Icon Highlights and Search Directed Navigation, have the potential to reduce file retrieval times. However, for this potential to be realised in actual systems, further study is necessary to address two important issues. First, there are important design and implementation challenges in advancing the research prototypes previously evaluated into complete interactive systems that can be used for real work. Second, it is unknown how real users would employ these systems while engaged in actual work; would the potential performance improvements suggested by the earlier lab studies be realised? We therefore describe the design, implementation, and longitudinal field study evaluation of Finder Highlights, a file browser plugin for the OS X 'Finder' that adds support for Icon Highlights and Search Directed Navigation. Study results confirm that the augmentations are effective in reducing real-world file retrieval times, with retrieval times 13% faster when using Finder Highlights compared to the standard tool (10.6 s versus 12.2 s), while also emphasising important differences between lab and field studies. In summary, the paper strongly suggests that large-scale deployment of interface augmentations to file browsers, particularly Icon Highlights, will have a marked effect in improving users' real-world file retrieval.

\

The Forget-me-not project is an attempt to explore new ways in which mobile and ubiquitous technologies might help alleviate the increasing load. Forget-me-not is a memory aid designed to help with everyday memory problems: finding a lost document, remembering somebody’s name, recalling how to operate a piece of machinery. It exploits some well understood features of human episodic memory to provide alternative ways of retrieving information that was once known but has now been forgotten.

\

Activity-based computing represents an alternative to the dominant application and document-centric model at the foundation of most mainstream desktop computing interfaces. In this paper, we present in-depth results from an in situ, longitudinal study of an activity-based computing system, Giornata. We detail the ways that the specific features of this system influenced the everyday work experiences of a small cohort of knowledge workers. Our analysis provides contributions at several levels of granularity—we provide concrete design recommendations based on participants’ reactions to the particular features of the Giornata system and a discussion about how our findings can provide insight about the broader understanding of knowledge work and activity within HCI.

\

GLIMPSE, which stands for GLobal IMPlicit SEarch, provides indexing and query schemes for file systems. The novelty of glimpse is that it uses a very small index — in most cases 2-4% of the size of the text — and still allows very flexible full-text retrieval including Boolean queries, approximate matching (i.e., allowing misspelling), and even searching for regular expressions. In a sense, glimpse extends agrep to entire file systems, while preserving most of its functionality and simplicity. Query times are typically slower than with inverted indexes, but they are still fast enough for many applications. For example, it took 5 seconds of CPU time to find all 19 occurrences of Usenix AND Winter in a file system containing 69MB of text spanning 4300 files. Glimpse is particularly designed for personal information, such as one’s own file system. The main characteristic of personal information is that it is non-uniform and includes many types of documents. An information retrieval system for personal information should support many types of queries, flexible interaction, low overhead, and customization, All these are important features of glimpse.

\

In this paper we present lessons learned from building a Semantic Desktop system, the gnowsis beta. On desktop computers, semantic software has to provide stable services and has to reflect the personal view of the user. Our approach to ontologies, the Personal In- formation Model PIMO allows to create tagging services like del.icio.us on the desktop. A semantic wiki allows further annotations. Continuous evaluations of the system helped to improve it. These results were created in the EPOS research project and are available in the open source projects Aperture, kaukolu wiki, and gnowsis and will be continued in the Nepomuk project. By using these components, other developers can create new desktop applications the web 2.0 way.

\

Users find it hard to delete unimportant personal information which often results in cluttered workspaces. We present a full design cycle for GrayArea, a novel interface that allows users to demote unimportant files by dragging them to a gray area at the bottom of their file folders. Demotion is an intermediate option between keeping and deleting. It combines the advantages of deletion (unimportant files don‟t compete for attention) and keeping (files are retrieved in their folder context). We developed the GrayArea working prototype using thorough iterative design. We evaluated it by asking 96 participants to „clean‟ two folders with, and without, GrayArea. Using GrayArea reduced folder clutter by 13%. Further, 81% of participants found it easier to demote than delete files, and most indicated they would use GrayArea if provided in their operating systems. The results provide strong evidence for the demotion principle suggested by the user-subjective approach.

\

Our studies have shown that as displays become larger, users leave more windows open for easy multitasking. A larger number of windows, however, may increase the time that users spend arranging and switching between tasks. We introduce GroupBar, a task management sys- tem for dealing with the profusion of windows on the PC desktop. Designed to offer the same basic form and func- tion as the existing Microsoft WindowsTM TaskBar, GroupBar additionally allows users to group windows into higher-level tasks and enables task switching with a single mouse click. In order to gain experience with GroupBar usage and to develop reasonable task defini- tions we conducted a longitudinal field study. Based on the results of that field study, we conducted a compara- tive user study wherein we found that participants were able to multitask faster when using GroupBar than when using the existing Windows TaskBar.

\

We posit that a semistructured data model offers the right balance of rich structure and flexible (or lack of) schema allowing naive end users to record information in whatever form makes it easy for them to manage. We de- scribe our Haystack system, which exposes the richness and flexibility of the data model while offering the user natural, traditional interfaces that shield them from the specifics of schemas, tuples, and database queries. We outline re- search challenges that remain to be addressed.

\

The World Wide Web is increasingly becoming the preferred repository of information. The strength of this information infrastructure is also its weakness. Faced with the chaos of millions of places to go and thousands of places to remember having been, the thousands of new Web users who join every day, need a helping hand. The aim of this paper is, to highlight possible components of technologies supporting web navigation and the maintenance of indexes to web resources. The BASE framework is suggested as a means of understanding the pragmatic technological choices, and six experimental prototypes are presented and discussed. The prototypes support various aspects of bookmark maintenance and information filtering.

We present a new focus+context (fisheye) technique for visualizing and manipulating large hierarchies. Our technique assigns more display space to a portion of the hierarchy while still embedding it in the context of the entire hierarchy. The essence of this scheme is to lay out the hierarchy in a uniform way on a hyperbolic plane and map this plane onto a circular display region. This supports a smooth blending between focus and context, as well as continuous redirection of the focus. We have developed effective procedures for manipulating the focus using pointer clicks as well as interactive dragging, and for smoothly animating transitions across such manipulation. A laboratory experiment comparing the hyperbolic browser with a conventional hierarchy browser was conducted.

\

The Implicit Query (IQ) prototype is a system which automatically generates context-sensitive searches based on a user’s current computing activities. In the demo, we show IQ running when users are reading or composing email. Queries are automatically generated by analyzing the email message, and results are presented in a small pane adjacent to the current window to provide peripheral awareness of related information.

\

In this paper we present importance-driven compositing window management, which considers windows not only as basic rectangular shapes but also integrates the importance of the windows’ content using a bottom-up visual attention model. Based on this information, importance-driven com- positing optimizes the spatial window layout for maximum visibility and interactivity of occluded content in combina- tion with see-through windows. We employ this technique for emerging window manager functions to minimize infor- mation overlap caused by popping up windows or floating toolbars and to improve the access to occluded window con- tent. An initial user study indicates that our technique pro- vides a more effective and satisfactory access to occluded information than the well-adopted Alt+Tab window switch- ing technique and see-through windows without optimized spatial layout. Author Keywords

\

Personal information management (PIM) systems provide a means to organize and re-find information. An effective PIM model would allow individuals to make intelligent use of the information they possess and, prospectively, create knowledge from the items in their collections. This paper introduces InfoATV, a system that associates users’ personal collections and the MEDLINE database, allowing them to re-find and (re) discover research documents. To facilitate re-finding our system allows users to navigate through re-creations of previous search and re-finding sessions—improving upon existing systems by allowing them to view their flow of activity to help them re-find. InfoATV facilitates re-finding for long-term management and for session-based re-finding activities. We identify two characteristics necessary for a successful search interface that help provide additional contextual data for future locating. Additionally, the system mines a user’s personal document collection for materials related to currently viewed documents and displays a network showing the ways in which those documents relate. This can assist users to, sometimes unexpectedly, (re)discover previously retrieved documents and reuse them for new purposes.

\

The Information Lens system is a prototype intelligent information-sharing system that is designed to include not only good user interfaces for supporting the problem-solving activity of individuals, but also good organizational interfaces for supporting the problem-solving activities of groups.

