Recent ischool_rw items

Cybersecurity Research: Addressing the Legal Barriers and Disincentives

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cybersecurity Research: Addressing the Legal Barriers and Disincentives

Improving English-Yorùbá Neural Machine Translation through Dataset Curation, Diacritic Restoration, and Fine-tuning of mT5 Models

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Improving English-Yorùbá Neural Machine Translation through Dataset Curation, Diacritic Restoration, and Fine-tuning of mT5 Models

Empowering Online Harm Survivors to Addressing Harm with a Restorative Justice Approach

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Online interpersonal harm, such as harassment and discrimination, is prevalent on social media platforms. Most platforms adopt content moderation as the primary solution, relying on measures like bans and content removal. These measures follow principles of punitive justice, which holds that perpetrators of harm should receive punishment in proportion to the offense. However, these strategies often fall short of addressing the needs of affected individuals — the survivors — who are typically excluded from decision-making and left with various unmet needs. My dissertation adopts a restorative justice lens and investigates ways to empower online harm survivors in addressing their unique needs. This approach emphasizes survivors' needs and agency, reconceptualizes views on perpetrator accountability, and mobilizes community resources for a collective response to the issue. Through interviews and co-design sessions with survivors, I identified key survivor needs such as sensemaking,...

Targeting Social Protection Programs with Machine Learning and Digital Data

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Social protection programs are essential to assisting the poor, but governments and humanitarian agencies are rarely resourced to provide aid to all those in need, so accurate targeting of benefits is critical. In developed economies, targeting decisions typically rely on administrative income data or broad survey-based social registries. In low-income countries, however, poverty information is rarely reliable, comprehensive, or up-to-date. Novel sources of digital data — from mobile phones and satellites, in particular — are well suited to fill this gap: they are predictive of wealth in low-income contexts and ubiquitously collected. The research studies in this dissertation design and evaluate new methods for targeting aid in low-resource contexts using machine learning, satellite imagery, and mobile phone data, and evaluate these methods in large, real-world interventions. Across social protection programs in Togo, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, the studies in this dissertation...

Caste-based hate speech moderation on Facebook (Meta) and Twitter (X)

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The paper will investigate the complexities involved in moderating casteist content on major social media platforms. Focusing on the challenges of categorizing hate speech targeting India's marginalized caste-oppressed minorities, the research aims to delve into the mechanisms utilized by platforms for content moderation. It will critically analyze existing categorization systems, exploring the efficacy and limitations in identifying and addressing casteist comments. This research draws on document analysis and comparative policy review methods to assess how platforms categorize and respond to caste-based hate speech. Moreover, it will highlight the implications of inadequate categorization on content visibility and community impact.

Library Science and Information Science

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Presentation at Getting Ready for 1999: A Conference on Library Education, University of Arizona, Graduate Library School, April, 7, 1978A discussion of the relationship between library science and information science and recent experience in the transition from School of Librarianship to School of Library and Information Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Feeling Air: Exploring Aesthetic and Material Qualities of Architectural Inflatables

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Feeling Air: Exploring Aesthetic and Material Qualities of Architectural Inflatables

This internet, on the ground

Fri, 6 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The internet's key points of global control lie in the hands of a few people, primarily private organizations based in the United States. These control points, as they exist today, raise structural risks to the global internet's long-term stability. I argue: the problem isn't that these control points exist, it's that there is no popular governance over them. I advocate for a localist approach to internet governance: small internets deployed on municipal scales, interoperating selectively, carefully, with this internet and one another.

Calling for a Plurality of Perspectives on Design Futuring: An Un-Manifesto

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Calling for a Plurality of Perspectives on Design Futuring: An Un-Manifesto

Designing Automated Assistants for Visual Data Exploration

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Visual data exploration enables analysts to identify trends and patterns, generate and verify hypotheses, and detect outliers and anomalies. However, the overwhelming number of decisions required in visual data exploration presents a barrier to discovering useful, action-able insights from data. To address this challenge, in this dissertation, we investigate how automated assistance via tooling aids visual data exploration.We introduce four systems to survey the design space of visual exploration assistants across different analytical tasks and interface modalities. We first describe VisPilot and Zenvisage++, two novel visual exploration assistants that accelerate the data exploration process for individual visual analysis tasks: drill-down analysis and pattern search. Next, we examine visual exploration assistants aimed at supporting multiple types of visual analysis tasks. We introduce Frontier, a general-purpose visual exploration assistant within a GUI-based charting tool...

