Archive for September, 2015

Sep 25 2015

Peter Simonyi, Master of Computer Science

Published by under News

Peter
2015-09-25, 10:13 AM
Today, Peter Simonyi successfully defended his MCS thesis, with only minor 
revisions required. 
Congratulations, Peter!

Peter’s Thesis: Interaction History Support for Web Applications

Abstract:

All users of complex software make decisions that they may later wish to change. Many computer systems have tools to support this need for revision, such as the undo command. However, the common history tools (like undo) do not support exploratory, epistemic interaction well. And there are common, non-specialized tasks that are difficult in common computer systems, but would be much easier with improved support for managing interaction history. Desktop computing environments have well-established norms for how undo works, but there is room to explore this in newer computing environments, such as the Web and surface computing, as their design culture has not stabilized to the same extent. We argue that history tracking needs to be more accessible to users. We developed a prototype JavaScript library for Web applications that lets users keep a history of all their interaction states, including those that would be discarded by using a traditional stack-model undo system. The history is presented to users in a tree structure similar to the model used in source control software. We ran a usability study of our system with two applications designed to encourage the kind of exploratory behaviour we wanted to support. We identified usability improvements that could be made, but the study suggests that this kind of system could be generally useful even in non-specialized fields.

 

Sep 15 2015

Jeff Wilson, Master of Computer Science

Published by under News

Jeff-ACH
2015-09-15, 4:40 PM
Today, Jeff Wilson successfully defended his MCS thesis, with only minor revisions required. 
Congratulations Jeff!


Jeff’s Thesis: ACH Walkthrough:  Designing and Building a Web Application for Collaborative Sensemaking

Abstract:

This thesis describes the research and development of a prototype for a co-located collaborative intelligence analysis tool: ACH Walkthrough. The tool is a collaborative variation of an established structured analysis method called Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, originally developed for intelligence analysis. Recent changes to web application architectures offer important opportunities to produce visually rich applications that support co-located and remote collaborative decision making scenarios. We begin by reviewing the literature on sensemaking and development frameworks for surface applications. We then explore architectural issues in using web frameworks for collaborative applications. We then present the design and implementation of ACH Walkthrough, our prototype design for team-based intelligence analysis, and the evaluation of the application’s major architectural components. Finally, we document feedback on the tool and explore alternative designs and architectural approaches.

 

 

Sep 08 2015

New Security Paradigms Workshop in Twente

Published by under Conferences

Screen Shot 2015-10-04 at 3.01.10 PM
The New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW) was in the Twente region of the Netherlands  this year. As usual, NSPW  invited new ideas, even if there are limitations or incomplete aspects, and everyone who does attended participate throughout. Robert Biddle presented collaborative work with Alain Forget and Sonia Chiasson, called CYOA: Choose Your Own Authentication.