\

Most Web browsers include Back, History and Bookmark facilities that simplify how people return to previously seen pages. While useful, these three facilities all operate on quite different underlying models, which undermines their usability. Our alternative revisitation system uses a single model of a recency-ordered history list to integrate Back, History and Bookmarks. Enhancements include: Back as a way to step through this list; implicit and explicit 'dog- ears' to mark pages on the list (replacing Bookmarks); searching/filtering the list through dynamic queries; and visual thumbnails to promote page recognition.

\

In this paper we introduce a new semantic desktop system called IRIS, an application framework for enabling users to create a “personal map” across their office-related information objects. Built as part of the CALO Cognitive Assistant project, IRIS represents a step in our quest to construct the kinds of tools that will significantly augment the user’s ability to perform knowledge work. This paper explains our design decisions, progress, and short- comings. The IRIS project has grown from the past work of others and offers opportunities to augment and otherwise collaborate with other current and future semantic desktop projects. This paper marks our entry into the ongoing conversation about semantic desktops, intelligent knowledge management, and systems for augmenting the performance of human teams.

\

In this paper we describe a system for creating and exposing relationships between documents: a user’s interaction with digital objects (like documents) is interpreted as links – to be discovered and maintained by the system. Such relationships are created automatically, requiring no priming by the user. Using a very simple set of heuristics, we demonstrate the uniquely useful relationships that can be established between documents that have been touched by the user. Furthermore, this mechanism for relationship building is media agnostic, thus discovering relationships that would not be found by conventional content based approaches. We describe a proof-of-concept implementation of this basic idea and discuss a couple of natural expansions of the scope of user activity monitoring.

\

Jimminy is a wearable personal note-taking and note-archival application that automatically displays notes that might be relevant to the wearer in his current environment. The system selects old notes to show on a head-up display based on the wearer’s current location, people in the immediate area, and the subject-line and contents of any current notes being written. This paper describes an experiment that evaluates the usefulness of the wearer’s physical context (location and people in the area) for automatically finding useful archived information. The results suggest that, while physical context can be used to discover useful archived notes, the subject and text of notes currently being entered are a much better indicator of usefulness in the personal note-taking domain. Index Terms—Wearable computers, intelligent agents, information retrieval, context.

\

Information cannot be found if it is not recorded. Existing rich graphical application approaches interfere with user input in many ways, forcing complex interactions to enter simple information, requiring complex cognition to decide where the data should be stored, and limiting the kind of information that can be entered to what can fit into specific applications' data models. Freeform text entry suffers from none of these limitations but produces data that is hard to retrieve or visualize. We describe the design and imple- mentation of Jourknow, a system that aims to bridge these two modalities, supporting lightweight text entry and weightless context capture that produces enough structure to support rich interactive presentation and retrieval of the arbitrary information entered.

\

The Kimura system augments and integrates independent tools into a pervasive computing system that monitors a user's interactions with the computer, an electronic whiteboard, and a variety of networked peripheral devices and data sources. The system draws from several physical sensors distributed throughout the office. This combination of virtual and physical context drives the creation of activity representations, or montages, on a wall-size peripheral display the electronic whiteboard.

\

Prior studies show that knowledge work is characterized by highly interlinked practices, including task, file and window management. However, existing personal information management tools primarily focus on a limited subset of knowledge work, forcing users to perform additional manual configuration work to integrate the different tools they use. In order to understand tool usage, we review literature on how users' activities are created and evolve over time as part of knowledge worker practices. From this we derive the activity life cycle, a conceptual framework describing the different states and transitions of an activity. The life cycle is used to inform the design of Laevo, a temporal activity-centric desktop interface for personal knowledge work. Laevo allows users to structure work within dedicated workspaces, managed on a timeline. Through a centralized notification system which doubles as a to-do list, incoming interruptions can be handled. Our field study indicates how highlighting the temporal nature of activities results in lightweight scalable activity management, while making users more aware about their ongoing and planned work.

\

LifeLines provide a general visualization environment for personal histories that can be applied to medical and court records, professional histories and other types of biographical data. A one screen overview shows multiple facets of the records. Aspects, for example medical conditions or legal cases, are displayed as individual time lines, while icons indicate discrete events, such as physician consultations or legal reviews. Line color and thickness illustrate relationships or significance, rescaling tools and filters allow users to focus on part of the information. LifeLines reduce the chances of missing information, facilitate spotting anomalies and trends, streamline access to details, while remaining tailorable and easily transferable between applications. The paper describes the use of LifeLines for youth records of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Justice and also for medical records. User's feedback was collected using a Visual Basic prototype for the youth record. Techniques to deal with complex records are reviewed and issues of a standard personal record format are discussed.

\

Conventional software systems, such as those based on the "desktop metaphor," are ill-equipped to manage the electronic information and events of the typical computer user. We introduce a new metaphor, Lifestreams for dynamically organizing a user's personal workspace. Lifestreams uses a simple organizational metaphor, a time-ordered stream of documents, as an underlying storage system. Stream filters are used to organize, monitor and summarize information for the user. Combined, they provide a system that subsumes many separate desktop applications. This paper describes the Lifestreams model and our prototype system.

\

We describe the need for a tool for aggregation and curation of user-created digital artifacts, which would otherwise be scattered across multiple storage locations, and early work on such a tool.

\

Traditional file systems provide a weak and inadequate structure for meaningful representations of file interrela- tionships and other context-providing metadata. Existing designs, which store additional file-oriented metadata ei- ther in a database, on disk, or both are limited by the technologies upon which they depend. Moreover, they do not provide for user-defined relationships among files. To address these issues, we created the Linking File System (LiFS), a file system design in which files may have both arbitrary user- or application-specified attributes, and at- tributed links between files. In order to assure performance when accessing links and attributes, the system is designed to store metadata in non-volatile memory. This paper dis- cusses several use cases that take advantage of this ap- proach and describes the user-space prototype we devel- oped to test the concepts presented.

\

This paper describes a longitudinal field experiment in personal note-taking that examines how people capture and use information in short textual notes. Study participants used our tool, a simple browser-based textual note-taking utility, to capture personal information over the course of ten days. We examined the information they kept in notes using the tool, how this information was expressed, and aspects of note creation, editing, deletion, and search. We found that notes were recorded extremely quickly and tersely, combined information of multiple types, and were rarely revised or deleted. The results of the study demonstrate the need for a tool such as ours to support the rapid capture and retrieval of short notes-to- self, and afford insights into how users' actual note- keeping tendencies could be used to better support their needs in future PIM tools.

\

We present the new paradigm of logic file systems, its implementation, and first experimental results. {I}t offers in an integrated way navigation and classification, the possibility of expressive queries, ease of use, and possible heterogeneity of data. {T}his paradigm is object-centered. {I}t associates logical descriptions to objects, and logical relations between descriptions serve as a basis for navigation and querying. We compare logic file systems with the hierarchical, boolean, and data-base paradigms. {W}e present briefly the rôle of logic in logic file systems, and in more details the implementation issues of a particular logic file system that uses a simple logic.

\

The free-form, evolving, personal information that people deal with in the course of their daily activities requires more flexible data structures and data management systems than tabular data structures provide. A tool for managing personal information must conveniently handle free textual data; allow for structure to evolve gracefully as the database grows; represent unnormalized data; and support data entry through database views. We have designed a new type of database that serves these needs -- called an “item/category” database -- and realized this design in a commercial personal computer software product named "Agenda".

\

Multimedia information has greatly enriched our digital life. Every day we freely scan and download different media objects on the lo- cal computer or through the Internet. With the explosion of the individual-related media data, the need of easily re-locating the visited media objects becomes more and more urgent. We design and implement a media retrieval system called M-ReFind that enables users to re-find the previously accessed media information by relevant contexts. In this paper, we demonstrate how a user adds associate contexts to the media objects s/he stores or accesses in daily life and re-finds them by certain context. We show that M-ReFind supports a convenient context-based media retrieval experience, allowing users to re-find local, removable or global media objects more easily.

\

A novel method for tracking physical activities is presented. The method is based on the assumption that all changes to the physical environment are done by users themselves, and that these actions can be tracked using wearable computer technology placed on human hands. Various limitations of the proposed method are discussed. Acknowledging these limitations, a range of possible applications are presented, e.g. a set of Physical-Virtual Artefacts intended to decrease the gap between the physical and virtual environments within offices. Also, some aspects of the modeling of user actions in office environments are discussed.

