In this article, we present an interactive visual information retrieval and recommendation system, called VisIRR, for large-scale document discovery. VisIRR effectively combines the paradigms of (1) a passive pull through query processes for retrieval and (2) an active push that recommends items of potential interest to users based on their preferences. Equipped with an efficient dynamic query interface against a large-scale corpus, VisIRR organizes the retrieved documents into high-level topics and visualizes them in a 2D space, representing the relationships among the topics along with their keyword summary. In addition, based on interactive personalized preference feedback with regard to documents, VisIRR provides document recommendations from the entire corpus, which are beyond the retrieved sets. Such recommended documents are visualized in the same space as the retrieved documents, so that users can seamlessly analyze both existing and newly recommended ones. This article presents novel computational methods, which make these integrated representations and fast interactions possible for a large-scale document corpus. We illustrate how the system works by providing detailed usage scenarios. Additionally, we present preliminary user study results for evaluating the effectiveness of the system.

We present the Test Matrix Tool (TMT) framework, a simulation-agnostic framework providing end-to-end support for robust analysis of complex systems. The need to execute a large number of simulations is common to many problem environments, even those already reduced by Design of Experiments or similar methodologies. TMT addresses key end-user needs in easing the specification, execution and analysis of simulation workloads in ways that are consistent between specific applications of the framework. The TMT design contributes modular specifications for key data communicated between and within the specification, execution and analysis components. Our TMT implementation is an instantiation of those formats freely available for general use. TMT's data analysis component provides a variety of features data filtering, comparison, transformation and visualization for analytic tasks on any TMT-embedded model. We provide a brief case study as an example of its use in a real-world application.

Hierarchical representations are common in digital repositories, yet are not always fully leveraged in their online search interfaces. This work describes ResultMaps, which use hierarchical treemap representations with query string-driven digital library search engines. We describe two lab experiments, which find that ResultsMap users yield significantly better results over a control condition on some subjective measures, and we find evidence that ResultMaps have ancillary benefits via increased understanding of some aspects of repository content. The ResultMap system and experiments contribute an understanding of the benefits--direct and indirect--of the ResultMap approach to repository search visualization.

MacKenzie and Soukoreff have previously introduced a Fitts' Law-based performance model of expert two-thumb text entry on mini-QWERTY keyboards [4]. In this work we validate the original model using results from a longitudinal study of mini-QWERTY keyboards, and update the model to account for observed inter-key time data.