Emotional Meaning Making with Data

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Emotional Meaning Making with Data

Values by Design Imaginaries: Exploring Values Work in UX Practice

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Recognizing the prevalence of initiatives to align technology with social values through design and “by design” (such as privacy by design, security by design, and governance by design), this dissertation explores the current and potential role of design techniques in attending to values, and analyzes user experience (UX) professionals’ “values work” practices—practices used to surface, advocate for, and attend to values—within large technology companies.

The first part of the dissertation interrogates the relationship between values and design practices, looking at privacy as a case study. A review of human computer interaction literature about privacy and design suggests the importance of thinking about the purpose of design, who does the work of design, and on whose behalf is design work done. In order to better understand how design in the service of “values work” could be...

Information-intensive innovation: the changing role of the private firm in the research ecosystem through the study of biosensed data

Thu, 19 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In a world instrumented with smart sensors and digital platforms, some of our most intimate and information-rich data are being collected and curated by private companies. The opportunities and risks derived from potential knowledge carried within these data streams are undeniable, and the clustering of data within the private sector is challenging traditional data infrastructures and sites of research. The role of private industry in research and development (R&D) has traditionally been limited—especially for earlier stage research—given the high risk, long time horizons, and uncertain returns on investment. However, the information economy has changed the way Silicon Valley and other technology firms operate their business models, which has vast implications for how they respectively innovate. Information drives competitive advantage, and builds upon the emergence of technical infrastructure for collecting, storing, and analyzing data at scale.

Basic research and...

Economic Indicators and Social Networks: New approaches to measuring poverty, prices, and impacts of technology

Thu, 2 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Economic Indicators and Social Networks: New approaches to measuring poverty, prices, and impacts of technology

Emotional Biosensing: Exploring Critical Alternatives

Thu, 2 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Emotional biosensing is rising in daily life: Data and categories claim to know how people feel and suggest what they should do about it, while CSCW explores new biosensing possibilities. Prevalent approaches to emotional biosensing are too limited, focusing on the individual, optimization, and normative categorization. Conceptual shifts can help explore alternatives: toward materiality, from representation toward performativity, inter-action to intra-action, shifting biopolitics, and shifting affect/desire. We contribute (1) synthesizing wide-ranging conceptual lenses, providing analysis connecting them to emotional biosensing design, (2) analyzing selected design exemplars to apply these lenses to design research, and (3) offering our own recommendations for designers and design researchers. In particular we suggest humility in knowledge claims with emotional biosensing, prioritizing care and affirmation over self- improvement, and exploring alternative desires. We call for...

Tensions of Data-Driven Reflection: A Case Study of Real-Time Emotional Biosensing

Thu, 2 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Biosensing displays, increasingly enrolled in emotional reflection, promise authoritative insight by presenting users’ emotions as discrete categories. Rather than machines interpreting emotions, we sought to explore an alternative with emotional biosensing displays in which users formed their own interpretations and felt comfortable critiquing the display. So, we designed, implemented, and deployed, as a technology probe, an emotional biosensory display: Ripple is a shirt whose pattern changes color responding to the wearer’s skin conductance, which is associated with excitement. 17 participants wore Ripple over 2 days of daily life. While some participants appreciated the ‘physical connection’ Ripple provided between body and emotion, for others Ripple fostered insecurities about ‘how much’ feeling they had. Despite our design intentions, we found participants rarely questioned the display’s relation to their feelings. Using biopolitics to speculate on Ripple’s surprising authority,...

Context, Causality, and Information Flow: Implications for Privacy Engineering, Security, and Data Economics

Wed, 6 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The creators of technical infrastructure are under social and legal pressure to comply with expectations that can be difficult to translate into computational and business logics. This dissertation bridges this gap through three projects that focus on privacy engineering, information security, and data economics, respectively. These projects culminate in a new formal method for evaluating the strategic and tactical value of data: data games. This method relies on a core theoretical contribution building on the work of Shannon, Dretske, Pearl, Koller, and Nissenbaum: a definition of situated information flow as causal flow in the context of other causal relations and strategic choices.