\

With the growing importance of systems containing arbitrary semi-structured relationships, the need for supporting users searching in such repositories has grown. Currently support for users' search needs either has required domain-specific user interfaces or has required users to be schema experts. We have developed a general-purpose tool that offers users helpful navigation and refinement options for seeking information in these semistructured repositories. We show how a tool can be built without requiring domain-specific assumptions about the information being explored. In addition to describing a general approach to the problem, we provide a set of natural, general-purpose refinement tactics, many generalized from past work on textual information retrieval.

\

We present Magnet Mail (MM), a visualization system to retrieve information from email archives via a zoomable interface. MM allows users to infer relationships among their email documents based on searching keywords. The prototype interacts with a mass-market email system and uses a magnet metaphor to simulate user interaction with emails. The graphical implementation relies mostly on the Piccolo toolkit.

\

While most mail reader applications allow users to file messages into folders, in practice this task tends to be tedious. For each message, the user must first decide which folder is most appropriate. Then, the user must inform the mail reader of that choice by selecting the appropriate icon or menu item from among what is typically a set of several dozen choices. The combined effort of choosing a folder and conveying that choice to the application often discourages users from filing their mail, resulting in unmanageable inboxes that contain hundreds or even thousands of unfiled messages. MailCat encourages users to file their mail by simplifying the task. Using an adaptive classifier, it predicts the three folders that are most likely to be appropriate for a given message, and provides shortcut buttons that permit the user to file it into a predicted folder effortlessly. For typical users, MailCat’s predictions are accurate over 80% to 90 % of the time, resulting in a substantial reduction in the time and cognitive burden required to file messages.

\

Current email applications offer a conventional but limiting file-and-folder system for email organisation. This project presents a fresh approach with MailStacker, an email application which uses a visual “pile” interface metaphor for email management. In deviating from the traditionally favoured interface of email applications that uses textual lists of emails within “folders”, the pile interface offers unique features such as spatial email organisation, graphical representations of emails for non-textual recognition of email messages, and visual task reminding for task-related emails. This project examines the effectiveness of the pile metaphor for email management, particularly for email organisation and task management. User evaluations indicate piles can be useful for quick and casual email organisation, but further work is required to integrate digital email piles with existing email collections.

\

Many computer users receive hundreds (if not thousands) of emails per week; users often keep these emails and have many years of personal emails archived: users use their stored emails to manage appointments, to-do lists, and store useful information. In this paper we present an interactive email visualization tool (Mailview) that utilizes filter and coordination techniques to explore this archived data. The tool enables users to analyze and visualize hundreds of stored emails, it displays the emails on time-dependent plots enabling users to observe trends over time and perceive emails with similar features. Interaction is an important aspect of finding meaning within information, hence the tool utilizes focus+context views, dynamic filters, detail-on-demand techniques and coordinated views, finally, we discuss various methods that enable the system to be designed such that it can display hundreds of objects at interactive rates.

\

Computers are becoming the vehicle for an increasing range of everyday activities. Acquisition of news and information, mail and even social interactions and entertainment have become more and more computer based. At the same time, an increasing number of untrained users are interacting with computers, and this number will continue to rise as technologies such as hand-held computers and interactive

\

Combining and summarizing meta-data from various kinds of data sources is one possible solution to the data fragmentation we are suffering from. Multiple projects have addressed this issue already. This paper presents a new approach named Memacs. It automati- cally generates a detailed linked diary of our digital artifacts scat- tered across local files of multiple formats as well as data silos of the internet. Being elegantly simple and open, Memacs uses al- ready existing visualization features of GNU Emacs and Org-mode to provide a promising platform for life-logging, Quantified Self movement, and people looking for advanced Personal Information Management (PIM) in general.

\

There is considerable interest in the question of how users can be supported in the management of large information systems. Existing systems are perceived as being difficult to use, and future systems will handle very much more information than at present, exacerbating the problem. This paper describes a prototype interface, MEMOIRS (Managing Episodic Memory for Office Information Retrieval Systems), which is designed to support the management of personal information in a new way. This approach treats a personal filing system as a history of events (of which documents are a particular type), and focuses upon user’s recall for those events. MEMOIRS therefore exemplifies a mnemonic support system which aims to optimize performance in two ways: It aims to improve user’s recall for the information they have handled; and it is also designed to exploit as much of what is recalled as possible. The rationale behind this approach is discussed and a broad specification of the system presented, with examples of MEMOIRS in use. The approach is compared and contrasted with other filing systems based upon models of human memory which are associative, rather than event-driven, in character.

\

MessyDesk is a replacement desktop that invites free-form decoration. MessyBoard is a large, projected, shared bulle- tin board that is decorated collaboratively by a small group of users. We built these programs with the goal of helping people remember more of the content that they access through a computer. Our approach is to embed content within distinct contexts. For instance, a computer with multiple projection screens could surround the user with panoramic vistas that correspond to projects that the user is working on. Since few people are willing to create their own context, we created MessyDesk and MessyBoard in order to entice people to decorate. Though we have not yet evaluated the impact of either pro- gram on users' memories, we have observed people using these programs over a several week period. From anecdotal evidence, we believe that MessyDesk may be a good tool for decoration and information management. MessyBoard became popular when we projected the board on the wall in our lab. We have seen that different research groups use it differently. One group uses it mostly for jokes and games, and another group uses it for long design discussions. It is good for scheduling, and supports factual as well as emo- tional communication among group members.

\

The value of electronic mail as a medium for collaborative and coordinated work can be enhanced by relating messages to conversations. While some groupware systems have offered such facilities, their ability to assess conversational context is dependent on explicit user action and the use of specific systems by all collaborators. This paper describes Mona, a novel conversation based email platform. Mona provides a hypertext representation of conversational context without requiring any additional effort from the user or the use of specific email systems by other collaborators. Mona’s lack of requirements and independence is made possible by inferring conversational context with heuristics using information inherently transferred in all email communications. Mona’s heuristics are described, as are its mechanisms for personalizing conversation views.

\

Mountain visualizes a person's email archive in terms of all the people with whom this person has been in touch over the years. Each layer in the Mountain represents a different person. Layers are ordered by time, with the first people in the email archive at the bottom and the most recent people in the archive at the top right portion of the mountain. The thickness of each layer refers to how recently the person has been in contact with ego (the owner of the email archive). Users can highlight specific layers in the Mountain causing the first words of every email exchanged with this person to appear on the screen.

\

MyLifeBits is a project to fulfill the Memex vision first posited by Vannevar Bush in 1945. It is a system for storing all of one’s digital media, including documents, images, sounds, and videos. It is built on four principles: (1) collections and search must replace hierarchy for organization (2) many visualizations should be supported (3) annotations are critical to non-text media and must be made easy, and (4) authoring should be via transclusion.

\

This paper introduces the NEPOMUK project which aims to create a standard and reference implementation for the Social Semantic Desktop. We outline the requirements and functionalities that were identified for a useful Semantic Desktop system and present an architecture that fulfills these requirements which was acquired by incremental refinement of the architecture of existing Semantic Desktop prototypes. The NEPOMUK project is primarily motivated by three real-life industrial use-cases, we briefly outline these and the processes used to extract required functionalities from the people working in these areas today, and we present a selection of typical tasks where the Semantic Desktop could be of benefit.

\

Although there have been many prototypes of visualization in support of information retrieval, there has been little systematic evaluation that distinguishes the benefits of the visualization per se from that of various accompanying features. The current study focuses on such an evaluation of NIRVE, a tool that supports visualization of search results. Insofar as possible, functionally equivalent 3D, 2D, and text versions of NIRVE were implemented. Nine novices and six professional users completed a series of information-seeking tasks on a set of retrieved documents. There were high interface costs for the 3D visualization, although those costs decreased substantially with experience. Performance was best when the tool’s properties matched task demands; only under the right combination of task, user, and interface did 3D visualization result in performance comparable to functionally matched 2D and textual tools.

