UWM Multimedia Software Lab Ethan Munson Dept of

UWM Multimedia Software Lab Ethan Munson Dept. of EECS UW-Milwaukee

Laboratory Goals z Study and create novel software to support better multimedia authoring and browsing tools y. Style sheets y. Software environments using hypermedia y. Multimedia document analysis z Emphasis on language-based solutions y. Document specification languages y. Style sheet languages

Laboratory Funding z Grant from NSF CAREER program ysupports one Ph. D, one MS student z Subcontract from Center for Adaptive Data. Driven Information Processing (U. Maryland, Baltimore County) y. Supports one undergraduate student y. Possibly others z Various equipment and software donations y. Sun, Macromedia, Eaton

Laboratory Facilities z Laboratory space: 46 m 2, open format z Computing facilities y. Sun E 250 file server (2 Sparcs, 80 GB RAID, Solaris, AFS) y. Sun Ultra 10 (4), SGI Indigo 2 (2), HP 715 (2) y. Wintel, G 3 Mac y. Digital video, camcorder, scanner, printers

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Projects z Software Concordance z CADIP research y. Web image search y. Usability of information visualization z User tolerance for GUI delays

Software Concordance z Goal: Improve software development process with hypermedia services z Building Java source-code editor that supports embedded hyper-links and multimedia y. Integrated parsing and version control y. Links defined manually y. XML for non-source-code documents z Will build analysis and visualization tools

Software Concordance z Current status: building editor using y. Fluid program analysis suite (CMU/UWM) y. Chimera hypermedia toolkit (Colorado) y. Kaomi multimedia authoring toolkit (INRIA/Opera) ? ? z Tien Nhut Nguyen (Ph. D student) y. Hypermedia infrastructure z Satish Chandra Gupta (MS student) y. Source code editor y. Interface with Fluid

Retrieving Web Images z MS thesis by Yelena Tsymbalenko z Use HTML metadata (HTML source) to identify images relevant to one-word text query yno image downloading or processing required z Initial results y. High precision for some simple forms of metadata y. Structural clues not effective y. Possible methodologic problems z Current status: need student

Information Visualization Usability z Many visualization techniques for IR data have been proposed y. Stereoscopic Field Analyzer (SFA) is one xrequires 3 D goggles and 2 -hand magnetic tracking controls z Goal: test usability of SFA on realistic data sets y. These systems have high “face validity”, but little rigorous testing z Current status: beginning research now y. Nicholas Bohne (undergraduate)

User Perception of GUI Latency z Goal: understand how fast a GUI must be to make users happy y. Is “as fast as possible” necessary or even correct? z First study instrumented MS Word to control delay y. Weak results due to bad methodology y. Subject’s words don’t match their survey results xvideotape may have been a problem

Current Latency Study z What is minimum delay that a user can perceive for each GUI task (menu, button, typing)? y. Common wisdom: 100 ms z Initial results: 140 -180 ms z Scientific issues y. Turns out to be difficult to study x. Subjects have trouble determining whether delay occurred y. Does perceptible delay vary with task? x. Some evidence, but methodologic problems make result uncertain

Future Latency Research z Improve experimental technique z Measure full probability distribution y. Long, boring testing with small number of subjects z Test more GUI tasks yto try to find task differences z Move to studying user preference, rather than perception

Other topics z Formal models of hypermedia and hypermedia design y. Two MS theses, possible collaboration with Brazilian researchers