The first project studies privacy engineering's use of Contextual Integrity theory (CI), which defines privacy as appropriate information flow according to norms specific to social contexts or spheres. Computer scientists using CI have innovated as they have implemented the theory and blended...

Strange and Unstable Fabrication

Tue, 3 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In the 1950’s a group of artists led by experimental composer John Cage actively engaged chance as a means to limit their control over the artworks they produced. These artists described a world filled with active and lively forces, from the sounds of rain to blemishes in paper, that could be harnessed in creative production to give rise to new aesthetics and cultivate new sensitivities to the everyday. This approach to making was not simply act of creative expression but active attempt at creative expansion—a way of submitting to a world of creative forces beyond the self for the sake of seeing, hearing, or feeling things anew. I use these practices as a lens to reflect on the way human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers think about and design for making, specifically as it relates to the present day “maker movement.” I focus on how the design of digital fabrication systems, like 3D printers, could make room for creative forces beyond the maker and why such modes of making...

Feed Subscription Management

Sun, 15 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

An increasing number of data sources and services are made available on the Web, and in many cases these information sources are or easily could be made available as feeds. However, the more data sources and services are exposed through feed-based services, the more it becomes necessary to manage and be able to share those services, so that users and uses of those services can build on the foundation of an open and decentralized architecture. In this paper we present the Feed Subscription Management (FSM) architecture, which is a model for managing feed subscriptions and supports structured feed subscriptions. Based on FSM, it is easy to build services that manage feed-based services so that those feed-based services can easily create, change and delete feed subscriptions, and that it is easily possible to share feed subscriptions across users and/or devices. Our main reason for focusing on feeds is that we see feeds as a good foundation for an ecosystem of RESTful services,...

From RESTful Services to RDF: Connecting the Web and the Semantic Web

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

RESTful services on the Web expose information through retrievable resource representations that represent self-describing descriptions of resources, and through the way how these resources are interlinked through the hyperlinks that can be found in those representations. This basic design of RESTful services means that for extracting the most useful information from a service, it is necessary to understand a service's representations, which means both the semantics in terms of describing a resource, and also its semantics in terms of describing its linkage with other resources. Based on the Resource Linking Language (ReLL), this paper describes a framework for how RESTful services can be described, and how these descriptions can then be used to harvest information from these services. Building on this framework, a layered model of RESTful service semantics allows to represent a service's information in RDF/OWL. Because REST is based on the linkage between resources, the same...

Improving Federal Spending Transparency: Lessons Drawn from Recovery.gov

Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Information about federal spending can affect national priorities and government processes, having impacts on society that few other data sources can rival. However, building effective open government and transparency mechanisms holds a host of technical, conceptual, and organizational challenges. To help guide development and deployment of future federal spending transparency systems, this paper explores the effectiveness of accountability measures deployed for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 ("Recovery Act" or "ARRA"). The Recovery Act provides an excellent case study to better understand the general requirements for designing and deploying "Open Government" systems. In this document, we show specific examples of how problems in data quality, service design, and systems architecture limit the effectiveness of ARRA's promised transparency. We also highlight organizational and incentive issues that impede transparency, and point to design processes as well...

On Inquiry: Human Concept Formation and Construction of Meaning through Library and Information Science Intermediation

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Library and Information Science (LIS) is centrally concerned with providing instruments (documents, organization, bibliographies, indexes) to enable people to become better informed through use of documents. The relationship between how people become informed and LIS intermediation, the Basic Relationship, is fundamental to the theory, practice, and professional education of LIS.

This Basic Relationship and how it is understood in the field is investigated through analysis of selected LIS texts according to criteria derived from principles of Assimilation Theory, grounded in educational psychology, integrated with complementary ideas from the cognate fields of ancient rhetoric, cognitive linguistics, philosophy, and communications studies. These criteria were applied in the analysis of 413 LIS texts. Distinct from the "interdisciplinary" trend in our field, to utilize ideas from other fields as LIS concepts, here, ideas from other fields are used to reveal LIS core concepts...