\

Personal ontologies have been proposed as a means to support thesemantic management of user information. Assuming that a personal ontologysystem is in use, new tools have to be developed at user interface level toexploit the enhanced capabilities offered by the system. In this work, we presentan ontology-based file manager that allows semantic searching on the user’s personal information space. The file manager exploits the ontology relations to present files associated with specific concepts, proposes new related concepts tousers, and helps them explore the information space and locate the required file

\

Trying to find information on the Web is like trying to find something at a jumble sale: it's fun, and you can make serendipitous discoveries, but for directed search it's better to go to a department store - there, someone has already done most of the arranging for you. Unfortunately, the Web's continuing explosion in size, its enormous diversity of topics, and its great volatility, make unaided human indexing impossible. This problem is just a special case of the general problem of organizing information to create knowledge. A similar problem arises on the desktop when dealing with le systems, where users must search by name, and often they do not remember the le's name or location. File names are artifacts of current operating systems, but human understanding neither requires objects to be named, nor does it have problems with multiple objects sharing properties|names, for instance. The limitations mentioned above result because today's computer systems do not analyze the les they are asked to store. Instead they note only simple attributes like creation date and le type and leave the bulk of organizing, naming, annotating, and nding those les to their users. This may have made sense in the 1970s when computers were slow and expensive, but it makes no sense today. We argue for a new data model to information representation based on the use of persistent objects with dynamic attributes and search operations over them. This representation is

\

We have implemented a browser companion called PadPrints that dynamically builds a graphical history-map of visited web pages. PadPrints relies on Pad++, a zooming user interface (ZUI) development substrate, to display the history-map using minimal screen space. PadPrints functions in conjunction with a traditional web browser but without requiring any browser modifications. We performed two usability studies of PadPrints. The first addressed general navigation effectiveness. The second focused on history-related aspects of navigation. In tasks requiring returns to prior pages, users of PadPrints completed tasks in 61.2% of the time required by users of the same browser without PadPrints. We also observed significant decreases in the number of pages accessed when using PadPrints. Users found browsing with PadPrints more satisfying than using Netscape alone.

\

Here we present PaperSpace a computer vision based document management system that allows users to combine paper and digital documents. Using PaperSpace users can locate paper copies of printed digital documents, retrieve digital versions of paper documents and fluidly move between digital and paper documents. The system works by tracking 2D identity and operation codes printed in the margins of each page of the document. Users can activate commands by selecting the command from the command bar at the bottom of each document. Through an informal evaluation we found that all users felt our system would be valuable in helping them organize their cluttered desk and manage digital and paper documents better.

\

One of the greatest challenges in enterprises today is the lack of dynamic and ongoing information about individuals' activities, interests, and expertise. Availability of such "personal chronicles" can provide rich benefits at both an individual and enterprise level. For example, personal chronicles can help individuals to far more effectively retrieve and review their activities and interactions, while at an enterprise level they can be data-mined to identify groups of common and complementary interests and skills, or to identify implicit work processes that are commonplace in every enterprise. Today's existing tools are very limited in their support for dynamic capture of ongoing activities, in the organization and presentation of captured information, and in supporting rich annotation, search, retrieval, and publication of this information. In this paper, we propose a set of Personal Chronicling Tools (PCT) to support enterprise knowledge workers in digital event archiving and collaboration-oriented publishing. PCT is composed of four primary tools with the following capabilities: (1) event monitoring, (2) interactive annotation, (3) browse/search, and (4) edit/publish. All are designed to exploit existing enterprise infrastructure, storing captured raw data and metadata in secure databases. The first tool is a group of event monitors. These run on user client devices and capture user events such as emails, web pages browsed, instant messaging sessions, and documents edited. Monitors for new event classes are easily added as plug-ins through an XML interface. The second tool, the event annotator, enables context-sensitive user tagging and book marking of interesting moments. The third is an event browser which extends corporate email tools, providing semantic search (by embedding WordNet as a common dictionary) and the ability to follow threads of many kinds. Finally, a publishing tool facilitates the publication of relevant events with a fraction of the effort required to maintain a manual chronicle such as a weblog. This paper presents the overall system architecture, and a prototype implementation.

\

Our use and interaction with computers creates a lot of information about our activities, interactions with others and, ultimately, about ourselves. However, this personal information is often spread over many different places making it difficult to visualize and control. Personal Information is not usually processed nor cross-referenced with information from other sources. We present Personal Information Dashboard, a web application that allows users to see, at a glance, various facets of their lives. We show people’s life patterns using and combining several sources of personal information in a more natural and graphical way. Imagine waking up in the morning and, just by looking at the computer, immediately know, not only how many emails you have on your incoming box, but also which ones are of most interest to you based on several aspects of yourself and the email itself. User tests show that the interface has hood usability and that, indeed, the users can find meaningful personal patterns in the visualizations, providing them with unexpected insights.

\

The Personal Map provides an automated visual overview of the user’s online social network, which can be used in lieu of user-generated contact lists. We explored people’s mental models of their social networks by having them draw whom they cared about, and then developed the Personal Map to automatically visualize these models. Our automated models use past email behavior to infer whom users care about, and how users implicitly cluster or organize contacts in their minds. A user test of the Personal Map indicates that people found it both accurate and compelling. We integrated the underlying model into users’ everyday email through a list of most important and related contacts, and studied its usage. While some people used the list of related contacts, they did not care for its dynamic nature, leading to new user interface designs.

\

Prototyping and evaluation combine to explore ways that an effective, integrative organization of project-related information might emerge as a by-product of a person’s efforts to plan a project. The Personal Project Planner works as an extension to the file manager -- providing people with rich-text overlays to their information. Document-like project plans provide a context in which to create or reference documents, email messages, web pages, etc. that are needed to complete the plan. The user can later locate an information item such as an email message with reference to the plan (e.g., as an alternative to searching through the inbox or sent mail). Results of an interim evaluation of the Planner are very promising and suggest special directions of focus for limited available prototyping resources.

\

Personal computer users typically manage hundreds of directories and thousands of files with hierarchically structured file managers, plus archaic cluttered-desktop window managers, and iconic representations of applications. These users must deal with the annoying overhead of window housekeeping and the greater burden of mapping their organizational roles onto the unnecessarily rigid hierarchy. An alternate approach is presented, Personal Role Manager (PRM), to structure the screen layout and the interface tools to better match the multiple roles that individuals have in an organization. Each role has a vision statement, schedule, hierarchy of tasks, set of people, and collection of documents.

\

In pursuit of computational tools for augmenting computer users’ abilities to interleave multiple tasks, we examined computer users’ ability to identify and recall computing events deemed to be important, both with and without supportive reminder tools. Memory for events occurring during computer sessions was studied both 24 hours after an initial taped session and again after a one-month period of time. Results show that memory for important computing events is fragile and that software tools could be used to augment users’ memories of how they have spent their time while computing. In addition, we observed that approximately half of the events that users identified as important could be identified automatically with available computational methods, and an attempt was made to characterize the nature of the remaining events. Finally, in a probe of alternate designs for reminding systems, we found that users typically preferred to see snapshots of their computing events in a prototype reminder system, without audio, as opposed to a full video version of an event reminder system.

\

Systems for fast search of personal information are rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Such systems promise to dramatically improve personal information management, yet most are modeled on Web search in which users know very little about the content that they are searching. We describe the design and deployment of a system called Phlat that optimizes search for personal information with an intuitive interface that merges search and browsing through a variety of associative and contextual cues. In addition, Phlat supports a unified tagging (labeling) scheme for organizing personal content across storage systems (files, email, etc.). The system has been deployed to hundreds of employees within our organization. We report on both quantitative and qualitative aspects of system use. Phlat is available as a free download at http://research.microsoft.com/adapt/phlat.

\

A user study was conducted to investigate how people deal with the flow of information in their workspaces. Subjects reported that, in an attempt to quickly and informally manage their information, they created piles of documents. Piles were seen as complementary to the folder filing system, which was used for more formal archiving. A new desktop interface element–the pile– was developed and prototyped through an iterative process. The design includes direct manipulation techniques and support for browsing, and goes beyond physical world functionality by providing system assistance for automatic pile construction and reorganization. Preliminary user tests indicate the design is promising and raise issues that will be addressed in future work.

