waashk/acm huggingface dataset:
electronic conferencing - issues beyond software selection  electronic conferencing is rapidly becoming a popular medium for communication. we have witnessed wide-spread installations of electronic conferencing systems on college campuses and in academic settings that provide information and resource sharing in a variety of ways. probably you have already made the decision to purchase or develop an electronic conferencing package for your site. you may already be using it to meet some of the demands of your user community.  but once the conferencing software has been chosen and installed, there still exists the potential for a myriad of problems to arise. anticipating these issues and planning for them before-hand could determine whether electronic conferencing is considered a success at your installation.  this paper examines a variety of issues on a multi-level basis. it focuses primarily on problems that are dealt with at the administrative level and at the individual conference-coordinator level. issues such as qualifications of conference coordinators, selection procedures of coordinators, proposal guidelines for creation of new conferences, accessibility, and establishment of conference etiquette are discussed. the paper also looks at issues at the conference-user level, such as how first-time users react to the new medium and the degree of involvement of the users in the planning process.  every institution is unique in its resources, its climate, and its purpose. the types of issues raised by this paper are the kind that have unique answers for each community posing the questions. this paper discusses scenarios that can be resolved to satisfaction in many ways, depending on your own situation. it also presents a checklist of administrative-level considerations, and describes an example of a successful implementation of electronic conferencing.  joan o'bryan
an introduction to the internet and how it can be used for collaboration for k-12 teachers (tutorial session)(abstract only)  goals and content: this tutorial will provide a simple overview of the internet for k-12 teachers with no internet experience. it will demonstrate many useful resources that teachers can find on the internet to use directly in their classrooms or in working with other teachers. it will explain how to get started using the internet and will provide free admission to the boston computer museum.  nicole yankelovich
high performance infrastructure for visually-intensive cscw applications  we describe a scalable cscw infrastructure designed to handle heavy- weight data sets, such as extremely large images and video. scalability is achieved through exclusive use of reliable and unreliable multicast protocols. the infrastructure uses a replicated architecture rather than a centralized architecture, both to reduce latency and to improve responsiveness. use of 1) reliable (multicast) transport of absolute, rather than relative, information sets, 2) time stamps, and 3) a last-in-wins policy provide coherency often lacking in replicated architectures. the infrastructure allows users to toggle between wysiwis and non-wysiwis modes. that, coupled with effective use of multicast groups, allows greatly improved responsiveness and performance for managing heavy-weight data.  stephen zabele steven l. rohall ralph l. vinciguerra
a critical assessment of the minimalist approach to documentation  carroll's (1991) minimal manual has been considered an important advance in teaching first-time users the basics of computer programs. unfortunately, it is not very clear what minimalism really means. practitioners, for example, will find it difficult to create their own minimal manual because the principles of minimalism have not been described in enough detail (see horn, 1992; tripp, 1990). it is also not yet settled that a minimalist approach is the most effective one because critical experiments have hardly been conducted. this study therefore closely examines the minimalist principles and claims.  this paper describes the basic ideas of minimalism, its design principles and how they can be operationalized. a parallel is drawn between a minimalist and constructivist perspective on learning and instruction. like minimalism, constructivism places a high value on experience-based learning in context- rich environments. like minimalism, it stresses the need to capitalize on the learner's prior knowledge as much as possible. and like minimalism, constructivists urge learners to follow their own plans and goals, to make inferences, and to abstract principles from what they experience (see duffy & jonassen, 1991, 1992).  an experiment is reported that examines the claims of minimalism. strong and significant gains on several factors were found, all favoring the minimal manual over a control (conventional) manual. the discussion points to several issues that minimalism has yet to address.  hans van der meij
"gazetotalk"  we propose a new human interface (hi) system named "gazetotalk" that is implemented by vision based gaze detection, acoustic speech recognition (asr), and animated human-like agent cg with facial expressions and gestures. the "gazetotalk" system demonstrates that eye-tracking technologies can be utilized to improve hi effectively by working with other non-verbal messages such as facial expressions and gestures.  conventional voice interface system have the following serious drawbacks. (1) they cannot distinct between input voice and other noise, and (2) cannot understand who is the intended hearer of each utterance. a "push-to-wk" mechanism can be used to ease these problems, but it spoils the advantages of voice interfaces (e.g. contact-less, suitability in hand-busy situation).  in real human dialogues, besides exchanging content messages, people use non- verbal messages such as gaze, facial expressions and gestures to establish or maintain conversations, or recover from problems that arise in the conversation.  