Creative Information Seeking and Interface Design
Inspired by Weisberg’s argument that everyone is creative, this paper highlights a model of information seeking capturing users’ creative traits by synthesizing established models in information seeking and creativity. Using Google, a pilot study was conducted to understand subjects’ creative information seeking process. Claims Analysis and Interaction Framework were used to elicit design features that might have supported subjects’ creative, ”serendipitous” information seeking. This paper presents novel, initial work towards eliciting conceptual design features for users’ creative, ”serendipitous” information seeking behaviors. It concludes with a discussion on creativity and interface design for information retrieval systems.

title: Subjective Relevance: Implications on Digital Libraries for Experts and Novices
abstract: Traditional information retrieval (IR) systems are developed based on the “best match” principle which assumes that users can specify their needs in a query and documents retrieved are relevant to users. However, this objective measure of relevance is limited as it does not consider differences in experts' and novices' knowledge and context. This paper presents initial work towards addressing this limitation by investigating subjective relevance (that can include topical, pertinence, situational, and motivational relevance) features that can be incorporated into digital library interfaces to help experts and novices search and judge relevance more effectively. A pilot study was conducted to elicit initial subjective relevance features from experts and novices. The paper concludes with a discussion of elicited design features and their implications for user-centered digital libraries.

title: Creativity in Digital Libraries and Information Retrieval Environments
abstract: Inspired by Weisberg’s [20] argument that creativity exists in everyone and on the assumption that every information seeker is creative and undergoes a creative process in information seeking, this paper synthesizes a holistic “creativity” model and “information seeking” model to identify stages in a creative process for information seeking. A pilot study was conducted to verify these stages and also examine if present digital libraries and information retrieval environments provide “creative” features to support creative information seeking. We discussed these initial findings and made recommendations for further work to better support creative information seeking in digital libraries and information retrieval environments.

title: Subjective Relevance: Implications on Interface Design for Information Retrieval Systems
abstract: Information retrieval (IR) systems are traditionally developed using the objective relevance approach based on the “best match” principle assuming that users can specify their needs in queries and that the documents retrieved are relevant to them. This paper advocates a subjective relevance (SR) approach to value-add objective relevance and address its limitations by considering relevance in terms of users' needs and contexts. A pilot study was conducted to elicit features on SR from experts and novices. Elicited features were then analyzed using characteristics of SR types and stages in information seeking to inform the design of an IR interface supporting SR. The paper presents initial work towards the design and development of user-centered IR systems that prompt features supporting the four main types of SR.

title: Creative Interface Design for Information Seeking
abstract: Inspired by Weisberg's argument that everyone is creative, and exists in varying degrees, this PhD proposal aims to investigate the relationship between creativity and information seeking, and explores implications for interface design with design features that might support users' information seeking behaviours. A holistic model of creativity was proposed synthesizing established models in creativity. Based on the model, five approaches investigating relationships between creativity and information seeking were highlighted. Initial work carried out attempted to understand users' information seeking behaviours to elicit supportive features. Discussion of on-going work is also presented to indicate approaches proposed to design, implement, and evaluate a prototype with design features to support information seeking.

title: A reconfigurable crossbar switch with adaptive bandwidth control for networks-on-chip
abstract: We propose a new crossbar switch structure with adaptive bandwidth control. In a complex SoC design, the proposed crossbar switch efficiently incorporates various IPs with different bandwidth requirements. Simulation under various traffic scenarios shows that the throughput of the proposed crossbar switch is as high as that of a conventional switch operating at twice the speed. The proposed crossbar switch shows maximum 27% improvement in throughput and maximum 41% improvement in latency compared to the conventional one. The proposed crossbar switch is implemented using Verilog HDL, synthesized with an 0.18 /spl mu/m process library, and verified on FPGAs. The area and power overhead of the proposed crossbar switch is 21% and 15%, respectively, when compared to the conventional crossbar switch.

title: Image metamorphosis using snakes and free-form deformations
abstract: This paper presents new solutions to the following three problems in image morphing: feature specification, warp generation, and transition control. To reduce the burden of feature specification, we first adopt a computer vision technique called snakes. We next propose the use of multilevel free-form deformations (MFFD) to achieve -continuous and one-to-one warps among feature point pairs. The resulting technique, based on B-spline approximation, is simpler and faster than previous warp generation methods. Finally, we simplify the MFFD method to construct -continuous surfaces for deriving transition functions to control geometry and color blending.

title: Cooperative peer groups in NICE
abstract: We present a distributed scheme for trust inference in peer-to-peer networks. Our work is in the context of the NICE system, which is a platform for implementing cooperative applications over the Internet. We describe a technique for efficiently storing user reputation information in a completely decentralized manner, and show how this information can be used to efficiently identify non-cooperative users in NICE. We present a simulation-based study of our algorithms, in which we show our scheme scales to thousands of users using modest amounts of storage, processing, and bandwidth at any individual node. Lastly we show that our scheme is robust and can form cooperative groups in systems where the vast majority of users are malicious.

title: MetaFluxNet: the management of metabolic reaction information and quantitative metabolic flux analysis
abstract: MetaFluxNet is a program package for managing information on the metabolic reaction network and for quantitatively analyzing metabolic fluxes in an interactive and customized way. It allows users to interpret and examine metabolic behavior in response to genetic and/or environmental modifications. As a result, quantitative in silico simulations of metabolic pathways can be carried out to understand the metabolic status and to design the metabolic engineering strategies. The main features of the program include a well-developed model construction environment, user-friendly interface for metabolic flux analysis (MFA), comparative MFA of strains having different genotypes under various environmental conditions, and automated pathway layout creation.



A manual for MetaFluxNet is available as PDF file.

title: Assessing local influence for nonlinear structural equation models with ignorable missing data
abstract: A method is proposed in this paper to assess the local influence of minor perturbations for a nonlinear structural equation model with missing data that are missing at random. The main idea is to apply Zhu and Lee's ( (2001) 111) approach to the conditional expectation of the complete-data log-likelihood function in the corresponding EM algorithm for deriving the conformal normal curvature. Building blocks for achieving the diagnostic measures are computed via latent variables that are generated by the Gibbs sampler and Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. It is shown that the proposed methodology is feasible for a wide variety of perturbation schemes. To illustrate the methodology, results that are obtained from analyses of some artificial examples, a simulation study, and a real example are presented.