Privacy Issues of the W3C Geolocation API

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The W3C's Geolocation API may rapidly standardize the transmission of location information on the Web, but, in dealing with such sensitive information, it also raises serious privacy concerns. We analyze the manner and extent to which the current W3C Geolocation API provides mechanisms to support privacy. We propose a privacy framework for the consideration of location information and use it to evaluate the W3C Geolocation API, both the specification and its use in the wild, and recommend some modifications to the API as a result of our analysis.

KnowPrivacy

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Online privacy and behavioral profiling are of growing concern among both consumers and government officials. In this report, we examine both the data handling practices of popular websites and the concerns of consumers in an effort to identify problematic practices. We analyze the policies of the 50 most visited websites to better understand disclosures about the types of data collected about users, how that information is used, and with whom it is shared. We also look at specific practices such as sharing information with affiliates and third-party tracking. To understand user concerns and knowledge of data collection we look at surveys and polls conducted by previous privacy researchers. We look at records of complaints and inquiries filed with privacy watchdog organizations such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, The California Office of Privacy Protection, and TRUSTe. Finally, to gain some insight into what aspects of data collection...

Web Services for Recovery.gov

Mon, 5 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

One of the main goals of the Recovery.gov Web site is to provide information about how funds for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 are allocated and spent. In this report, we propose a reporting architecture that would focus on the reporting services rather than the Web site and page design, and that uses these Web services to build the user-facing part of ARRA reporting. Our proposed architecture is based on simple and well-established Web technologies, and the main goal of this architecture is to provide citizens and watchdog groups simple and easy access to machine-readable data. Our architecture uses a more sophisticated framework than simple downloads of data files. Our proposed architecture is based on the principles of Representational State Transfer (REST) and uses established and widely supported Web technologies such as feeds and XML. We argue that such an architecture is easy to design and implement, easy to understand for users, and easy...

LODE: Linking Open Descriptions of Events

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

People conventionally refer to an action or occurrence taking place at a certain time at a specific location as an event. This notion is potentially useful for connecting individual facts recorded in the rapidly growing collection of linked data sets and for discovering more complex relationships between data. In this paper, we provide an overview and comparison of existing RDFS+OWL event models, looking at the different choices they make of how to represent events. We describe a recommended model for publishing records of events as Linked Data. We present tools for populating this model and a prototype of an "event directory" web service, which can be used to locate stable URIs for events that have occurred and to provide RDFS+OWL descriptions of them and links to related resources.

Implementing Risk-Limiting Audits in California

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Risk-limiting post-election audits limit the chance of certifying an electoral outcome if the outcome is not what a full hand count would show. Building on previous work, we report on pilot risk-limiting audits in four elections during 2008 in three California counties: one during the February 2008 Primary Election in Marin County and three during the November 2008 General Elections in Marin, Santa Cruz and Yolo Counties. We explain what makes an audit risk-limiting and how existing and proposed laws fall short. We discuss the differences among our four pilot audits. We identify challenges to practical, efficient risk-limiting audits and conclude that current approaches are too complex to be used routinely on a large scale. One important logistical bottleneck is the difficulty of exporting data from commercial election management systems in a format amenable to audit calculations. Finally, we propose a bare-bones risk-limiting audit that is less efficient than these pilot...

Who Signed Up for the Do-Not-Call List?

Wed, 3 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This paper uses the results of a natural experiment to assess consumer demand for a particular kind of privacy—protection from unwanted telemarketing calls. We obtained the phone numbers placed on the Federal Trade Commission's do-not-call (DNC) registry, redacted for privacy. After matching those numbers to demographic and other information based on geographic location, we regressed the observed signup frequencies on individual demographic variables to profile the DNC registrants. Grouped logits of county averages of signup frequencies were run on explanatory variables suggested by a simple choice model of the DNC registration decision and the calling pattern of telemarketers. We find that a parsimonious specification accounts for most of the variance explained by the full set of variables. Signup frequencies are larger in areas of higher incomes and greater educational attainment. They are lower for areas with greater incidence of Latino origin and linguistic isolation....

