Information Retrieval List Digest 088 (October 13, 1991) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-088 IRLIST Digest October 13, 1991 Volume VIII, Number 45 Issue 88 ********************************************************** I. NOTICES A. Meeting Announcements/Calls for Papers 1. User Interfaces Strategies '92 A Live Satellite TV Broadcast, December 12, 1992 2. MLA '92 ********************************************************** I.A.1. Fr: Ben Shneiderman Re: User Interface Strategies '92 User Interface Strategies '92 A Live Satellite TV Broadcast December 12, 1991 University of Maryland Instructional Television Organized by Ben Shneiderman Speakers: Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland User Interfaces for Information Visualization Thomas K. Landauer, Bellcore Helping people get more information out of text Brad A. Myers, Carnegie Mellon University Extending direct manipulation: Demonstrational interfaces and User Interface Development Environments Brenda Laurel, Telepresence Research Be There Here: An Introduction to Telepresence Audience: User interface designers, programmers, software engineers, interface evaluators, managers in the computing and communications fields, technical writers, human factors specialists, trainers, marketing personnel. Overview: Four leaders in the field offer their perspectives on why the user interface is a central focus for expanding applications of computers in business, education, the home, etc. They offer their visions and suggest exciting opportunities for the next decade's developments. Demonstrations, new software tools, guiding principles, emerging theories, and future scenarios will be presented. Enrollment: This live satellite course will be broadcast from the University of Maryland Instructional Television System via Ku and C Bands. In order to view the broadcast, access to a satellite dish is necessary. Contact your organization's training or conference director to ask if he or she can organize a satellite downlink and obtain a site license. If you do not have access to a satellite dish, a number of open viewing sites have been established in major metropolitan areas person for 1 to 9 persons or $1,600 site license for groups of 10 or more. For information on viewing locations and for questions about the broadcast, call (301) 405-4905 or FAX (301) 314-9639. The broadcast will be in cooperation with the National Technological University (NTU). Lecture 1: 11:00am - Noon EST Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland: User Interfaces for Information Visualization The next generation of database management, directory browsing, information retrieval, hypermedia, scientific data management, and library systems can enable convenient use of larger data sets by a wider range of users. User interface designers can provide more powerful search techniques, more comprehensible query facilities, better presentation methods, and smoother integration of technology with task. Novel graphical and direct manipulation approaches to query formulation and information presentation/manipulation will be shown. These approaches include a filter/flow metaphor for boolean expressions, dynamic query methods with continuous visual presentation of results as the query is changed (possibly employing parallel computation), and color-coded 2-D space-filling tree-maps to show multiple-level hierarchies in a single display (hundreds of directories and more than a thousand files can be seen at once). Ben Shneiderman is Head of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, Professor of Computer Science, and Member of the Institute Advanced Computer Studies all at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Designing the User Interface and Software Psychology,and the co-author of the hyperbook/disk Hypertext Hands-On!. Dr. Shneiderman is editor of the Ablex Publishers series on Human-Computer Interaction, on the editorial board of 6 journals, the author of 130 technical papers, and the creator of the Hyperties hypertext system. He is an international lecturer and consultant for many organizations including Apple, AT&T, IBM, Library of Congress, NASA, and NCR. Lecture 2: 12:30pm - 1:25pm EST Thomas K. Landauer, Bellcore: Helping people get more information out of text The Cognitive Science Research Group at Bellcore has spent a decade investigating why people find it hard to access textual information, and trying out new ways to help them. The research focuses on the fundamental problems in information retrieval: the difficulty of asking the right question when you don't already know the answer, of finding the same words as authors have used, of finding your way in a maze of information. New and proven tools have emerged for indexing, navigation and display of text. Among them are Unlimited Aliasing, Adaptive Indexing, Fisheye Viewers, Latent Semantic Indexing, the SuperBook(TM) text browser, all ways to harness computation in support of human intelligence. An important foundation of the success of this work has been the observation and analysis of people using textual information, with and without various computer aids. "Formative design evaluation", in which the details of what helps and hinders in a new design is used to drive the next design, has resulted in some of the few systems ever demonstrated to actually improve on the utility of previous techniques (like paper books and libraries!). Tom Landauer is manager of the Cognitive Science Research Group, a part of the Computer Science Research Division, at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore), the science and engineering organization jointly owned by the regional Bell telephone companies. Tom holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard, and taught psychology at Dartmouth College and Stanford University before joining Bell Labs in 1969. In 1979 he organized a group to study human-computer interaction, and moved this group to Bellcore when AT&T split. Landauer is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Psychological Association. He is a former member of the National Research Council Committee on Human Factors, and a member of several editorial boards. He has published two books and over 100 scientific papers. Lecture 3: 1:35pm - 2:30pm EST Brad A. Myers, Carnegie Mellon University: Extending direct manipulation: Demonstrational interfaces and User Interface Development Environments Direct manipulation