This research investigates the information behavior of undergraduate students in the context of academic and three everyday-life information domains (health, news, leisure). Data was collected using an online survey of all undergraduates at McGill University, with 3565 usable responses obtained (response rate 15.6%). Results-to-date show that there is variation by domain in the choice of resource, choice of search tool, and judgment of credibility. The results also show that while the students are able to make good judgements regarding the credibility of resources, that judgement is not always reflected in the resources they actually choose to use.

Although many challenges of managing computer files have been identified in past studies -- and many alternative prototypes made -- the scale and structure of personal file collections remain relatively unknown. We studied 348 such collections, and found they are typically considerably larger in scale (30-190 thousand files) and structure (folder trees twice taller and many times wider) than previously thought, which suggests files and folders are used now more than ever despite advances in Web storage, desktop search, and tagging. Data along many measures within and across collections were log normally distributed, indicating that personal collections resemble imbalanced, group-made collections and confirming the intuition that personal information management behaviour varies greatly. Directions for the generation of test collections and other future research are discussed.

Many large digital collections are organized by sorting their items into topics and arranging these topics hierarchically, such as those displayed in a tree view. The resulting information organization structures mitigate some of the challenges of searching digital information realms; however, the topic hierarchies are often large and complex, and thus difficult to navigate. Automated techniques have been shown to produce significantly smaller, simplified versions of existing topic hierarchies while preserving access to the majority of the collection, but these simplified topic hierarchies have never been tested with human participants, and so it is not clear what effect simplification would have on the exploration and use of such structures for browsing and retrieval. This study partly addresses this gap by performing a comparative test with three groups of university students (N=62) performing ten topic hierarchy exploration tasks using one of three versions of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) hierarchy: 1) the original LCSH hierarchy, acting as a baseline, 2) a shallower version of 1), and 3) a narrower version of 2). A quantitative analysis of measures of accuracy, time, and browsing shows that participants using the simplified trees were significantly more accurate and faster than those using the unmodified tree, and the narrower, balanced tree was also faster than the shallower tree. These results show that automated topic hierarchy simplification can facilitate the use of such hierarchies, which has implications for the development of information organization theory and human-information interaction techniques for similar information structures.

Rumble strips (RS) offer ideal conditions for multimodality research. Designed to reduce crashes and alert drowsy or inattentive drivers, their effectiveness in crash reduction is not questioned but little is known regarding how information from tactile vibrations and auditory rumbling is integrated during low-vision driving conditions. In this paper, we report descriptive data related to participants' perceptual experience while driving on a RS road during a snow storm, as well as data collected from participants driving in a simulated snow storm environment, and suggest future research perspectives.

Many variables have been shown to impact whether a vibration stimulus will be perceived. We present a user study that takes into account not only previously investigated predictors such as vibration intensity and duration along with the age of the person receiving the stimulus, but also the amount of motion, as measured by an accelerometer, at the site of vibration immediately preceding the stimulus. This is a more specific measure than in previous studies showing an effect on perception due to gross conditions such as walking. We show that a logistic regression model including prior acceleration is significantly better at predicting vibration perception than a model including only vibration intensity, duration and participant age. In addition to the overall regression, we discuss individual participant differences and measures of classification performance for real-world applications. Our expectation is that haptic interface designers will be able to use such results to design better vibrations that are perceivable under the user's current activity conditions, without being annoyingly loud or jarring, eventually approaching ``perceptually equivalent' feedback independent of motion.

Despite many recent developments in virtual reality, an effective locomotion interface which allows for normal walking through large virtual environments was until recently still lacking. Here, we describe the new CyberWalk omnidirectional treadmill system, which makes it possible for users to walk endlessly in any direction, while never leaving the confines of the limited walking surface. The treadmill system improves on previous designs, both in its mechanical features and in the control system employed to keep users close to the center of the treadmill. As a result, users are able to start walking, vary their walking speed and direction, and stop walking as they would on a normal, stationary surface. The treadmill system was validated in two experiments, in which both the walking behavior and the performance in a basic spatial updating task were compared to that during normal overground walking. The results suggest that walking on the CyberWalk treadmill is very close to normal walking, especially after some initial familiarization. Moreover, we did not find a detrimental effect of treadmill walking in the spatial updating task. The CyberWalk system constitutes a significant step forward to bringing the real world into the laboratory or workplace.

For us humans, walking is our most natural way of moving through the world. One of the major challenges in present research on navigation in virtual reality is to enable users to physically walk through virtual environments. Although treadmills, in principle, allow users to walk for extended periods of time through large virtual environments, existing setups largely fail to produce a truly immersive sense of navigation. Partially, this is because of inadequate control of treadmill speed as a function of walking behavior. Here, we present a new control algorithm that allows users to walk naturally on a treadmill, including starting to walk from standstill, stopping, and varying walking speed. The treadmill speed control consists of a feedback loop based on the measured user position relative to a given reference position, plus a feed-forward term based on online estimation of the user's walking velocity. The purpose of this design is to make the treadmill compensate fully for any persistent walker motion, while keeping the accelerations exerted on the user as low as possible. We evaluated the performance of the algorithm by conducting a behavioral experiment in which we varied its most important parameters. Participants walked at normal walking speed and then, on an auditory cue, abruptly stopped. After being brought back to the center of the treadmill by the control algorithm, they rated how smoothly the treadmill had changed its velocity in response to the change in walking speed. Ratings, in general, were quite high, indicating good control performance. Moreover, ratings clearly depended on the control algorithm parameters that were varied. Ratings were especially affected by the way the treadmill reversed its direction of motion. In conclusion, controlling treadmill speed in such a way that changes in treadmill speed are unobtrusive and do not disturb VR immersiveness is feasible on a normal treadmill with a straightforward control algorithm.