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Technology: Legal and Policy Challenges

Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Legislative protection that provides for a fair and balanced market of copyrighted material becomes much more challenging as new technology including peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) reduces the transaction costs of obtaining copyrighted material. This paper examines the current state of P2P trading and technology in relation to the currently applicable laws, and makes proposals on how the existing laws could be modified to better adapt to the rapidly changing forefront of technology. These laws will lose much of their relevance as P2P technology approaches what I call the “P2P Singularity” of completely anonymous file exchange, where identification and prosecution of infringing individual users becomes technically infeasible. At this point, the majority of the laws protecting digital copyrighted material loose much of their relevance as the cost and ability to enforce the laws becomes drastically higher than the overall benefit gained. After the networks have evolved to this...

Judging a Book by its Cover — Online Previews and Book Sales

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There has been a continued debate about the benefits and cost associated with providing free samples of information goods on the Internet. Some argue that the samples lead to increased sales through increased awareness of the good while others claim that the previews and samples cannibalize sales. In this paper I present a unifying model where we show that information about the good, specifically samples/trial versions/previews etc of the good have both a sales promoting and cannibalizing effect and that either of the two can be dominant. I then set up an experiment in which I look at the impact on the sales of a specific set of books from the enabling of full text search of the contents and previews of pages relevant to the search query. I find no significant impact on sales from these previews. The sample available to me is however on the small side and also from a very specific genre, both of which impact the results.

Feeds as Query Result Serializations

Wed, 8 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Many Web-based data sources and services are available as feeds, a model that provides consumers with a loosely coupled way of interacting with providers. The current feed model is limited in its capabilities, however. Though it is simple to implement and scales well, it cannot be transferred to a wider range of application scenarios. This paper conceptualizes feeds as a way to serialize query results, describes the current hardcoded query semantics of such a perspective, and surveys the ways in which extensions of this hardcoded model have been proposed or implemented. Our generalized view of feeds as query result serializations has implications for the applicability of feeds as a generic Web service for any collection that is providing access to individual information items. As one interesting and compelling class of applications, we describe a simple way in which a query-based approach to feeds can be used to support location-based services.

Proposed Guideline Clarifications for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The "Initial Implementing Guidance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" provides guidance for a feed-based information dissemination architecture. In this report, we suggest some improvements and refinements of the initial guidelines, in the hope of paving the path for a more transparent and useful feed-based architecture. This report is meant as a preliminary guide to how the current guidelines could be made more specific and provide better guidance for providers and consumers of Recovery Act spending information. It is by no means intended as a complete or final set of recommendations.

Web Site Metadata

Sun, 1 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The currently established formats for how a Web site can publish metadata about a site's pages, the robots.txt file and sitemaps, focus on how to provide information to crawlers about where to not go and where to go on a site. This is sufficient as input for crawlers, but does not allow Web sites to publish richer metadata about their site's structure, such as the navigational structure. This paper looks at the availability of Web site metadata on today's Web in terms of available information resources and quantitative aspects of their contents. Such an analysis of the available Web site metadata not only makes it easier to understand what data is available today; it also serves as the foundation for investigating what kind of information retrieval processes could be driven by that data, and what additional data could be provided by Web sites if they had richer data formats to publish metadata.

Unexpected Collaborations: Kids' Appropriation of GarageBand as a Group Creative Tool

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper we present a case study of kids' appropriation of GarageBand digital music software to create an informal, ad hoc collaborative process. We argue that elements of the socio-spatial context of use combined with the software and the audio mode created a "safe" space for collaboration and a powerful mode for informal creative exchange and feedback. We conclude with suggestions for future study and questions to consider for the design of systems to support kids' creative collaboration.

Open Location-Oriented Services for the Web

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Location concepts are still not part of today's Web architecture, which means that applications must rely on higher-level specifications to use and provide location-oriented services. This problem can be approached in two different approaches, the first being a tightly coupled approach for scenarios targeting an integrated system architecture, and the second being a loosely coupled approach, being centered around cooperating services in the open world of the Web. This paper argues that the current specifications for location-oriented services cater mainly for the tightly coupled approach, whereas the loosely coupled approach is not yet addressed by available specifications. A more lightweight and loosely coupled approach to location-oriented services is the central issue for making the valuable data in geographic information systems better available on the Web. Only if location-oriented services can be used easily and cooperatively, today's rapidly evolving infrastructure of...