the "gazetotalk" system simulates this kind of "meta-communication" facility by utilizing vision based gaze detection, asr, and human-like agent cg. when the user intends to input voice commands, he gazes on the agent on the display in order to request to talk, just as in daily human-human dialogues. this gaze is recognized by the gaze detection module and the agent shows a particular facial expression and gestures as a feedback to establish an "eye- contact." then the system accepts or rejects speech input from the user depending on the state of the "eye- contact."  this mechanism allows the "gazetotalk" system to accept only intended voice input and ignore another voices and environmental noises successfully, without forcing any arbitrary operation to the user. we also demonstrate an extended mechanism to treat more flexible "eye contact" variations.  the preliminary experiments suggest that in the context of meta-communication, nonverbal messages can be utilized to improve hi in terms of naturalness, friendliness and tactfulness.  tetsuro chino kazuhiro fukui kaoru suzuki
issues in multimedia databases  multimedia is a popular term these days, and the database community, naturally, is talking about multimedia databases. the reason multimedia is getting so much attention is clear: technology trends are now beginning to make it possible to store and display, at a reasonable price, audio and still images through a computer. it is expected that video storage will also be affordable in the near future. the purpose of this panel is to explore what new challenges this multimedia explosion brings to the database community.  h. v. jagadish
computerization and managerial control in large offices  there is considerable debate over whether current practices of office computerization represent a continuation or reversal of "scientific management" principles. this issue will be discussed in light of case study research being conducted at the head office of a large insurance firm. the company is in the process of introducing on-line systems at the clerical level in the policy administration area. as part of this process and the concomitant reorganization of the company along territorial lines, the new jobs being created show a marked reduction in task fragmentation and some lessening of hierarchy, both regarded as characteristics of taylorian organization. however, other features of scientific management, including skill dissociation, separation of conception from execution and control by monopoly of knowledge, are still very much in evidence, with computer systems playing a central role. taylor's ghost may be dressed in modern garb, but it is certainly recognizable in computerized offices.  andrew clement
on completeness of historical relational query languages  numerous proposals for extending the relational data model to incorporate the temporal dimension of data have appeared in the past several years. these proposals have differed considerably in the way that the temporal dimension has been incorporated both into the structure of the extended relations of these temporal models and into the extended relational algebra or calculus that they define. because of these differences, it has been difficult to compare the proposed models and to make judgments as to which of them might in some sense be equivalent or even better. in this paper we define temporally grouped and temporally ungrouped historical data models and propose two notions of historical relational completeness, analogous to codd's notion of relational completeness, one for each type of model. we show that the temporally ungrouped models are less expressive than the grouped models, but demonstrate a technique for extending the ungrouped models with a grouping mechanism to capture the additional semantic power of temporal grouping. for the ungrouped models, we define three different languages, a logic with explicit reference to time, a temporal logic, and a temporal algebra, and motivate our choice for the first of these as the basis for completeness for these models. for the grouped models, we define a many-sorted logic with variables over ordinary values, historical values, and times. finally, we demonstrate the equivalence of this grouped calculus and the ungrouped calculus extended with a grouping mechanism. we believe the classification of historical data models into grouped and ungrouped models provides a useful framework for the comparison of models in the literature, and furthermore, the exposition of equivalent languages for each type provides reasonable standards for common, and minimal, notions of historical relational completeness.  james clifford albert croker alexander tuzhilin
prairie (video program) (abstract only): a conceptual framework for a virtual organization  prairie is a simulation prototype or vision, demonstrating how individuals may work together in a virtual work enviroment designed for a whole enterprise. prairie addresses various organizational and social issues exacerbated by distance and time. by using the concept of communities and by extending physical interaction cues to others across distance and time, we demonstrate possible solutions to these issues. in prairie, people and information are organized into mission-based (organizational units), goal-based (project teams) and interest-based (special interest groups) hierarchies for ease of navigation. a worker may alternately navigate to communities by using personal links from their private virtual desktops. each community has two areas. one area contains the information germane to a community, that is pushed or pulled depending on the nature of the information. each community also has an area with a shared view where community members can meet or congregate. presence in these community areas range from seeing thumbnail photos to holding a video- conference. the shared view facilitates ad hoc, informal interactions which are important for maintaining and building social networks and organizational culture. we believe the framework for prairie is flexible, integrated, and scaleable so it can be adapted to model other organizations, communities, and processes.  stephen h. sato anatole v. gershman kishore s. swaminathan
