Back from Barcelona I managed to reorganize the notes I took during the workshop. I have to admit that most of the presentations were a bit, herr …, technical for my taste. However here are the notes.
I presented the work I did with Pierre Dillenbourg and Lorenzo Viscanti and I received some good feedback that I will use to deep my knowledge of semantic information retrieval algorithms.
Tags: data mining, information retrieval, information visualization, search engine, spreading activation
Who is paying my bandwidth? 
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Researching Barcelona for a vacation? Its always a good idea to consider staying in a time share. Relax and enjoy yourself where ever you may choose get timeshares for rent. Make sure to read up on time share regulations to educate yourself. If you are looking for a change of scenery then you need timeshares for sale. A good resource that explains how a time share works is something you need to look over.
MAPresso, developed by Adrian Herzog, is a free Java applet for making choropleth maps and cartograms. These kind of distorted maps equalize the surface of a certain country on the map with a particular feature (the population, for instance).
In the picture below: Italy, South Tyrol: Election results (elezioni provincali 2003) by the Civic Network.
Tags: anamorphosis maps, information visualization, map algorithms, maps
The maps presented on this website are cartograms, otherwise known as density-equalising maps. The maps of the world you are used to seeing attempt to represent countries according to their land area. A cartogram re-sizes each country (or other geographical unit) according to some other variable – for example population, GDP, number of people with AIDS, etc. In the population example, densely-populated country such as the UK will appear much larger than it does on a standard map, and sparsely populated countries will appear smaller.
In the picture below, the map of Crude Petroleum Import.
Singapore imports (net) more crude petroleum than anywhere else, when this is measured per person. The value of imports per person is US$ 1808 per year. Burundi has the lowest value of net imports of crude petroleum per person: 0.02 US cents worth is imported per hundred people that live there.
One explanation for this difference between Singapore and Burundi is as follows. Singapore is a rich island well positioned on trade routes, so can afford to receive large amounts of oil per person. Burundi is a poor landlocked central African territory, so there are many barriers to imports.
Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.
Tags: anamorphosis maps, art, map algorithms, maps
This is the title of the presentation I am going to give, together with Lorenzo Viscanti, at the Workshop the Future of Web Search, held in Barcelona on May 19-20, 2006.
I am basically going to present the work we did on the Visual Information Retrieval Experiment, as well as the general outline of my thesis. Here are the slides of the presentation.
UPDATE 2-2-2007: Fabien pointed me to the video of the talk. From the page is also possible to download the updated slides of the presentation.
A. Sarma. A survey of collaborative tools in software development. ISR Technical Report UCI-ISR-05-3, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, USA, 2005. [pdf]
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Collaboration is at the heart of software development. Virtually all software development requires collaboration among developers within and outside their project teams, to achieve a common ob jective. A number of classification frameworks exist that can be used to classify collaborative tools. In addition to placing the various tools in context, developers can use these kind of frameworks to select the right mix of tools for their situation. Each classification framework has a different focus: some provide a detailed taxonomy to compare tools in a particular area, some classify tools based on the functionality of the tools, some classify tools based on the high-level approach to collaboration that the tools take, and so on. However, currently no framework exists that classifies tools based on the user effort required to collaborate eectively. This however is also a critical component in choosing the “right” set of tools for a team.
In this survey, the authors take a look at collaborative tools from the perspective of user effort. For the purposes of this paper, the users define user eort as the time expended in setting up the tools, monitoring the tools, and interpreting the information from the tools. While they cannot quantify the efforts required of each tool in detail, it is clear that there is a natural ordering among dierent groups of tools. We propose a framework that identifies these groups and highlights this ordering. Based on this framework, their survey organizes the individual tools into tiers.
Google Trends is a nice tool to reconstruct how some search terms have been used over time. In the picture below I tried the name of two learning technologies paradigm which do not mean anything per se. Usually around these buzz words there are very different ideas and a great deal of interest. The graph shows how people are less and less using the word e-learning and how the word mobile learning is barely used since the last quarter of 2004. Interesting.
With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.
Tags: data mining, google, information metric, search engine, society, statistics
Finally I can write a RIP (Repose In Peace) on the Virtual Information Retrieval experiment. In the last strategy I was trying to detect possible differences between the two algorithms (LSI and CNG) to support the user in exploring the results of the query. Finally I found an effect when using the relative distance index between jumps.
Basically, when the user explores the results in the map, s/he select items one at a time. Our initial hypothesis was that the distance between each ‘jump’ was a function of the pertinence of the document (either detected by the user or as an absolute value).
We found that this hypothesis was not verified when looking at the distances from an absolute point of view, as the documents are not distributed equally in the map. On the contrary, if we look at these distances from a relative point of view (number of closer documents compared to the next document chosen), then we have a different overview of what happened.
It happens in fact that CNG is more efficient in splitting good results from the rest of the documents returned from the query. We have seen this through the heatmap, as LSI spreads the results all around. Subsequently, the user is more able to identify the good results as they are well isolated in the bottom part of the map. As the user moves from that selection the absolute distance increases a lot but the relative distance stays low. And certainly lower that what the user does using LSI (see test below).
> wilcox.test(distance_rel ~ as.factor(method))
Wilcoxon rank sum test with continuity correction
data: distance_rel by as.factor(method)
W = 423460.5, p-value = 2.271e-12
alternative hypothesis: true mu is not equal to 0
In sum, we could not see an improvement of the performances as the task was maybe too difficult but we could register an interesting effect in the user strategy that reflects on the ability of each method to cluster the results in a way that facilitated the user.
Tags: clustering, information retrieval, Latent Semantic Analysis, map algorithms, spreading activation, user experience
Julian Beever is an English artist who is famous for his art on the pavements of England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium. Its peculiarity? Beever gives his drawings an anamorphosis view, his images are drawn in such a way which gives them three dimensionality when viewing from the correct angle.
Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.
Tags: anamorphosis maps, art, urban, urban exploration
As a final attempt to understand the exploration strategies used by the participants of the Visual Information Retrieval experiment we decided to try to map their jumps on the map in relation to the available possibilities calling this a “relative distance”. For instance, if two consecutive documents in the jump sequence were the absolute closest this would have produced a relative distance of 1.
On the contrary all the other documents which would have been at a shorter distance to the starting one, would count as more units on this relative distance.
This is a trick to understand to what extent the user tried to explore the nodes which were closer to the selected one, or, in other words, we wanted to understand whether the jumps distance was a function of the document pertinence.
The picture below represent a small excerpt of the results of this analysis. The last column tell use whether the user was reading a correct answer to the task.