Service-based Systems in Clinical Environments

Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

In this report we present an architectural approach to add quality-of-service (QoS) assurance and location awareness to service-based systems within existing clinical infrastructures. To address typical design requirements of such systems (e.g., cooperating services, performance and availability) the work proposes a service-oriented architecture (SOA) as architectural concept and architectural translucency to provide stable QoS. We evaluate position sensing systems, QoS assurance approaches and present design principles for service-based health care applications. Furthermore, we present a clinical application scenario and an architectural approach to integrate existing infrastructure into a human centric assistance system.

Understanding Service Systems Through Standards

Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When service systems span multiple firms, possibly in multiple geographies, they can be difficult to model effectively, as they become subject to the complex legal, economic, political and social forces of the environment in which they operate. We must consider, therefore, the structure of institutions mediating the links amongst services in order to gain an understanding of the quality of these links, and how varying link quality contributes to the overall structure and efficiency of a service system. This paper explores an approach towards studying the structure of such cross-firm service systems by critically examining the nature of the standards used to expose services to one another.

Taggers versus Linkers: Comparing Tags and Anchor Text of Web Pages

Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The Web is home to information services that generate vast quantities of content. This presents a tremendous challenge for services that organize this content and facilitate efficient and relevant retrieval. Tagging is one way to organize this information. Tags are short, user-selected keywords and phrases applied to a Web resource, which can serve as concise semantic descriptions of that resource. Hyperlink anchor text appears to serve similar purposes — namely, as user-generated, concise resource descriptions, useful for navigation and search. In this paper, various aspects of tags and anchors are compared using qualitative characterization, textual properties and usage metrics. We aim to validate perceptions of similarity between these two types of metadata, and to assess the possibility of improving current tag recommendation systems using anchor text. The properties of general level and specific tags are studied and observations are made about how user-generated categorization...

Financial Information: The Internet and its Effects

Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The abundance of online advertisements for stock brokers, mutual funds and currency trading suggests that web-based trading in the financial markets has been widely embraced by the general public. Stock trading once had high entry barriers, including startup capital, a good understanding of the market, and access to special information. This paper explores how the Web has reduced entry barriers and in the process has transformed personal investing and related services. Issues of information quality, timeliness, aggregation and analysis as related to web-based trading are considered.

Designing a Time-Aware Service System: Bridging the Front and Back Stages in Service System Design

Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A service "system" implies a systematic strategy, design, implementation, operation, and evaluation of services. This systematic approach enables to more specifically define intrinsic problems of services and solve them. One of the problems involves time efficiency; it affects the quality of each service and, as a result, customer satisfaction. In other words, time efficiency has been one of the most critical factors in services' competitive power. Therefore, this paper recognizes the importance of time efficiency in a service system and then proposes the design of a time-aware service system which supports efficient service delivery and deployment. As for the complete design of service systems, the front and back stages should be considered together. This paper also addresses the time efficiency in terms of both the front and back stages. At the back stage, information for a time-aware service system is introduced and defined, and then the information is utilized in the front...

Feed Feeds: Managing Feeds Using Feeds

Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Feeds have become an important information channel on the Web, but the management of feed metadata so far has received little attention. It is hard for feed publishers to manage and publish their feed information in a unified format, and for feed consumers to manage and use their feed subscription data across various feed readers, and to share it with other users. We present a system for managing feed metadata using feeds, which we call "feed feeds". Because these feeds are Atom feeds, the widely deployed Atom and AtomPub standards can be used to manage feed metadata, making feed management available through an established API.

Automatically Assessing the Quality of Wikipedia Articles

Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia has fast become one of the Internet's most dominant sources of information. Dubbed "the free encyclopedia", Wikipedia contains millions of articles that are written, edited, and maintained by volunteers. Due in part to the open, collaborative process by which content is generated, many have questioned the reliability of these articles. The high variance in quality between articles is a potential source of confusion that likely leaves many visitors unable to distinguish between good articles and bad. In this work, we describe how a very simple metric – word count – can be used to as a proxy for article quality, and discuss the implications of this result for Wikipedia in particular, and quality assessment in general.

