Intranet Alman käytettävyydestä

Usability testing is a productive and reliable method for evaluating the usability of software. Planning and implementing the test and analyzing its results is typically considered time-consuming, whereas applying usability methods in general is considered difficult. Because of this, usability testing is often priorized lower than more concrete issues in software engineering projects. Intranet Alma is a web service, users of which consist of students and personnel of the University of Helsinki. Alma was published in 2004 at the opening ceremony of the university. It has 45 000 users, and it replaces several former university network services. In this thesis, the usability of intranet Alma is evaluated with usability testing. The testing method applied has been lightened to make its taking into use as easy as possible. In the test, six students each tried to solve nine test tasks with Alma. As a result concrete usability problems were described in the final test report. Goal-orientation was given less importance in the applied usability testing. In addition, the system was tested only with test users from the largest user group. Usability test found general usability problems that occurred no matter the task or the user. However, further evaluation needs to be done: in addition to the general usability problems, there are task-dependent problems, solving of which requires thorough gathering of users goals. In the basic structure and central functionality of Alma, for example in navigation, there are serious and often repeating usability problems. It would be of interest to verify the designed user interface solutions to these problems before taking them into use. In the long run, the goals of the users, that the software is planned to support, are worth gathering, and the software development should be based on these goals.

AndroMedia - Towards a Context-aware Mobile Music Recommender

Portable music players have made it possible to listen to a personal collection of music in almost every situation, and they are often used during some activity to provide a stimulating audio environment. Studies have demonstrated the effects of music on the human body and mind, indicating that selecting music according to situation can, besides making the situation more enjoyable, also make humans perform better. For example, music can boost performance during physical exercises, alleviate stress and positively affect learning. We believe that people intuitively select different types of music for different situations. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a portable music player, AndroMedia, designed to provide personalised music recommendations using the user’s current context and listening habits together with other user’s situational listening patterns. We have developed a prototype that consists of a central server and a PDA client. The client uses Bluetooth sensors to acquire context information and logs user interaction to infer implicit user feedback. The user interface also allows the user to give explicit feedback. Large user interface elements facilitate touch-based usage in busy environments. The prototype provides the necessary framework for using the collected information together with other user’s listening history in a context- enhanced collaborative filtering algorithm to generate context-sensitive recommendations. The current implementation is limited to using traditional collaborative filtering algorithms. We outline the techniques required to create context-aware recommendations and present a survey on mobile context-aware music recommenders found in literature. As opposed to the explored systems, AndroMedia utilises other users’ listening habits when suggesting tunes, and does not require any laborious set up processes.

Tekstikatkelmahakumenetelmien toteuttaminen tiedonhakujärjestelmässä

Information retrieval of concise and consistent text passages is called passage retrieval. Passages can be used in an information retrieval system to improve its user interface and performance. In this thesis passage retrieval is compared to other forms of information retrieval. Implementation of passage retrieval as a feature of an information retrieval system is discussed. Various existing passage retrieval methods, their implementation and their efficiency are compared. I evaluated two different implementations of passage retrieval: direct passage retrieval and combined passage retrieval. In comparison combined passage retrieval turned out to be more efficient.

CowLog

We have developed CowLog, which is open-source software for recording behaviors from digital video and is easy to use and modify. CowLog tracks the time code from digital video files. The program is suitable for coding any digital video, but the authors have used it in animal research. The program has two main windows: a coding window, which is a graphical user interface used for choosing video files and defining output files that also has buttons for scoring behaviors, and a video window, which displays the video used for coding. The windows can be used in separate displays. The user types the key codes for the predefined behavioral categories, and CowLog transcribes their timing from the video time code to a data file. CowLog comes with an additional feature, an R package called Animal, for elementary analyses of the data files. With the analysis package, the user can calculate the frequencies, bout durations, and total durations of the coded behaviors and produce summary plots from the data.

CowLog

We have developed CowLog, which is open-source software for recording behaviors from digital video and is easy to use and modify. CowLog tracks the time code from digital video files. The program is suitable for coding any digital video, but the authors have used it in animal research. The program has two main windows: a coding window, which is a graphical user interface used for choosing video files and defining output files that also has buttons for scoring behaviors, and a video window, which displays the video used for coding. The windows can be used in separate displays. The user types the key codes for the predefined behavioral categories, and CowLog transcribes their timing from the video time code to a data file. CowLog comes with an additional feature, an R package called Animal, for elementary analyses of the data files. With the analysis package, the user can calculate the frequencies, bout durations, and total durations of the coded behaviors and produce summary plots from the data.