\

Traditional document systems use hierarchical filing structures as the basis for organizing, storing and retrieving documents. However, this structure is very limited in comparison with the rich and varied forms of document interaction and category management in everyday document use. Presto is a prototype document management system providing rich interaction with documents through meaningful, user-level document attributes, such as “Word file,” “published paper,” “shared with Jim,” “about Presto,” or “currently in progress.” Document attributes capture the multiple different roles that a single document might play, and they allow users to rapidly reorganize their document space for the task at hand. They also provide a basis for novel document systems design and new approaches to document management and interaction. In this article, we outline the motivations behind this approach, describe the principal components of our implementation, discuss architectural consequences, and show how these support new forms of interaction with large personal document spaces.

\

As part of a long-term investigation into visualizing email, we have created two visualizations of email archives. One highlights social networks while the other depicts the temporal rhythms of interactions with individuals. While interviewing users of these systems, it became clear that the applications triggered recall of many personal events. One of the most striking and not entirely expected outcomes was that the visualizations motivated retelling stories from the users’ pasts to others. In this paper, we discuss the motivation and design of these projects and analyze their use as catalysts for personal narrative and recall.

\

\

Abstract: The Desktop metaphor has repeatedly been declared antiquated in various ways. It nevertheless continues existing. Despite the widely pronounced critique, it is still not clear what functional requirements have to be met by a new none-desktop interface. In this context, we define and explain the functional requirements (paradigms) we think fundamental for upcoming generations of non-desktop user interfaces. In close collaboration with users, we have also developed a graphical user interface (GUI) that illustrates these new paradigms and which is at the same time a concrete proposition for a new metaphor.

\

Although the document imaging industry has taken off in the last few years, document image filing for the individual information worker is still not widespread or effective. In this paper, we focus on building an electronic filing system for paper documents that supports the ad hoc, multifarious work of information workers. Motivated by interviews with researchers and a survey of descriptive studies of paper document filing, we have focused on minimizing or delaying costs of document filing and supporting a rich variety of methods for accessing and using stored documents. We have implemented a prototype system called Protofoil for storing, retrieving, and manipulating paper documents as electronic images that integrates many user interface---paper and workstation--and information retrieval technologies. Protofoil has been tested through use in our laboratory, and has been deployed in a field study at a lawyer's office.

\

As the scope of personal data grows, it becomes in- creasingly difficult to find what we need when we need it. Desktop search tools provide a potential answer, but most existing tools are incomplete solutions: they index content, but fail to capture dynamic relationships from the user’s context. One emerging solution to this is context- enhanced search, a technique that reorders and extends the results of content-only search using contextual infor- mation. Within this framework, we propose using strict causality, rather than temporal locality, the current state of the art, to direct contextual searches. Causality more accurately identifies data flow between files, reducing the false-positives created by context-switching and back- ground noise. Further, unlike previous work, we con- duct an online user study with a fully-functioning imple- mentation to evaluate user-perceived search quality di- rectly. Search results generated by our causality mech- anism are rated a statistically-significant 17% higher on average over all queries than by using content-only search or context-enhanced search with temporal locality.

\

In the field of Human-Computer Interaction, provenance refers to the history and genealogy of a document or file. Provenance helps us to understand the evolution and relationships of files; how and when different versions of a document were created, or how different documents in a collection build on each other through copy-paste events. Though methods for tracking provenance and the subsequent use of this meta-data have been proposed and developed into tools, there have been no studies documenting the types and frequency of provenance events in typical computer use. This is knowledge essential for the design of efficient query methods and information displays. We conducted a longitudinal study of knowledge workers at Intel Corporation tracking provenance events in their computer use. We also interviewed knowledge workers to determine the effectiveness of provenance cues for document recall. Our data shows that provenance relationships are common, and provenance cues aid recall.

\

While there are many established methodologies for information systems development, designing by example has not been formally explored and applied previously. Our work is also motivated by the desire to explore interface-driven development techniques that could complement existing approaches such as model-driven engineering with the goal of reducing the need for modelling and reengineering of existing applications and interfaces, while still supporting the development task. We explore the example-based technique for rapid development of powerful and flexible information management tools based on the example of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, a system that was originally designed to support the workflow of digital photographers in a flexible way. We analyse experiments in which two new systems — one for managing collections of research papers and another for software project management — were developed based on the Lightroom paradigm. We derive a conceptual frame- work for engineering by example and assess the method by comparing it to traditional model-driven engineering.

\

Most computer users find organizing large amounts of personal information problematic. Often, hierarchies are the sole means to do it. However, users can remember a broader range of autobiographic contextual data about their personal items. Unfortunately, it can seldom be used to manage and retrieve them. Even when this is possible, it is often done by asking users to fill in values for arbitrary properties in dialog boxes or wizards. We propose that narrative-based interfaces can be a natural and effective way to help users recall relevant autobiographic data about their personal items and convey it to the computer. Using Quill, a narrative-based personal document retrieval interface, as a case-study, we show how such an interface can be designed. We demonstrate the approach's validity based on a set of user studies, discussing how the problems raised by the evaluation of such an interface were overcome.

\

We report on the design process of a personal information management system, Raton Laveur, and how it was influenced by an intimate relationship between iterative fieldwork and design thinking. Initially, the system was conceived as a paper-based UI to calendar, contacts, to-dos and notes. As the fieldwork progressed, our understanding of peoples practices and the constraints of their office infrastructures radically shifted our design goals away from paper-based interaction to embedded interaction with our system. By this we mean embedding information management functionality in an existing application such as email.

\

An important issue in the application of machine learning techniques to information management tasks is the nature of features extracted from textual information. We have created an intelligent email agent that can learn actions such as filtering, prioritizing, downloading to palmtops, and for- warding cmail to voicemail using automatic feature extraction, Our agent’s new feature extraction approach is based on first learning concepts present within the mail, then using these concepts as features for learning actions to perform on the messages, What features should be chosen? This pa- per describes the concept features approach and considers two sources for learning conceptual features: groups defined by the user and groups defined by the agent’s task. Additionally, features may be defined by vectorized examples or keywords, Experimental results are provided for two email sorting tasks.

\

The Remail design team defined a specification for an innovative and integrated email client. This design-lead effort tackled three key problems that email researchers have discovered: lack of context, co-opting of email, and keeping track of too many things. Based on earlier design and research explorations, we conceived of a client from the ground up that attacked these problems in an integrated fashion. Our solutions were based on three constructs: showing message context, marking email, and selective display. A small team of programmers implemented much of the design in a functional prototype. This experimental client continues to allow researchers to expand and explore these concepts.

\

The Remembrance Agent (RA) is a program which augments human memory by displaying a list of documents which might be relevant to the user’s current context. Unlike most information retrieval systems, the RA runs continuously without user intervention. Its unobtrusive interface allows a user to pursue or ignore the RA’s suggestions as desired.

\

A key constraint on the effectiveness of window-based human-computer interfaces is that the display screen is too small for many applications. This results in “window thrashing,” in which the user must expend considerable effort to keep desired windows visible. Rooms is a window manager that overcomes small screen size by exploiting the statistics of window access, dividing the user’s workspace into a suite of virtual workspaces with transitions among them. Mechanisms are described for solving the problems of navigation and simultaneous access to separated information that arise from multiple workspaces.

\

Our studies have shown that as displays become larger, users leave more windows open for easy multitasking. A larger number of windows, however, may increase the time that users spend arranging and switching between tasks. We present Scalable Fabric, a task management system designed to address problems with the proliferation of open windows on the PC desktop. Scalable Fabric couples window management with a flexible visual representation to provide a focus-plus-context solution to desktop complexity. Users interact with windows in a central focus region of the display in a normal manner, but when a user moves a window into the periphery, it shrinks in size, getting smaller as it nears the edge of the display. The window “minimize” action is redefined to return the window to its preferred location in the periphery, allowing windows to remain visible when not in use. Windows in the periphery may be grouped together into named tasks, and task switching is accomplished with a single mouse click. The spatial arrangement of tasks leverages human spatial memory to make task switching easier. We review the evolution of Scalable Fabric over three design iterations, including discussion of results from two user studies that were performed to compare the experience with Scalable Fabric to that of the Microsoft Windows XP TaskBar.

