The Receipts2Go system is about the world of one-page documents: cash register receipts, book covers, cereal boxes, price tags, train tickets, fire extinguisher tags. In that world, we're exploring techniques for extracting accurate information from documents for which we have no layout descriptions -- indeed no initial idea of what the document's genre is -- using photos taken with cell phone cameras by users who aren't skilled document capture technicians. This paper outlines the system and reports on some initial results, including the algorithms we've found useful for cleaning up those document images, and the techniques used to extract and organize relevant information from thousands of similar-but-different page layouts.

We present research focused on designing visual analytics (VA) systems for workers in organizational environments. We focus on business analysts and asset managers, who work collaboratively to analyze information and make decisions. Through extensive investigations in two organizational environments, we found that these users struggle with managing and analyzing information from multiple perspectives. Their current tools lack support for aggregating, organizing, and sharing such information. To address their needs, we characterized their analytic workflows, extracted specific key knowledge actions for each task commonly found in these workflows, and designed and evaluated two visual analytics systems that support and encapsulate these knowledge actions. We provide design guidelines that should be used when designing visual analytics systems, and illustrate their effectiveness with two systems built by following them.

In an enterprise environment, business information, such as project proposals and product discussions, is dynamic and often embedded in documents and document activities (e.g, emails, Web pages and office documents). Because this information is essential to business processes, corporate employees need an effective means to retrieve it. Some commercial products, including Google Desktop, provide keyword searches for finding some of this information. However, this approach is not always effective as successful keyword searches can be difficult to construct, and even the best queries may fail to find some important materials. In this paper, we present Taste (Temporal Activities and Story TElling), an interactive visual analytics system that enhances the enterprise employee's capabilities in searching and sharing diverse and dynamic business information. Taste was designed, after interviews with corporate employees, to follow their information retrieval cues and help them manage, review and share the business information embedded in their document activities. Results of our lab and field studies validate that Taste provides employees the confidence and necessary features to more efficiently and effectively retrieve business information from their documents and activities.

Software tools that make it easier for analysts to collaborate as a natural part of their work will lead to better analysis that is informed by more perspectives. We are interested to know if software tools can be designed that support collaboration even as they allow analysts to find documents and organize information (including evidence, schemas, and hypotheses). We have modified the Entity Workspace system, described previously, to test such designs. We have evaluated the resulting design in both a laboratory study and a study where it is situated with an analysis team. In both cases, effects on collaboration appear to be positive. Key aspects of the design include an evidence notebook optimized for organizing entities (rather than text characters), information structures that can be collapsed and expanded, visualization of evidence that emphasizes events and documents (rather than emphasizing the entity graph), and a notification system that finds entities of mutual interest to multiple analysts. Long-term tests suggest that this approach can support both top-down and bottom-up styles of analysis.

Knowledge workers making sense of a topic divide their time among activities including searching for information, reading, and taking notes. We have built a software system that supports and integrates these activities. To test its effectiveness, we conducted a study where subjects used it to perform medical question-answering tasks. Initial results indicate that subjects could use the system, but that the nature of this use depended on the subject's overall question-answering strategy. Two dominant strategies emerged that we call the Reader and Searcher strategies.

In this paper, we discuss a re-configurable pipeline architecture that is ideally suited for applications in which a user is interactively managing a stream of data. Currently, document service buses allow stand-alone document services (translation, printing, etc.) to be combined for batch processing. Our architecture allows services to be composed and re-configured on the fly in order to support interactive applications. To motivate the need for such an architecture we address the problem of finding and organizing images on the World Wide Web. The resulting tool, PicturePiper, provides a mechanism for allowing users access to images on the web related to a topic of interest.

Traditional server-based web applications allow access to server-hosted resources, but often exhibit poor responsiveness due to server load and network delays. Client-side web applications, on the other hand, provide excellent interactivity at the expense of limited access to server resources. The WebWriter II Editor, a direct manipulation HTML editor that runs in a web browser, uses both server-side and client-side processing in order to achieve the advantages of both. In particular, this editor downloads the document data structure to the browser and performs all operations locally. The user interface is based on HTML frames and includes individual frames for previewing the document and displaying general and specific control panels. All editing is done by JavaScript code residing in roughly twenty HTML pages that are downloaded into these frames as needed. Such a client-server architecture, based on frames, client-side data structures, and multiple JavaScript-enhanced HTML pages appears promising for a wide variety of applications. This paper describes this architecture, the Meteor Shower Application Architecture, and its use in the WebWriter II Editor. 1

Article A taxonomy of see-through tools Share on Authors: Eric A. Bier Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Maureen C. Stone Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Ken Fishkin Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , William Buxton University of Toronto, CSRI, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 1A4 University of Toronto, CSRI, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 1A4View Profile , Thomas Baudel Université de Paris-Sud, LRI, 91 405 Orsay Cedex, France Université de Paris-Sud, LRI, 91 405 Orsay Cedex, FranceView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '94: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 1994 Pages 358–364https://doi.org/10.1145/191666.191786Online:24 April 1994Publication History 83citation1,192DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations83Total Downloads1,192Last 12 Months17Last 6 weeks5 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

MagicLensT'l filters area new user interface tool that combine an arbitrarily-shaped region with an operator that changes the view of objects viewed through that region.These tools can be interactively positioned over on-screen applications much as a magnifying glass is moved over a newspaper.They can be used to help the user understand various types of information, from text documents to scientific visualizations.Because these filters are movable and apply to only part of the screen, they have a number of advantages over traditional windowwide viewing modes: they employ an attractive metaphor based on physical lenses, show a modified view in the context of the original view, limit clutter to a small region, allow easy construction of visual macros and provide a uniform paradigm that can be extended across different types of infomlation and applications.This paper describes these advantages in more detail and illustrates them with examples of magic lens filters in use over a variety of applications.

