To facilitate interaction with documents in interactive tabletop applications, we explore how the orientation of documents supports efficient reading and writing. In this paper, the orientation of paper documents is systematically investigated in five different experiments. In the first three experiments, 36 Japanese participants, 18 left- and 18 right-handed, explored preferred document orientation for reading horizontal Japanese texts. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the participants preferred to rotate text documents clockwise if left-handed and counter-clockwise if right-handed relative to their median line. On average, they rotated text documents more when annotating (about 10°) than when reading (about 5°). The difference in document rotation can be explained by the fact that text documents are rotated to facilitate hand manipulation, because they are rotated more when finer hand motions are required. No difference in document angle was found between Japanese horizontal texts and English texts (Experiment 3). In the fourth experiment, we found that right-handed people read text documents faster when they were rotated between –10° and 20° counter-clockwise. Finally, the last experiment explored the effect of document orientation on the performance of transcribing texts. The participants transcribed texts faster when documents were rotated 10° counter-clockwise. In light of the results from these paper-based experiments, we give guidelines for how to present text documents in tabletop applications depending on tasks, documents, and users.

Managing an audience's visual attention to presentation content is critical for effective communication in tele-conferences. This paper explores how audience and presenter coordinate visual and verbal information, and how consistent their gaze behavior is, to understand if their gaze behavior can be used for inferring and communicating attention in remote presentations. In a lab study, participants were asked first to view a short video presentation, and next, to rehearse and present to a remote viewer using the slides from the video presentation. We found that presenters coordinate their speech and gaze at visual regions of the slides in a timely manner (in 72% of all events analyzed), whereas audience only looked at what the presenter talked about in 53% of all events. Rehearsing aloud and presenting resulted in similar scanpaths. To further explore if it possible to infer if what a presenter is looking at is also talked about, we successfully trained models to detect an attention match between gaze and speech. These findings suggest that using the presenter's gaze has the potential to reliably communicate the presenter's focus on essential parts of the visual presentation material to help the audience better follow the presenter.

Social media offers potential opportunities for businesses to extract business intelligence. This paper presents Tweetviz, an interactive tool to help businesses extract actionable information from a large set of noisy Twitter messages. Tweetviz visualizes the tweet sentiment of business locations, identifies other business venues that Twitter users visit, and estimates some simple demographics of the Twitter users frequenting a business. A user study to evaluate the system's ability indicates that Tweetviz can provide an overview of a business's issues and sentiment as well as information aiding users in creating customer profiles.

People often use more than one query when searching for information. They revisit search results to re-find information and build an understanding of their search need through iterative explorations of query formulation. These tasks are not well-supported by search interfaces and web browsers. We designed and built SearchPanel, a Chrome browser extension that supports people in their ongoing information seeking. This extension combines document and process metadata into an interactive representation of the retrieved documents that can be used for sense-making, navigation, and re-finding documents. In a real-world deployment spanning over two months, results show that SearchPanel appears to have been primarily used for complex information needs, in search sessions with long durations and high numbers of queries. When process metadata was present in the UI, searchers in explorative search sessions submitted more and longer queries and interacted more with the SERP. These results indicate that the process metadata features in SearchPanel seem to be of particular importance for exploratory search.

Although longer queries can produce better results for information seeking tasks, people tend to type short queries. We created an interface designed to encourage people to type longer queries, and evaluated it in two Mechanical Turk experiments. Results suggest that our interface manipulation may be effective for eliciting longer queries.

Exploratory search is a complex, iterative information seeking activity that involves running multiple queries and finding and examining many documents. We designed a query preview control that visualizes the distribution of newly-retrieved and re-retrieved documents prior to running the query. When evaluating the preview control with a control condition, we found effects on both people's information seeking behavior and improved retrieval performance. People spent more time formulating a query and were more likely to explore search results more deeply, retrieved a more diverse set of documents, and found more different relevant documents when using the preview.

The modern workplace is inherently collaborative, and this collaboration relies on effective communication among co-workers. Many communication tools -- email, blogs, wikis, Twitter, etc. -- have become increasingly available and accepted in workplace communications. In this paper, we report on a study of communications technologies used over a one year period in a small US corporation. We found that participants used a large number of communication tools for different purposes, and that the introduction of new tools did not impact significantly the use of previously-adopted technologies. Further, we identified distinct classes of users based on patterns of tool use. This work has implications for the design of technology in the evolving ecology of communication tools.