\

The self-organizing file cabinet is an information retrieval system associated with a user's physical file cabinet. It enhances a physical file cabinet with electronic information about the papers in it. It can remember, organize, update, and help the user find documents contained in the physical file cabinet. The system consists of a module for extracting electronic information about the papers stored in the file cabinet, a module for representing and storing this information in multiple views, and a module that allows a user to interact with this information. The focus of this paper is on the design and evaluation of the self-organized file cabinet.

\

A semantic file system is an information storage system that provides flexible associative access to the system's contents by automatically extracting attributes from files with file type specific transducers. Associative access is provided by a conservative extension to existing tree-structured file system protocols, and by protocols that are designed specifically for content based access. Compatibility with existing file system protocols is provided by introducing the concept of a virtual directory. Virtual directory names are interpreted as queries, and thus provide flexible associative access to files and directories in a manner compatible with existing software. Rapid attribute-based access to file system contents is implemented by automatic extraction and indexing of key properties of file system objects. The automatic indexing of files and directories is called "semantic" because user programmable transducers use information about the semantics of updated file system objects to extract the properties for indexing. Experimental results from a semantic file system implementation support the thesis that semantic file systems present a more effective storage abstraction than do traditional tree structured file systems for information sharing and command level programming.

\

The explosion of the amount of information available in digital form has made search a hot research topic for the Information Management Community. While most of the research on search is focused on the WWW, individual computer users have developed their own vast collections of data on their desktops, and these collections are in critical need for good search tools. We describe the Semex System that offers users a flexible platform for personal information management. Semex has two main goals. The first goal is to enable browsing personal information by semantically meaningful associations. The challenge it to automatically create such associations between data items on one’s desktop, and to create enough of them so Semex becomes an indispensable tool. Our second goal is to leverage the personal information space we created to increase users’ productivity. As our first tar- get, Semex leverages the personal information to en- able lightweight information integration tasks that are discouragingly difficult to perform with today’s tools.

\

Most information retrieval technologies are designed to facilitate information discovery. However, much knowledge work involves finding and re-using previously seen information. We describe the design and evaluation of a system, called Stuff I've Seen (SIS), that facilitates information re-use. This is accomplished in two ways. First, the system provides a unified index of information that a person has seen, whether it was seen as email, web page, document, appointment, etc. Second, because the information has been seen before, rich contextual cues can be used in the search interface. The system has been used internally by more than 230 employees. We report on both qualitative and quantitative aspects of system use. Initial findings show that time and people are important retrieval cues. Users find information more easily using SIS, and use other search tools less frequently after installation.

\

This poster presents various methods for visualization and analysis of small-world email networks with various perspectives: visualization on the surface of a sphere to reveal the relationships between different groups, a 2.5D hierarchical visualization method combined with the centrality value of nodes to analyze important people, a 2.5D visualization method for temporal email networks to analyze the evolution of email relationships between people changing over time, and an ambient display method for finding social circles derived from the email network. These methods are applied to various email networks inside a research organization.

\

Snip!t is a web bookmarking tool, however unlike most web bookmarks, the user can also select a portion (snip) of the page content and then, using a bookmarklet, this selection is sent to the Snip!t web application. The snip of the page is stored along with the page url, title etc. and the user can sort the snip into categories or share it with others using RSS feeds. In addition, when the selected text contains a recognised type of data such as a date, post code, person’s name, etc., then actions are suggested. For example, if the selected text is recognised as a post code and this leads to suggested actions such as finding the local BBC news for a specific area.

\

The crucial insight from the Soylent work is that the implicit information generated through online interaction can give a meaningful (if incomplete) picture of the contexts in which people interact. These traces can be accu- mulated into a history that can be usefully processed and provided to the user. In this case, we have illustrated contact management possibilities with the tool.

\

Information workers typically demand the aggregation of multiple information resources related to their activities such as documents, contacts, and emails. Current mechanisms for aggregation of resources lack enough flexibility to collect different kinds of information and offer no support to facilitate their prompt retrieval. This paper presents Sphere Juggler, a system that integrates seamlessly with the popular Microsoft Windows interface facilitating the grouping of information related with the current activities of people as well as a fast switching between them. The architecture of the system and its interface are described. A preliminary evaluation of the system indicates that people envisions important benefits by having the functionality offered by the system

\

SwiftFile is an intelligent assistant that helps users organize their e-mail into folders. Swift- File uses a text classifier to predict where each new message is likely to be filed by the user and provides shortcut buttons to quickly file messages into one of its predicted folders. One of the challenges faced by Swift- File is that the user’s mail-filing habits are constantly changing — users are frequently creating, deleting and rearranging folders to meet their current filing needs. In this pa- per, we discuss the importance of incremental learning in SwiftFile. We present several criteria for judging how well incremental learning algorithms adapt to quickly changing data and evaluate SwiftFile’s classifier using these criteria. We find that SwiftFile’s classifier is surprisingly responsive and does not require the extensive training that is of- ten assumed in most learning systems.

\

Today, most computer users work with traditional hierarchical file systems for organizing large amounts of personal files. Recently, tagging has grown popular as an alternative means of organizing information resources. We argue that tagging is a powerful paradigm for efficient information access which overcomes many deficiencies of hierarchical file systems, especially in the context of the organization of large quantities of personal files. In this paper we present TagFS, a filesystem with tagging support which aims at a seamless integration of the tagging paradigm with local applications. While retaining the notions of directories and files and providing all standard filesystem operations, the semantics of these primitives are changed to modifications of the tag annotations.

\

With tagstore the user does not use the usual method of filing data in a hierarchy of folders as the only possible method. In a tagstore files and folders are being tagged by the user. Using those tags tagstore automatically generates navigation hierarchies called TagTrees. Within those TagTrees the user is able to navigate using his or her preferred software tools like file browsers, "file save..." or "file open..." dialogs.

\

The Tapestry experimental mail system developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center is predicated on the belief that information filtering can be more effective when humans are involved in the filtering process. Tapestry was designed to support both content-based filtering and collaborative filtering, which entails people collaborating to help each other perform filtering by recording their reactions to documents they read. The reactions are called annotations; they can be accessed by other people’s filters. Tapestry is intended to handle any incoming stream of electronic documents and serves both as a mail filter and repository; its components are the indexer, document store, annotation store, filterer, little box, remailer, appraiser and reader/browser. Tapestry’s client/server architecture, its various components, and the Tapestry query language are described.

\

The Task Gallery is a window manager that uses interactive 3D graphics to provide direct support for task management and document comparison, lacking from many systems implementing the desktop metaphor. User tasks appear as artwork hung on the walls of a virtual art gallery, with the selected task on a stage. Multiple documents can be selected and displayed side-by-side using 3D space to provide uniform and intuitive scaling. The Task Gallery hosts any Windows application, using a novel redirection mechanism that routes input and output between the 3D environment and unmodified 2D Windows applications. User studies suggest that the Task Gallery helps with task management, is enjoyable to use, and that the 3D metaphor evokes spatial memory and cognition.

\

Email has come to play a central role in task management, yet email tool features have remained relatively static in recent years, lagging behind users’ evolving practices. The Taskmaster system narrows this gap by recasting email as task management and embedding task-centric resources directly in the client. In this paper, we describe the field research that inspired Taskmaster and the principles behind its design. We then describe how user studies conducted with “live” email data over a two-week period revealed the value of a task-centric approach to email system design and its potential benefits for overloaded users.

\

This paper reports on TaskTracer — a software system being designed to help highly multitasking knowledge workers rapidly locate, discover, and reuse past processes they used to success- fully complete tasks. The system monitors users’ interaction with a computer, collects detailed records of users’ activities and re- sources accessed, associates (automatically or with users’ assis- tance) each interaction event with a particular task, enables users to access records of past activities and quickly restore task contexts. We present a novel Publisher-Subscriber architecture for collecting and processing users’ activity data, describe several different user interfaces tried with TaskTracer, and discuss the possibility of applying machine learning techniques to recog- nize/predict users’ tasks.