asserting beliefs in mls relational models  multilevel relations, based on the current multilevel secure (mls) relational data models, can present a user with information that is difficult to interpret and may display an inconsistent outlook about the views of other users. such ambiguity is due to the lack of a comprehensive method for asserting and interpreting beliefs about lower level information. in this paper we identify different beliefs that can be held by higher level users about lower level information, and we introduce the new concept of a mirage tuple. we present a mechanism for asserting beliefs about all accessible tuples, including lower level tuples. this mechanism provides every user of an mls database with an unambiguous interpretation of all viewable information and presents a consistent account of the views at all levels below the user's level.  nenad a. jukic susan v. vrbsky
unisql's next-generation object-relational database management system  object-relational dbmss have been receiving a great deal of attention from industry analysts and press as the next generation of database management systems. the motivation for a next generation dbms is driven by the reality of shortened business cycles. this dynamic environment demands fast, cost- effective, time-to-market of new or modified business processes, services, and products. to support this important business need, the next generation dbms must: 1. leverage the large investments made in existing relational technology, both in data and skill set; 2. take advantage of the flexibility, productivity, and performance benefits of oo modeling; and 3. integrate robust dbms services for production quality systems. the objective of this article is to provide a brief overview of unisql's commercial object-relational database management system.  albert d'andrea phil janus
deadlock freedom using edge locks  we define a series of locking protocols for database systems that all have three main features: freedom from deadlock, multiple granularity, and support for general collections of locking primitives. a rooted directed acyclic graph is used to represent multiple granularities, as in system r. deadlock freedom is guaranteed by extending the system r protocol to require locks on edges of the graph in addition to the locks required on nodes.  henry f. korth
data mining on an oltp system (nearly) for free  this paper proposes a scheme for scheduling disk requests that takes advantage of the ability of high-level functions to operate directly at individual disk drives. we show that such a scheme makes it possible to support a data mining workload on an oltp system almost for free: there is only a small impact on the throughput and response time of the existing workload. specifically, we show that an oltp system has the disk resources to consistently provide one third of its sequential bandwidth to a background data mining task with close to zero impact on oltp throughput and response time at high transaction loads. at low transaction loads, we show much lower impact than observed in previous work. this means that a production oltp system can be used for data mining tasks without the expense of a second dedicated system. our scheme takes advantage of close interaction with the on-disk scheduler by reading blocks for the data mining workload as the disk head "passes over" them while satisfying demand blocks from the oltp request stream. we show that this scheme provides a consistent level of throughput for the background workload even at very high foreground loads. such a scheme is of most benefit in combination with an active disk environment that allows the background data mining application to also take advantage of the processing power and memory available directly on the disk drives.  erik riedel christos faloutsos gregory r. ganger david f. nagle
experiments in automatic statistical thesaurus construction  a well constructed thesaurus has long been recognized as a valuable tool in the effective operation of an information retrieval system. this paper reports the results of experiments designed to determine the validity of an approach to the automatic construction of global thesauri (described originally by crouch in [1] and [2] based on a clustering of the document collection. the authors validate the approach by showing that the use of thesauri generated by this method results in substantial improvements in retrieval effectiveness in four test collections. the term discrimination value theory, used in the thesaurus generation algorithm to determine a term's membership in a particular thesaurus class, is found not to be useful in distinguishing a "good" from an "indifferent" or "poor" thesaurus class). in conclusion, the authors suggest an alternate approach to automatic thesaurus construction which greatly simplifies the work of producing viable thesaurus classes. experimental results show that the alternate approach described herein in some cases produces thesauri which are comparable in retrieval effectiveness to those produced by the first method at much lower cost.  carolyn j. crouch bokyung yang
the design of 1nf relational databases into nested normal form  we develop new algorithms for the design of non first normal form relational databases that are in nested normal form. previously, a set of given multivalued dependencies and those multivalued dependencies implied by given functional dependencies were used to obtain a nested normal form decomposition of a scheme. this method ignored the semantic distinction between functional and multivalued dependencies and utilized only full multivalued dependencies in the design process. we propose new algorithms which take advantage of this distinction, and use embedded multivalued dependencies to enhance the decomposition. this results in further elimination of redundancy due to functional dependencies in nested normal form designs.  mark a. roth henry f. korth