MD:Notes - Designing an Information Service for Public Hospitals

Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The hospital organization, containing a variety of clinical providers and supporting departments, is a complex service delivery system. This system requires a taxonomy of clinical documentation between the different clinicians and services for patient care coordination and billing justification. Our project, MD:Notes (where MD stands for "multiple device") is about the design of a new application for physicians to enter progress notes, one component of all clinical documentation. This paper focuses on the user-centered research conducted at Highland and San Francisco General Hospital around the physicians, the primary stakeholders of the application. Our research demonstrates that a lack of mobility, difficult entry, transcription lag time and a lack of mandate to switch completely over to the electronic format is causing breakdowns that lead to poor service quality. While the design of the application is focused around the physicians, considerations must also be made to...

Practical Obscurity in the Digital Age: Public Records in the Private Sector

Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, I outline the legislative framework governing information privacy practices in the public and private sectors in the United States and, more narrowly, the state of California, with particular attention paid to criminal justice system information. I will explore the relationship between the courts, which maintain public criminal records, and Corporate Data Brokers (CDBs), which aggregate and sell information from court records, as well as the accuracy and privacy of their systems. While legislation guiding the government's handling of information may need to be extended to the private sector, state governments have a role to play in improving their technology infrastructure to ensure that accurate, timely information is available in the public records. This is particularly important for the criminal justice system, the source of data brokers collecting. In making this argument, I look at one state, Colorado, that did a great deal early on to improve their criminal...

Location Management for Mobile Devices

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Location-awareness, in the form of location information about clients and location-based services provided by servers, is becoming increasingly important for networked communications in general, and wireless and mobile devices in particular. The current fragmented landscape of location concepts and location-awareness, however, is not suitable for handling location information on a Web scale. Providing users with mechanisms which allow them to control how they want to expose their location information, and thus allow control over how to share location information with others and services, is a crucial step for better location management for mobile devices. This paper presents a concept for representing location vocabularies, matching and mapping them, how these vocabularies can be used to support better privacy for users of location-based services, and better location sharing between users and services. The concept is based on a language for describing place name vocabularies,...

Putting Things to REST

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Integrating resources into the Web is an important aspect of making them accessible as part of this global information system. The integration of physical things into the Web so far has not been done on a large scale, which makes it harder to realize network effects that could emerge by the combination of today's Web content, and the integration of physical things into the Web. This paper presents a path towards a Web where physical objects are made available through RESTful principles. By using this architectural style for pervasive and ubiquitous computing scenarios, they will scale better, integrate better with other applications, and pave the path towards a "Web of Things" that seamlessly integrates conceptual and physical resources.

Web-Style Multimedia Annotations

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Annotation of multimedia resources supports a wide range of applications, ranging from associating metadata with multimedia resources or parts of these resources, to the collaborative use of multimedia resources through the act of distributed authoring and annotation of resources. Most annotation frameworks, however, are based on a closed approach, where the annotations data is limited to the annotation framework, and cannot readily be reused in other application scenarios. We present a declarative approach to multimedia annotations, which represents the annotations in an XML format independent from the multimedia resources. Using this declarative approach, multimedia annotations can be used in an easier and more flexible way, enabling application scenarios such as third-party annotations and annotation aggregation and filtering.

Bridging the “Front Stage” and “Back Stage” in Service System Design

Sat, 7 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Service management and design has thus far primarily focused on the interactions between employees and customers. This perspective holds that the quality of the “service experience” is determined by the customer during this final “service encounter” that takes place in the “front stage.” This emphasis discounts the contribution of the activities in the “back stage” of the service value chain where materials or information needed by the front stage are processed. However, the vast increase in web-driven consumer self-service applications and other automated services requires new thinking about service design and service quality. It is essential to consider the entire network of services that comprise the back and front stages as complementary parts of a “service system.” We need new concepts and methods in service design that recognize how back stage information and processes can improve the front stage experience. This paper envisions a methodology for designing service systems...

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