Integrating Indigenous culture into STEM education is a critical process in building pathways to justice and diversifying design. This process serves to (re)center our conceptions of STEM education by challenging strictly Western notions of STEM, representing an opportunity for learning not just in curricular design, but in technological design as well. Postcolonial computing scholars have critically examined design processes, highlighting the dominance of Western knowledge undergirding cross-cultural design. However, such efforts have yet to fully leverage insights from national curricular (re)centering initiatives. We take up this opportunity through a qualitative case study of an educational outreach organization in British Columbia, Canada, a subsidiary of a nation-wide effort in curricular integration of Indigenous and Western STEM material. Applying postcolonial computing thought, we offer enrichments to theory by providing an empirical basis for a) integrating resiliency, b) politicization in design, and c) arguments for (re)centering epistemological authority in computing. These contributions both enrich theory and enhance the practice of cross-cultural design by encouraging and exploring an Indigenous (re)centering of our understanding of both curricular and technological design.

ICT globalization continues to spread hardware, software, and accompanying technologies, so too does knowledges and trainings on those ICTs. This knowledge migration process has been linked by scholars to a 'colonial impulse' inherent in computing as a knowledge enterprise, which incorporates into broader colonizing forces. Through simultaneous explorations of dual case studies with a tribal ISP in California and an educational organization that works with indigenous First Nations communities in British Columbia, we depict how power circulates in this process, both empowering and disempowering communities. We then offer a brief argument for the need to foreground methods and approaches to disentangling these contradicting forces.

Information seeking is an important but often difficult task, especially when it involves large and complex data sets. We hypothesize that a context-sensitive interaction paradigm would greatly assist users in their information seeking. Such a paradigm would allow users to both express their requests and receive requested information in context. Driven by this hypothesis, we have taken rigorous steps to design, develop, and evaluate a full-fledged, context-sensitive information system. We started with a Wizard-of-OZ (WOZ) study to verify the effectiveness of our envi-sioned system. We then built a fully automated system based on the findings from our WOZ study. We targeted the development and integration of two sets of technologies: context-sensitive mul-timodal input interpretation and multimedia output generation. Finally, we formally evaluated the usability of our system in real world conditions. The results show that our system greatly improves the users' ability to perform practical information-seek-ing tasks. These results not only confirm our initial hypothesis, but they also indicate the practicality of our approaches.

This paper describes a novel instance-based sentence boundary determination method for natural language generation that optimizes a set of criteria based on examples in a corpus. Compared to existing sentence boundary determination approaches, our work offers three significant contributions. First, our approach provides a general domain independent framework that effectively addresses sentence boundary determination by balancing a comprehensive set of sentence complexity and quality related constraints. Second, our approach can simulate the characteristics and the style of naturally occurring sentences in an application domain since our solutions are optimized based on their similarities to examples in a corpus. Third, our approach can adapt easily to suit a natural language generation system's capability by balancing the strengths and weaknesses of its subcomponents (e.g. its aggregation and referring expression generation capability). Our final evaluation shows that the proposed method results in significantly better sentence generation outcomes than a widely adopted approach.

This paper presents mSpiders, a system that extends traditional co-browsing to support mobility and awareness among participants. The system offers mobile users the ability to easily get help and share web documents with others over the Internet and greatly enhances users' Web-sharing experience. By introducing a new method to track and present the current attention of each participant - their region of interest (ROI), the system enables all participants aware of each other's presence and what they are viewing, independent of the specificities of Web content, browsers used and their settings.

In this paper, we describe how quantifiers can be generated in a text generation system. By taking advantage of discourse and ontological information, quantified expressions can replace entities in a text, making the text more fluent and concise. In addition to avoiding ambiguities between distributive and collective readings in universal quantification generation, we will also show how different scope orderings between universal and existential quantifiers will result in different quantified expressions in our algorithm.

We present a corpus-based study of the sequential ordering among premodifiers in noun phrases. This information is important for the fluency of generated text in practical applications. We propose and evaluate three approaches to identify sequential order among premodifiers: direct evidence, transitive closure, and clustering. Our implemented system can make over 94% of such ordering decisions correctly, as evaluated on a large, previously unseen test corpus.

This paper discusses methods for assigning code-words for the purpose of fingerprinting digital data, e.g., software, documents, music, and video. Fingerprinting consists of uniquely marking and registering each copy of the data. This marking allows a distributor to detect any unauthorized copy and trace it back to the user. This threat of detection will deter users from releasing unauthorized copies. A problem arises when users collude: for digital data, two different fingerprinted objects can be compared and the differences between them detected. Hence, a set of users can collude to detect the location of the fingerprint. They can then alter the fingerprint to mask their identities. We present a general fingerprinting solution which is secure in the context of collusion. In addition, we discuss methods for distributing fingerprinted data.

Creating high-quality multimedia presentations requires much skill, time, and effort.This is particularly true when temporal media, such as speech and animation, are involved.We describe the design and implementation of a knowledge-based system that generates customized temporal multimedia presentations.We provide art overview of the system's architecture, and explain how speech, written text, and graphics are generated and coordinated.Our emphasis is on how temporal media are coordinated by the system through a multi-stage negotiation process.In negotiation, media-specific generation components interact with a novel coordination component that solves temporal constraints provided by the generators.We illustrate our work with a set of examples generated by the system in a testbed application intended to update hospital caregivers on the status of patients who have undergone a cardiac bypass operation.

Aggregating different pieces of similar information is necessary to generate concise and easy to understand reports in technical domains. This paper presents a general algorithm that combines similar messages in order to generate one or more coherent sentences for them. The process is not as trivial as might be expected. Problems encountered are briefly described.