Publications

Publication date: 2008
Web search engines today typically show results as a list of titles and short snippets that summarize how the retrieved documents are related to the query. However, recent research suggests that longer summaries can be preferable for certain types of queries. This paper presents empirical evidence that judges can predict appropriate search result summary lengths, and that perceptions of search...
Publication date: 2008

Recipient of "Top Student Paper by Elsevier" for 2008 Awarded in Prague, CZ

Despite continuing population and economic growth in the Bay Area, the rate of adoption of FasTrak, the electronic toll collection system employed in California, has been significantly lower than similar systems in comparable urban areas of the United States. Prior economic research suggests...

Publication date: 2008

In the early years of the American republic, only white male landowners could vote, and then typically by expressing their preferences in a public setting, for all to witness. Our electoral system has changed drastically since that time; now almost all Americans cast votes with the assistance of computerized equipment. While much good stems from the use of computerized equipment in elections—...

Publication date: 2008
Past, present and emerging technologies of memory are important concerns for memory studies. What is remembered individually and collectively depends in part on technologies of memory and socio-technical practices, which are changing radically. We identify specific concerns about developments in digital memory capture, storage and retrieval. Decisions are being made now that may have far-reaching...
Publication date: 2008
By 2000, over one-third of Silicon Valley's high-skilled workers were foreign-born, and overwhelmingly from Asia. These US-educated engineers are transforming developmental opportunities for formerly peripheral regions as they build professional and business connections to their home countries. In a process more akin to 'brain circulation' than 'brain drain', these engineers and entrepreneurs,...
Publication date: 2008

A growing number of systems on the Internet create what we call information pools, or collections of online information goods for public, club or private consumption. Examples of information pools include collaborative editing websites (e.g. Wikipedia), peer-to-peer file sharing networks (e.g., Napster), multimedia contribution sites (e.g. YouTube), and amorphous collections of commentary (e.g...

Publication date: 2008
Every year almost 10 million children die before reaching the age of five despite the fact that two-thirds of these deaths could be prevented by effective low-cost interventions. To combat this, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF developed the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) treatment algorithms.

In Tanzania, IMCI is the national policy for the treatment...
Publication date: 2008
Handcrafted objects, such as knit scarves or sweaters, subtly signify the time and skill involved in their creation. Yet a handcraft artifact itself cannot convey the experience of its creation. We present the design, implementation, and preliminary evaluation of Spyn, a system for knitters to virtually weave stories into their creations. Using Spyn, a knitter can record, playback and share...
Publication date: 2008
Online dating systems play a prominent role in the social lives of millions of their users, but little research has considered how users perceive one another through their personal profiles. We examined how users perceive attractiveness in online dating profiles, which provide their first exposure to a potential partner. Participants rated whole profiles and profile components on such qualities...
Publication date: 2008
This paper introduces design guidelines for new technology that leverage our understanding of traditional interactions with bound paper in the form of books and notebooks. Existing, physical interactions with books have evolved over hundreds of years, providing a rich history that we can use to inform our design of new computing technologies. In this paper, we initially survey existing paper...
Publication date: 2008
Despite general awareness of the importance of keeping one's system secure, and widespread availability of consumer security technologies, actual investment in security remains highly variable across the Internet population, allowing attacks such as distributed denialof- service (DDoS) and spam distribution to continue unabated. By modeling security investment decision-making in established (e.g...
Publication date: 2008
We aim to advance the understanding of individual security decision-making, by combining formal and behavioral analysis. We sketch a game-theoretic model of security decision-making that generalizes the
Publication date: 2008
Using an ethnographic approach, this study sought to understand how the personal aspirations and social landscapes of Ghanaians living in London shaped their use of a constellation of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as camcorders, digital cameras, the internet and mobile phones. Two trajectories of ICT use were discovered among the individuals interviewed. One...
Publication date: 2008
In studying categorization, cognitive science has focused primarily on cultural categorization, ignoring individual and institutional categorization. Because recent technological developments have made individual and institutional classification systems much more available and powerful, our understanding of the cognitive and social mechanisms that produce these systems is increasingly important....
Publication date: 2008
Should users of technically protected content be able to give notice and require content owners to take down the technical measure to enable fair uses?

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