some considerations for using approximate optimal queries  an optimal query has been defined as one which will recover all the known relevant documents of a query in their best probability of relevance ranking. we have slightly modified the definition so that it also allows one to trace its evolution from the original to the optimal via the various feedback stages. such a query can be constructed by modifying the original query with terms from the known relevant documents. it is pointed out that such a term addition strategy differs materially from other approaches that add terms based on term association with all query terms, and calculated from the whole document collection. the effect of viewing a document as constituted of components, and hence affecting the weighting and retreival results of of the optimal query, is also discussed.  k. l. kwok
building an internet resource for a specialized online community  spie is a nonprofit organization with 11,000 members worldwide. the society's constituency comprises optical and optoelectronic scientists and engineers in communications, biomedical, manufacturing, aerospace, and other applications. the perceived need to link our technical community electronically is both a response to a future scenario of pervasive interconnectivity among the scientific community and a need to address the issues raised by a changing paradigm for technical publishing, wherein the rise of electronic communication may obviate the need for the traditional publisher (and its capital investment). through a growing but still modest effort over the last two years, spie has created an array of online services that are essentially paving the way for our organization's future offerings in the electronic publishing world. many of our experiences and observations may apply to any group involved in setting up such a resource, and we hope this case study will provide some assistance to others embarking on that process.  rich donnelly rick hermann
linguistic instruments and qualitative reasoning for schema integration  two major problems in schema integration are to identify correspondences between different conceptual schemas and to verify that the proposed correspondences are consistent with the semantics of the schemas. we propose a heuristic method, based on the use of galois lattices, for identifying schema correspondences. we show how the results of this method can be checked for correctness by introducing a number of necessary conditions for schema mergeability. these conditions are formulated in the context of a semantically rich modelling formalism, the distinguishing feature of which is the use of case grammar.  paul johannesson
mdm: a multiple-data model tool for the management of heterogeneous database schemes  mdm is a tool that enables the users to define schemes of different data models and to perform translations of schemes from one model to another. these functionalities can be at the basis of a customizable and integrated case environment supporting the analysis and design of information systems. mdm has two main components: the model manager and the schema manager. the model manager supports a specialized user, the model engineer, in the definition of a variety of models, on the basis of a limited set of metaconstructs covering almost all known conceptual models. the schema manager allows designers to create and modify schemes over the defined models, and to generate at each time a translation of a scheme into any of the data models currently available. translations between models are automatically derived, at definition time, by combining a predefined set of elementary transformations, which implement the standard translations between simple combinations of constructs.  paolo atzeni riccardo torlone
indexing for data models with constraints and classes (extended abstract)  we examine i/o-efficient data structures that provide indexing support for new data models. the database languages of these models include concepts from constraint programming (e.g., relational tuples are generalized to conjunctions of constraints) and from object-oriented programming (e.g., objects are organized in class hierarchies). let n be the size of the database, c the number of classes, b the secondary storage page size, and t the size of the output of a query. indexing by one attribute in the constraint data model (for a fairly general type of constraints) is equivalent to external dynamic interval management, which is a special case of external dynamic 2-dimensional range searching. we present a semi-dynamic data structure for this problem which has optimal worst-case space o(n/b) pages and optimal query i/o time o(logbn+t/b) and has o(logbn+(log ;2bn)/b) amortized insert i/o time. if the order of the insertions is random then the expected number of i/o operations needed to perform insertions is reduced to o(logbn). indexing by one attribute and by class name in an object-oriented model, where objects are organized as a forest hierarchy of classes, is also a special case of external dynamic 2-dimensional range searching. based on this observation we first identify a simple algorithm with good worst-case performance for the class indexing problem. using the forest structure of the class hierarchy and techniques from the constraint indexing problem, we improve its query i/o time from o(log2c logbn + t/b) to o(logb \\+ log2b).  paris c. kanellakis sridhar ramaswamy darren e. vengroff jeffrey s. vitter
cscw and organizational learning (workshop session) (abstract only)  this workshop aims to bring together people engaged in the study of the relationships beytween organizational learning and cscw to present and discuss their ideas and findings. issues will include conceptual frameworks; the role of organizational learning in getting the work done; empirical studies of the relation between organizational learning and cscw; methods for developing applications that support organizational learning; and the relationship between studies of organizational learning and studies of organizational memory.  liam bannon giorgio de michelis paal soergaard