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Browsing by Author "Niu, Shuo"

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    CS5604: Information and Storage Retrieval ​Fall 2017 - FE (Front-End Team) 
    Chon, Jieun; Wang, Haitao; Bian, Yali; Niu, Shuo (Virginia Tech, 2017-12-24)
    Social media and Web data are becoming important sources of information for researchers to monitor and study global events. GETAR, led by Dr. Edward Fox, is a project aiming to collect, organize, browse, visualize, study, analyze, summarize, and explore content and sources related to biodiversity, climate change, crises, disasters, elections, energy policy, environmental policy/planning, geospatial information, green engineering, human rights, inequality, migrations, nuclear power, population growth, resiliency, shootings, sustainability, violence, etc. The report introduces the work of the Front End (FE) team analyzing users' requirements and building user interfaces for people to explore tweet/webpage data. The work of the FE team highly relies on the results from other teams. Our duty includes presenting the collected tweets/webpages, visualizing the clusters and topics, showing the indexed and clustered search results, and last but not least allowing users to perform customized queries and exploration. Therefore the team needs to consider how other teams collect and manage the data, as well as how people utilize the information to gain insights from the data repository. Throughout Fall 2017, our team aims to bridge the data archive and users’ need, focusing on providing various user interfaces for tweet/webpage exploration and analysis. Overall, two main user interfaces are designed and implemented throughout the semester. (1) A visualization-based analytical tool for people to create categories by searching and interacting with filtering tools, which are presented in visualizations such as bar-chart, tag cloud, and node-link graph. (2) A geo-based interface for location-based information, implemented with GeoBlacklight, enabling users to view tweets/webpages on maps. This report documents the background, plans, schedule, design, implementation, software installation, and other related useful information. We used Solr and a triple-store to provide data, and the "getar-cs5604f17-final_shard1_replica1" collection was used in the final testing and delivery. An overview of the team work and detailed design and implementation are both provided. We highlight the visualization-based interface and the location-based interface, as they provide visual tools for people to better understand the data collected by all the teams. We seek to provide information on how we extract users' requirements, how user needs are reflected in light of the related literature, and how that leads to the design of the visualization and geo-interface. An installation manual is also detailed, seeking to help other software engineers who will keep working on GETAR to reuse our work.
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    Investigating Awareness-Supporting Techniques in Co-located Sensemaking
    Niu, Shuo (Virginia Tech, 2019-08-07)
    Co-located sensemaking has benefitted from multi-user multi-touch devices such as tabletops and wall-mounted displays. Sensemakers use these displays to establish personal workspaces in which to perform individual sensemaking tasks, while preserving a shared space for the exchange and integration of findings. A large open interaction space allows multiple sensemakers to interact with the display at the same time and to communicate with partners face-to-face. However, collaborative systems must balance the tradeoff between working separately to complete individual work, and the need to communicate and maintain collaborative awareness. Dividing the tasks and working at the same time might encourage more alternative exploration paths, but reduced social exchange could also lead to weak mutual understanding and increased effort for work integration. Furthermore, close collaboration on the same task increases mutual awareness, but the tendency toward one-person dominance or turn-taking interaction underutilizes individual time and space, thereby reducing the benefits of divide-and-conquer. The four studies introduced in this dissertation investigated co-located space factors for notifications and shared visualization as two awareness-supporting techniques to assist individual contribution and teamwork. The research identifies control, awareness, and communication as key co-located space factors to balance cooperation, coordination, contribution, and communication. Knowledge on how notification and visualization techniques affect the co-located factors is explored and summarized. The findings identify design knowledge to better balance the individual work and styles of collaboration. Finally, this dissertation concludes by examining how awareness-supporting techniques affect the relationship between control, awareness, and communication.
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    Reorganize Your Blogs: Supporting Blog Re-visitation with Natural Language Processing and Visualization
    Niu, Shuo; McCrickard, D. Scott; Stelter, Timothy L.; Dix, Alan; Taylor, G. Don (MDPI, 2019-10-07)
    Temporally-connected personal blogs contain voluminous textual content, presenting challenges in re-visiting and reflecting on experiences. Other data repositories have benefited from natural language processing (NLP) and interactive visualizations (VIS) to support exploration, but little is known about how these techniques could be used with blogs to present experiences and support multimodal interaction with blogs, particularly for authors. This paper presents the effect of reorganization—reorganizing the large blog set with NLP and presenting abstract topics with VIS—to support novel re-visitation experiences to blogs. The BlogCloud tool, a blog re-visitation tool that reorganizes blog paragraphs around user-searched keywords, implements reorganization and similarity-based content grouping. Through a public use session with bloggers who wrote about extended hikes, we observed the effect of NLP-based reorganization in delivering novel re-visitation experiences. Findings suggest that the re-presented topics provide new reflection materials and re-visitation paths, enabling interaction with symbolic items in memory.