In certain applications such as radiology and imagery analysis, it is important to minimize errors. In this paper we evaluate a structured inspection method that uses eye tracking information as a feedback mechanism to the image inspector. Our two-phase method starts with a free viewing phase during which gaze data is collected. During the next phase, we either segment the image, mask previously seen areas of the image, or combine the two techniques, and repeat the search. We compare the different methods proposed for the second search phase by evaluating the inspection method using true positive and false negative rates, and subjective workload. Results show that gaze-blocked configurations reduced the subjective workload, and that gaze-blocking without segmentation showed the largest increase in true positive identifications and the largest decrease in false negative identifications of previously unseen objects.

We propose an Augmented Reality (AR) system that helps users take a picture from a designated pose, such as the position and camera angle of an earlier photo. Repeat photography is frequently used to observe and document changes in an object. Our system uses AR technology to estimate camera poses in real time. When a user takes a photo, the camera pose is saved as a “view bookmark”. To support a user in taking a repeat photo, two simple graphics are rendered in an AR viewer on the camera's screen to guide the user to this bookmarked view. The system then uses image adjustment techniques to create an image based on the user's repeat photo that is even closer to the original.

One of the core challenges now facing smart rooms is supporting realistic, everyday activities. While much research has been done to push forward the frontiers of novel interaction techniques, we argue that technology geared toward widespread adoption requires a design approach that emphasizes straightforward configuration and control, as well as flexibility. We examined the work practices of users of a large, multi-purpose conference room, and designed DICE, a system to help them use the room's capabilities. We describe the design process, and report findings about the system's usability and about people's use of a multi-purpose conference room.

We describe a new approach to information retrieval: algorithmic mediation for intentional, synchronous collaborative exploratory search. Using our system, two or more users with a common information need search together, simultaneously. The collaborative system provides tools, user interfaces and, most importantly, algorithmically-mediated retrieval to focus, enhance and augment the team's search and communication activities. Collaborative search outperformed post hoc merging of similarly instrumented single user runs. Algorithmic mediation improved both collaborative search (allowing a team of searchers to find relevant information more efficiently and effectively), and exploratory search (allowing the searchers to find relevant information that cannot be found while working individually).

Motivated by and grounded in observations of eye-gaze patterns in human-human dialogue, this study explores using eye-gaze patterns in managing human-computer dialogue. We developed an interactive system, iTourist, for city trip planning, which encapsulated knowledge of eye-gaze patterns gained from studies of human-human collaboration systems. User study results show that it was possible to sense users' interest based on eye-gaze patterns and manage computer information output accordingly. Study participants could successfully plan their trip with iTourist and positively rated their experience of using it. We demonstrate that eye-gaze could play an important role in managing future multimodal human-computer dialogues.

If user interfaces should be made human-like vs. tool-like has been debated in the HCI field, and this debate affects the development of multimodal interfaces. However, little empirical study has been done to support either view so far. Even if there is evidence that humans interpret media as other humans, this does not mean that humans experience the interfaces as human-like. We studied how people experience a multimodal timetable system with varying degree of human-like spoken feedback in a Wizard-of-Oz study. The results showed that users' views and preferences lean significantly towards anthropomorphism after actually experiencing the multimodal timetable system. The more human-like the spoken feedback is the more participants preferred the system to be human-like. The results also showed that the users experience matched their preferences. This shows that in order to appreciate a human-like interface, the users have to experience it.

In this paper we present results on the learning effects of using the gulan educational system to understand spoken dialogue systems. The investigation is restricted to the dialogue management component, which uses a subset of the linlin dialogue manager. The results are based on an evaluation of questionnaires given to the students and of tutors assessment of the students knowledge before and after using the educational system. The study shows that the students knowledge on focus and dialogue structure for dialogue systems improved after using the system. We also gained insights on further development of the system. 1. Introduction The gulan system is a software package for teaching spoken dialogue systems technology [1]. The domain used in gulan is the Yellow pages, but the current lexicon only includes information on restaurants and cinemas in Stockholm. Its aim is to provide students with means to study the various components of a spoken dialogue system. gulan has been used for...

Design of information systems where spatial and temporal information is merged and can be accessed using various modalities requires careful examination on how to combine the communication modalities to achieve efficient interaction. In this paper we present ongoing work on designing a multimodal interface with timetable information for local buses where the same database information can be accessed by different user categories with various information needs. The prototype interface was evaluated to investigate how speech contributes to the interaction. The results showed that the subjects used a more optimal sequence of actions when using speech, and did fewer errors. We also present suggestions for future design of multimodal interfaces. 1. INTRODUCTION A recent development in interactive systems is to combine WWW-interaction with speech (e.g. WebGalaxy [8]). Our aim is to develop such a multimodal dialogue system. The application domain for our study is local bus timetable informa...