Toolglass™ widgets are new user interface tools that can appear, as though on a transparent sheet of glass, between an application and a traditional cursor.They can be positioned with one hand while the other positions the cursor.The widgets provide a rich and concise vocabulary for operating on application objects.These widgets may incorporate visual filters, called Magic Lens™ filters, that modify the presentation of application objects to reveal hidden information, to enhance data of interest, or to suppress distracting information.Together, these tools form a see-through interface that offers many advantages over traditional controls.They provide a new style of interaction that better exploits the user's everyday skills.They can reduce steps, cursor motion, and errors.Many widgets can be provided in a user interface, by designers and by users, without requiring dedicated screen space.In addition, lenses provide rich context-dependent feedback and the ability to view details and context simultaneously.Our widgets and lenses can be combined to form operation and viewing macros, and can be used over multiple applications.

EmbeddedButtons is a library of routines and a runtime kernel that support the integration of buttons into document media, including text and graphics. Existing document editors can be modified to participate in this open architecture with the addition of a few simple routines. Unlike many button systems that insert special button objects into document media, this system supports turning existing document objectsinto buttons. As a consequence, buttons inherit all of the attributes of normal document objects, and the appearance of buttons can be edited using operations already familiar to users. Facilities are provided for linking buttons to application windows so that documents can serve as application control panels. Hence, user interface designers can lay out control panels using familiar document editors rather than special-purpose tools. Three classes of buttons have been implemented, including buttons that pop up a menu and buttons that store and display the value of a variable. New button classes, editors, and applications can be added at run time. Two editors, one for text and one for graphics, currently participate in the architecture.

Recent electronic document editors and hypertext systems allow users to create customized user interfaces by adding user-pressable buttons to on-screen documents.Positioning these buttons is easy because users are already tlamlliar with the use of document editors.Unfortunately, the resulting user interfaces often ex!stonly in stand-alone document systems, making it hard to integrate them with other applications.Furthermore, because buttons are usually treated as special document objects, they cannot take advan~age of document editor formatting and layout capabilities to create thenappearance This paper describes the EmbeddedButtons architecture, which makes ~asy to integrate buttons into documents and to use the resulting documents for a variety of user interface types.EmbeddedButtons allows arbitrary document elements to behave as buttons.Documents can be linked to application windows to serve as application control panels.Buttons can store and display application state to serve as mode indicators.New button classes, editors, and apphcations can be added dynamically

Article MMM: a user interface architecture for shared editors on a single screen Share on Authors: Eric A. Bier Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Steven Freeman Cambridge University, Cambridge, England CB3 9EU Cambridge University, Cambridge, England CB3 9EUView Profile Authors Info & Claims UIST '91: Proceedings of the 4th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technologyNovember 1991 Pages 79–86https://doi.org/10.1145/120782.120791Online:11 November 1991Publication History 96citation1,097DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations96Total Downloads1,097Last 12 Months25Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

A large portion of the user interface in interactive solid modeling systems is devoted to the problem of placing and orienting objects in three dimensions. In particular, many operations must be provided for selecting control points, curves and surfaces, and for translating, rotating and scaling scene components into precise relationships with other scene components. By factoring these operations carefully, it is possible to provide the desired functionality so as to reduce both the size of the user interface and the time that it takes to use it. With snap-dragging, the user takes advantage of three main elements that work together: a general-purpose gravity function, alignment objects that can be created many at a time, and smooth-motion affine transformations. Scene composition is achieved in a single perspective view using a mouse and keyboard. With 19 mouse commands, 15 keyboard commands, 5 menus of numbers, and 1 single-level menu of numerical transformations, this user interface has fewer commands and requires fewer keystrokes than the skitters and jacks technique reported earlier.

Graphical search is a technique for finding all instances of a graphical pattern in a synthetic picture in which objects are regions bounded by lines and curves. The pattern may descirbe shape, color and other properties. Matched objects may be allowed to differ from the pattern in rotation and scale or may differ in shape by a specified tolerance. Graphical replace is a technique for replacing the shape, color, or other properties of matched objects with new properties described in a replacement pattern. Combined, the two techniques are similar to textual search and replace in text editors. Graphical search and replace can be used to make global changes to illustrations with repetitive patterns, independent of the means used to make those patterns. It can also be used to create a class of iterative or recursive shapes that can be specified by replacement rules.

We are interested in the problem of making precise line drawings using interactive computer graphics. In precise line drawings, specific relationships are expected to hold between points and lines. In published interactive drawing systems, precise relationships have been achieved by using rectangular grids or by solving simultaneous equations (constraints). The availability of fast display hardware and plentiful computational power suggest that we should take another look at the ruler and compass techniques traditionally used by draftsmen. Snap-dragging uses the ruler and compass metaphor to help the user place his next point with precision, and uses heuristics to automatically place guiding lines and circles that are likely to help the user construct each shape. Snap-dragging also provides translation, rotation, and scaling operations that take advantage of the precision placement capability. We show that snap-dragging compares favorably in power and ease of use with grid or constraint techniques.