\

Email was originally designed as a tool for asynchronous communication. However, as the number of messages increased, so did their variety. A wide range of new and unforeseen email tasks reflects this variety. One of the most commonly performed activities in email is management of pending tasks. This research focuses on how to support this activity in email and explores solutions that use different external representations of messages and associated tasks. Central to this research is understanding the role of both external artifacts in managing multiple pending tasks, as well as internal representations and processes and how they can be linked to external representations. In a recent study we compared the effects of two email interfaces (Microsoft Outlook Inbox and TimeStore-TaskView) on efficiency and effectiveness of information finding in email messages. We found that TimeStore-TaskView interface was overall faster for finding information related to task dates, time and task overviews, while the Inbox interface was faster for finding information from subject lines, senders or from the message body. Based on the results from the study, we are in the process of designing a modified email prototype and a follow-up user study.

\

We have developed a prototype to-do list called TaskVista that enables a user to create to-do items by typing or by drag-and-drop of files or email messages. TaskVista allows the user to promote items into Activities in our Activity- Centered Task Assistant (ACTA). Activities are prestructured containers that are created inside the email folder hierarchy to support PIM. Specialized subfolders called Components within each ACTA Activity automatically organize and present information appropriately for aspects of the activity at hand. ACTA is designed to create a more efficient PIM environment with the ultimate goal of providing context metadata for machine learning and automation techniques.

\

This paper proposes a concept for the user interface of information retrieval systems called an information workspace. The concept goes beyond the usual notion of an information retrieval system to encompass the cost structure of information from secondary storage to immediate use. As an implementation of the concept, the paper describes an experimental system, called the Information Visualizer, and its rationale. The system is based on (1) the use of 3D/Rooms for increasing the capacity of immediate storage available to the user, (2) the Cognitive Co-processor scheduler-based user interface interaction architecture for coupling the user to information agents, and (3) the use of information visualization for interacting with information structure.

\

We present Themail, a visualization that portrays relationships using the interaction histories preserved in email archives. Using the content of exchanged messages, it shows the words that characterize one’s correspondence with an individual and how they change over the period of the relationship. This paper describes the interface and content-parsing algorithms in Themail. It also presents the results from a user study where two main interaction modes with the visualization emerged: exploration of “big picture” trends and themes in email (haystack mode) and more detail-oriented exploration (needle mode). Finally, the paper discusses the limitations of the content parsing approach in Themail and the implications for further research on email content visualization.

\

This paper describes Thread Arcs, a novel interactive visualization technique designed to help people use threads found in email. Thread Arcs combine the chronology of messages with the branching tree structure of a conversational thread in a mixed-model visualization [10] that is stable and compact. By quickly scanning and interacting with Thread Arcs, people can see various attributes of conversations and find relevant messages in them easily. We tested this technique against other visualization techniques with users own email in a functional prototype of ReMail, our research group’s experimental email client. Thread Arcs proved an excellent match for the types of threads found in users’ email and the qualities users wanted in small-scale thread visualizations.

\

As more people use e-mail at home or on the job, more people have come to experience the pain of e-mail that Denning first wrote about 20 years ago [3]. In this paper, we present data from a field study in our own company to add to the existing body of research about how people use e-mail. We then use these data and prior literature to outline a framework of the five main activities that we believe people use e-mail for. In particular, we focus on two activities that we believe have been under-studied: attending to the flow of messages they arrive, and doing “triage” on a body of new messages. In addition, we outline potential design directions for improving the e-mail experience, with a focus on e-mail clients that group messages and their replies together into threads. We present a prototype of such an interface as well as results from a lab study of the prototype.

\

We present a method for viewing an e-mail discussion intended for use by participants during the discussion. The display technique is designed to help participants identify positions, arguments, and evidence, and make clarifications and corrections. As compared to other systems for computer-supported argumentation, our design places fewer formal constraints on users, preferring facilitation rather than prescription in its approach.

\

The desktop metaphor aimed to create a working environment, which would resemble that of the user’s desk. With information abundance this desktop is often cluttered with files and folders. Existing tools partially address the clutter problem and do not support all personal file management requirements. Time2Hide extends the original desktop metaphor by allowing icons that are not used for a long time to gradually fade and merge with the background. This aims to alleviate the problem of icon clutter. Users can also perform spatial searches, defining areas of the desktop they wish to search for icons; can reveal one or more hidden files or can go back in time animating the desktop and its changes. With Time2Hide a user can still use the desktop as a place for storing files and folders, without worrying about the possible clutter and without being afraid that the files might be moved to an unknown location. The new desktop has been implemented and evaluated. To this end, a group of eight users participated in a four-week experimental evaluation. The results of this evaluation reveal that such an enhanced desktop can significantly support users and propose suggestions for further improvements.

\

This paper describes the concept of Time-Machine Computing (TMC), a time-centric approach to organizing information on computers. A system based on Time-Machine Computing allows a user to visit the past and the future states of computers. When a user needs to refer to a document that he/she was working on at some other time, he/she can travel in the time dimension and the system restores the computer state at that time. Since the user’s activities on the system are automatically archived, the user’s daily workspace is seamlessly integrated into the information archive. The combination of spatial information management of the desktop metaphor and time traveling allows a user to organize and archive information without being bothered by folder hierarchies or the file classification problems that are common in today’s desktop environments. TMC also provides a mechanism for linking multiple applications and external information sources by exchanging time information. This paper describes the key features of TMC, a time-machine desktop environment called “TimeScape,” and several time-oriented application integration examples.

\

Email overload is a growing problem for many users in the workplace [1]. Users often have trouble retrieving messages for use later or in remembering to reply or to act on a particular message. There are two causes. The first is due to the problems associated with maintenance and retrieval in a semantic hierarchical structure. The second is due to current email systems are designed around the assumption that messages are informational and are read upon arrival, and that important messages are filed. The use of a semantic hierarchy for filing presents many problems for dealing with a large volume of data. Filing and maintenance is very time consuming and cognitively intensive. Since there can be hundreds of new messages arriving each day, it is difficult to file and maintain a reasonable hierarchy that facilitates efficient retrieval. Moreover, categories can become obsolete over time, and messages in different categories may become semantically related. Therefore, the user must spend time periodically to reorganize their mail hierarchy. People use email for more than communication. On the surface, email is a form of asynchronous communication. In reality, email are actually used for purposes such as document delivery and archiving, work task delegation, storing personal names and addresses, and scheduling appointments [1]. Also people need better tools to remind them of their tasks [2, 3] and current email systems lack such support.

\

TopicShop is an interface that helps users evaluate and organize collections of web sites. The main interface components are site profiles, which contain information that helps users select high-quality items, and a work area, which offers thumbnail images, annotation, and lightweight grouping techniques to help users organize selected sites. The two components are linked to allow task integration. Previous work [2] demonstrated that subjects who used TopicShop were able to select significantly more highquality sites, in less time and with less effort. We report here on studies that confirm and extend these results. We also show that TopicShop subjects spent just half the time organizing sites, yet still created more groups and more annotations, and agreed more in how they grouped sites. Finally, TopicShop subjects tightly integrated the tasks of evaluating and organizing sites.

\

In this paper, we described an innovative web history visualization and tagging tool – Trails, which is designed and developed to help people understand their browsing history and habits better. We gathered users’ impressions of using Trails, including comparison with traditional web history views, perceived usefulness, privacy concerns, and suggestions to improve the system.

\

A new method for the visualization of huge hierarchical data structures is presented. The method is based on the observation that we can easily see the branches, leaves, and their arrangement in a botanical tree, despite of the large number of elements. The strand model of Holton is used to convert an abstract tree into a geometric model. Non- leaf nodes are mapped to branches and child nodes to sub- branches. A naive application of this model leads to un- satisfactory results, hence it is tailored to suit our purposes better. Continuing branches are emphasized, long branches are contracted, and sets of leaves are shown as fruit. The method is applied to the visualization of directory structures. The elements, directories and files, as well as their relations can easily be extracted, thereby showing that the use of methods from botanical modeling can be effective for information visualization.

\

This paper describes a novel method for the visualization of hierarchically structured information. The Tree-Map visualization technique makes 100% use of the available display space, mapping the full hierarchy onto a rectangular region in a space-filling manner. This efficient use of space allows very large hierarchies to be displayed in their entirety and facilitates the presentation of semantic information.