interfaces, in which objects on the screen can be pointed to and manipulated using a mouse and keyboard, are now widely accepted. However, some critics point to limitations such as the difficulty of providing abstract commands and the lack of programmability. Demonstrational interfaces can overcome these problems while still providing the benefits of direct manipulation. A ``demonstrational interface'' watches while the user executes conventional direct manipulation actions, but creates a more general abstraction from the specific example. For instance, the user might drag a file named "v1.ps" to the trash can, and then a file named "v2.ps", and a demonstrational interface might automatically create a macro to delete all files that end in ".ps". Modern systems increasingly contain demonstrational features, including the way that the Macintosh MacDraw "Duplicate" command and the Microsoft Word "Renumber" command work. The first part of this talk defines demonstrational interfaces, shows a number of examples, and discusses how this exciting technology can be applied in novel systems. The second part of the talk discusses current directions in tools for helping build user interface software, including how demonstrational techniques are beginning to be extensively used. Brad Myers is a Research Computer Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the principal investigator of the Demonstrational Interfaces Project, funded by NSF, Apple and Siemens. From 1980 until 1983, he worked at PERQ Systems Corporation where he developed one of the first commercial window managers. Myers received a PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto where he developed the Peridot UIMS. He received the MS and BSc degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while a research intern at Xerox PARC. Myers is the author of Creating User Interfaces by Demonstration and over 35 journal and conference papers about user interface topics. He is an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Information Systems, The Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, and a member of the editorial board of Human- Computer Interaction. He is on the program committees of four annual conferences. Lecture 4: 3:00pm - 3:55pm EST Brenda Laurel, Telepresence Research: Be There Here: An Introduction to Telepresence Telepresence is the term used to describe technology that enables users to feel as if they are actually present in a different place or time. 'Virtual realitvy' and 'artificial reality' are popular names for this technology. Today, the most common form of telepresence involves head-mounted stereoscopic displays, three-dimensional audio environments, and instrumented gloves. Telepresence technology can provide the experience of being in two different kinds of spaces: computer-generated worlds or virtual environments, and actual environments that are physically distant, hazardous, or inaccessible. The lecture outline is: 1. Overview and evolution of telepresence 2. Description of current telepresence technology 3. Future technology issues and challenges 4. Discussion of current and future applications of telepresence in such areas as entertainment, education and training, and information management Brenda Laurel has worked in the personal computer industry since 1976 a programmer, software designer, marketeer, producer, and researcher. She has consulted in interactive entertainment and human-computer interface design for Apple, Atari, Lucasfilm, and the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In 1990, she joined Scott Fisher in founding Telepresence Research, a new company to conduct research and development in telepresence technology and applications. Brenda has published extensively on such subjects as virtual reality design, computer- based agents, and interactive fiction. She is editor of the book, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design [Addison-Wesley, 1990] and author of Computers as Theatre [Addison-Wesley, 1991]. Her PhD is from Ohio State University in 1986. Discussion: 4:05pm - 5:00pm EST Phoned-in and faxed questions will be discussed live by the four speakers. Ben Shneiderman Dept. of CS U. of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 ben@cs.umd.edu (301) 405-2680 (office)(transfers to secretary after 3 or 6 rings) (301) 405-6707 (fax) ********** I.A.2. Fr: Prudence Dalrymple Re: MLA 1992 CALL FOR PAPERS MLA 1992--WASHINGTON, D.C. Library Research Section Medical Informatics Section The Library Research Section and the Medical Informatics Section invite contributed papers for presentation at the 1992 MLA meeting in Washington, D.C. Submit an abstract of not more than 250 words describing a research project in medical informatics by October 1, 1991. Reports of research projects either completed or ongoing will be considered. The following statement of scope may be helpful in determining whether a topic is appropriate: linking of patient data to medical literature, development and use of expert systems or other computer aided decision supports, evaluative and descriptive reports of medical informatics training activities, development and evaluation of intelligent information retrieval systems such as COACH, research and development in UMLS, and so forth. Because medical informatics is an emerging field, reports of development and demonstration projects, as well as ongoing research projects are welcome. Abstracts should include a brief description of the project's objectives, the methods used to achieve the objective, results or expected results and implications and importance of findings. Completed papers will need to be submitted by November 8, 1991. You will be notified of final acceptance by November 22, 1991. Camera-ready copy of the abstract must reach the Medical Library Association by December 1,1991. Submit abstracts in electronic form or hard copy to either: Susan Speer Health Sciences Library East Carolina University Greenville, NC 27858-4354 ecsvax!hslbell@uncecs.edu or Prudence Dalrymple Graduate School of Library and Information Science 410 David Kinley Hall 1407 W. Gregory Drive Urbana, IL 61801 dalrympl@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu ********************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, Division of Library Automation, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA. 94612-3550. 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