Abstract:
Effective search support is an important tool for helping individuals deal with the problem of information overload. This is particularly true in the field of nanotechnology, where information from patents, grants, and research papers is growing rapidly. Guided by cognitive fit and cognitive load theories, we develop an advanced Web-based system, Nano Mapper, to support users' search and analysis of nanotechnology developments. We perform controlled experiments to evaluate the functions of Nano Mapper. We examine users' search effectiveness, efficiency, and evaluations of system usefulness, ease of use, and satisfaction. Our results demonstrate that Nano Mapper enables more effective and efficient searching, and users consider it to be more useful and easier to use than the benchmark systems. Users are also more satisfied with Nano Mapper and have higher intention to use it in the future. User evaluations of the analysis functions are equally positive. © 2012 M.E. Sharpe, Inc.
Abstract:
Digital libraries represent a form of information technology in which social impact matters as much as technological advancement. It is hard to evaluate a new technology in the absence of real users and large collections. The best way to develop new technology is in multi-year large-scale research projects that use real-world electronic testbeds for actual users and aim at developing new, comprehensive, and user-friendly technologies for digital libraries. Typically, these testbed projects also examine the broad social, economic, legal, ethical, and crosscultural contexts and impacts of digital library research.
Abstract:
The World-Wide Web (WWW) based Internet services have become a major channel for information delivery. For the same reason, information overload also has become a serious problem to the users of such services. It has been estimated that the amount of information stored on the Internet doubled every 18 months. The speed of increase of home pages can be even faster, some people estimated that it doubled every six months. Therefore, a scalable approach to support Internet searching is critical to the success of Internet services and other current or future National Information Infrastructure (NII) applications. In this paper, we discuss using a modified version of simulated annealing algorithm to develop an intelligent personal spider (agent). Which is based on automatic textual analysis of the Internet documents and hybrid simulated annealing.
Abstract:
As part of the ongoing Illinois Digital Library Initiative project, this research proposes an intelligent agent approach to Web searching. In this experiment, we developed two Web personal spiders based on best first search and genetic algorithm techniques, respectively. These personal spiders can dynamically take a user's selected starting homepages and search for the most closely related homepages in the Web, based on the links and keyword indexing. A graphical, dynamic, Java-based interface was developed and is available for Web access. A system architecture for implementing such an agent-based spider is presented, followed by detailed discussions of benchmark testing and user evaluation results. In benchmark testing, although the genetic algorithm spider did not outperform the best first search spider, we found both results to be comparable and complementary. In user evaluation, the genetic algorithm spider obtained significantly higher recall value than that of the best first search spider. However, their precision values were not statistically different. The mutation process introduced in genetic algorithm allows users to find other potential relevant homepages that cannot be explored via a conventional local search process. In addition, we found the Java-based interface to be a necessary component for design of a truly interactive and dynamic Web agent.
Abstract:
Counter-terrorism, intelligence analysts, and other investigators continue to analyze the Internet presence of terrorists, hate groups, and other extremists through the study of primary sources including terrorists' own websites, videos, chat sites, and Internet forums. Forums and videos are both particularly rich sources of information. Forums discussion sites supporting online conversations capture each conversation in a thread and the ensuing postings are usually time-stamped and attributable to a particular online poster (author). With careful analysis, they can reveal trends in topics and discussions, the sequencing of ideas, and the relationships between posters. Videos gain a global audience when posted to YouTube, but identifying and finding videos relating to a specific interest or topic can be difficult among the tens of millions of available items. The Dark Web Forum Portal was originally constructed to allow the examination, from a broad perspective, of the use of Web forums by terrorist and extremist groups. The Video Portal module has been added to facilitate the study of video as it is used by these groups. Both portals are available to researchers on a request basis. In this paper, we examine the evolution of the Dark Web Forum Portal's system design, share the results of a user evaluation, and provide an overview of the development of the new video portal. © 2011 IEEE.