\

Virtual environments based on the desktop metaphor provide limited support for creating and managing project- specific work contexts. The paper discusses existing approaches to supporting higher-level user activities and presents a system named UMEA (User-Monitoring Environment for Activities). The design of the system is informed by activity theory. The system: (a) organizes resources into project-related pools consisting of documents, folders, URLs, and contacts, (b) monitors user activities, (c) automatically adds new resources to pools associated with active projects, and (d) provides personal information management tools linked to individual projects. An empirical evaluation of the system is reported.

\

Computers today make it easy for people to scatter copies and versions of digital items across their file systems, but do little to help people manage the resulting mess. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a copy-aware computing ecosystem, inspired by a vision of computing when systems track and surface copy relationships between files. Based on two deployments of a copy-aware software prototype and in-depth interviews with individuals in collaborative relationships, we present our findings on the origins of copies and the barriers to eliminating them, but offer a promising solution based on the set of files that together represent a user‘s conceptual view of a document - the versionset. We show that the versionset is viable to infer, and we draw upon user activity logs and feedback on personalized views of versionsets to distill guidelines for the factors that define a versionset. We conclude by enumerating the many PIM user experiences that could be transformed as a result.

\

The idea of using visualization for document retrieval is introduced through a new paradigm for query response handling. The paradigm is based on parallel queries or points of interest. Each point of interest is defined by a number of key terms and a display position. Documents, represented by icons, are positioned in the display based on the frequency count of word matches in the document to key terms in the points of interest. This visualization method has been implemented through a visualization system called VIBE.

\

During our constant interaction with computers, we generate large amounts of personal information. However, it is often hard to find a certain item we are looking for, since our data is spread throughout several places and applications. Nevertheless, a meaningful visualization technique may be the solution to this problem. We present VisMe, an interactive integrated visualization system for personal information that allows users to meaningfully navigate and retrieve their data. Relevant concepts (people, subjects and documents) are uniformly displayed in interconnected time- lines. Each of these items can be progressively expanded into new timelines, allowing relations between them to be explored in a simple, straightforward way. Several avenues can be simultaneously explored in context, thus giving users insights into their digital selves that current tools have a hard time providing. VisMe goes beyond traditional desk- top search solutions by allowing not only keywords, but also the relations between different kinds of personal information to be used to retrieve personally relevant data.

\

People regularly interact with different representations of Web pages. A person looking for new information may initially find a Web page represented as a short snippet rendered by a search engine. When he wants to return to the same page the next day, the page may instead be represented by a link in his browser history. Previous research has explored how to best represent Web pages in support of specific task types, but, as we find in this paper, consistency in representation across tasks is also important. We explore how different representations are used in a variety of contexts and present a compact representation that supports both the identification of new, relevant Web pages and the re-finding of previously viewed pages.

\

This paper describes the use of relational database management system (RDBMS) and treemap visualization to represent and analyze a group of personal digital collections created in the context of work and with no external metadata. We evaluated the visualization vis a vis the results of previous personal information management (PIM) studies. We suggest that this visualization supports analysis that allows understanding PIM practices overtime.

\

As the number of electronic messages continues to grow, information visualization tools become increasingly important to support users in the complexity of managing the large amount of information they receive. This paper presents a visualization approach to support email browsing as well as querying. A new clustering mechanism is presented which, based on the hierarchical nature of domain names, provides an automatic classification of electronic messages. This representation is combined with a temporal visualization that supports browsing, Boolean searching and threading operations.

\

The World Wide Web is increasingly becoming the preferred repository of information. The strength of this information infrastructure is also its weakness. Faced with the chaos of millions of places to go and thousands of places to remember having been, the thousands of new Web users who join every day, need a helping hand. The aim of this paper is, to highlight possible components of technologies supporting web navigation and the maintenance of indexes to web resources. The BASE framework is suggested as a means of understanding the pragmatic technological choices, and six experimental prototypes are presented and discussed. The prototypes support various aspects of bookmark maintenance and information filtering.

The World-Wide Web has achieved global connectivity stimulating the transition of computers from knowledge processors to knowledge sources. But the Web and its client software are seriously deficient for supporting users' interactive use of this information. This paper presents two related designs with which to evolve the Web and its clients. The first is the WebBook, a 3D interactive book of HTML pages. The WebBook allows rapid interaction with objects at a higher level of aggregation than pages. The second is the Web Forager, an application that embeds the WebBook and other objects in a hierarchical 3D workspace. Both designs are intended as exercises to play off against analytical studies of information workspaces. Keywords 3D graphics, user interfaces, information access, WorldWide Web, information workspace, workspace. INTRODUCTION Whereas personal computers used to be viewed as knowledge processors---word processors or spreadsheet calculators, for instance, they are now beco

\

Reconnaissance agents show context by displaying documents with similar content to the one(s) the user currently has open. Research paper search engines show context by displaying documents that cite or are cited by the currently open document(s). We present a tool that applies such ideas to the personal web, that is, the space rooted in user documents but tightly connected to web documents as well. The tool organizes the personal web with a single topic hierarchy based on direct links, instead of the traditional file, bookmark, and (hidden) direct link hierarchies. The tool allows a user to easily navigate through related user and web documents, no matter whether the documents are related by directory-document, bookmark-document, direct-link, or even similar content relationships.

\

Current commercial web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer provide a wide and diverse range of utilities, such as history lists and bookmarks, that support revisiting previously seen pages on the web. Yet previous research indicates that these utilities are largely unused. In this paper, we present an alternative utility called WebView; a prototype designed to improve the efficiency and usability of page revisitation. It does this by paying particular attention to how previous pages are represented visually, and by integrating many revisitation capabilities into a single display space. Our preliminary evaluation of WebView indicates that users are enthusiastic about the functionality provided, and that it improves the efficiency of some navigational acts.

\

Each window on our computer desktop provides a view into some information. Although users can currently manipulate multiple windows, we assert that being able to spatially arrange smaller regions of these windows could help users perform certain tasks more efficiently. In this paper, we describe a novel interaction technique that allows users to replicate arbitrary regions of existing windows into inde- pendent windows called WinCuts. Each WinCut is a live view of a region of the source window with which users can interact. We also present an extension that allows users to share WinCuts across multiple devices. Next, we classify the set of tasks for which WinCuts may be useful, both in single as well as multiple device scenarios. We present high level implementation details so that other researchers can replicate this work. And finally, we discuss future work that we will pursue in extending these ideas.

\

http://www.iis.ee.ic.ac.uk/~rick/research/pubs/struggle-hcii2003.pdf

\

We present XSearcher, an associative memory based desk- top search system, which exploits associations by creating semantic links of personal desktop resources from explicit and implicit user activities. With these links, associations among memory fragments can be built or rebuilt in a user’s brain during a search. The personalized ranking scheme uses these links together with a user’s personal preferences to rank results by both relevance and importance. XSearcher enhances traditional keyword based search systems since it is closer to the way that human associative memory works.

\

According to cognitive science literature, human memory is predicated on contextual cues (e.g., room, music) in the environment. During recall tasks, we associate information/activities/objects with contextual cues. However, computer systems do not leverage our natural process of using contextual cues to facilitate recall. We present a new interaction technique, Pivoting, that allows users to search for contextually related activities and find a target piece of information (often not semantically related). A sample motivation for contextual search would be, 'what was that website I was looking at when Yesterday by The Beatles was last playing?' Our interaction technique is grounded in the cognitive science literature, and is demonstrated in our system YouPivot. In addition, we present a new personal annotation method, called TimeMarks, to further support contextual recall and the pivoting process. In a pilot study, participants were quicker to identify websites, and preferred using YouPivot, compared to current tools. YouPivot demonstrates how principles of human memory can be applied to enhance the search of digital information.

\

Structured mapping and coordination techniques are effective for making sense of conversations and building organizational memory. This paper proposes a new method for processing e-mail that brings these benefits to mailing lists. The technique leverages existing e-mail conventions instead of requiring participants to communicate within an imposed framework. Zest, a prototype browser for e-mail discussions, processes a standard e-mail folder, and displays a concise, conversation-like overview of the discussion in progress. In effect, Zest transforms an ordinary mailing list into a structured conversation system, without the need for special client software, and without the rigid formalism that previous such systems forced upon their users. Informal evidence suggests that the overviews shown by Zest are more readable and effective than the threaded message views that e-mail clients currently provide, and also that Zest stands a better chance of adoption than previous structured conversation tools.

\