Virginia Tech is the largest and most diverse university in Virginia. With a student body of nearly 25,000 in Blacksburg and numerous other sites across the Commonwealth of Virginia, it is the premier land-grant university in the state, with responsibilities for teaching, research, and service activities. Virginia Tech has the largest personal computer/workstation population of any American university, and has internationally reputed programs in human-computer interaction, human factors, and information access. The University and surrounding community are highly networked through the Blacksburg Electronic Village.

The overarching goal of our Research Infrastructure project is to focus on removing barriers to the accessibility of interactive computing and support humans in information technology, business, education, and design activities. Specifically, we have created a technological infrastructure to support our research in addressing the causes of usability barriers to computing. Our infrastructure consists of laboratories for research in usability methods, interaction technology, teleconferencing, and information access and visualization, as well as faculty and students skilled in these types of research. This is the fifth year of our 5-1/2 year award.

1. Past Year's Activities and Accomplishments

Goals, objectives, and targeted activities for the past year.
Our major goal for this year was to upgrade the departmental networking infrastructure to support rapidly growing needs in HCI, videoconferencing, digital libraries, and educational technologies. Major proposals were submitted in the areas of digital libraries and problem solving environments to support the integration of human-computer interaction techniques in these domains. Work is continuing in educational technologies, both at the university level (here described in conjunction with the digital libraries work) and at K-12 level in cooperation with the Montgomery County Public School System. Research work in virtual environments is expanding rapidly now that the new CAVE at Virginia Tech is operational. Considerable empirical work is underway in areas of remote evaluation, usability, digital libraries, data visualization, and industrial inspection.

UMRL (left) showing windows to subject and observation rooms with portable usability laboratory
on table in foreground. Teleconferencing Lab (right) shows window to observation room and Liveboard.

The ACITC center begins to take shape between the CS Department and Newman Library.

Internationally, the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations grew to 1100 documents with 39 members now participating worldwide.

Several research accomplishments have been recognized this year:

Kies, J.K. (October 1997) 1997 Alphonse Chapanis Best Student Paper Award, Human Factors and Ergonomic Society.

Liu, X. (1997). Analysis and reduction of Moire patterns in scanned halftones, most referenced dissertation in the Virginia Tech Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETS) digital library, approximately 10,000 downloads in 1997.

Snow, M.P., Kies, J.K., Neale, D.C., and Williges, R.C. (October 1997). Best Article Published in Ergonomics and Design, 1996 Volume, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

Components and materials required (Input).
This year award expenditures are projected at roughly $220,000. Added to that is support through new projects spawned by the project this year. These include grants from NSF (3 grants, $200K), IBM (1 grant, $120K), Virginia Tech (2 grants, $111K), NRL (3 grants, $422K), and Hitachi (1 grant, $99K).

Indications of success (Output).
Numbers of students supported: 45; Publications ca. 40 per year.

Specific projects or programs using the infrastructure:

• virtual environments research, development, and evaluation
• presence and disorientation in virtual environments
• remote usability methods development and evaluation
• video conferencing for distance learning and collaborative work
• digital libraries
• educational technologies
• WWW-based research and development
• data exploration and visualization
• new usability methods and tools

• The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
• Instructional software such as the QUIZIT system for network-based educational testing and evaluation
• A new version of the Usability Problem Classifier (UPC) for supporting the classification of usability problems found during evaluation
• New JAVA-based class libraries for supporting the implementation of collaborative network-based applications

• Supported dissertation research for one female with a visual disability and two minority females.

Degree of success.
This project has achieved its goals this year and, in fact, has surpassed its project objectives. For example, we did not foresee the creation of the community network called the Blacksburg Electronic Village and the involvement in K-12 educational research that would result. Recently, the Information Access laboratory has expanded and split into a Digital Libraries laboratory and a new joint venture with the University to develop the 21st Century Classroom with the best network-based multimedia computing we can possibly employ. Similarly, we did not forsee the extent of our involvement in virtual environments or the interest of our administration to consolidate these activities under the roof of the new ACITC.

Work this year has been less developmental and focussed more on new research and funding initiatives, completing the physical infrastructure, and positioning ourselves for new activities that we see in the next few years.

Outcome.
We have been truly fortunate during this project to have enjoyed strong top-level administrative support and good colleagues willing to build on the new opportunities. As a consequence our activities and the work for which we are known has changed dramatically.

Unmet goals (if any).
This project has considerably surpassed expectations because of the growth rate of activities and their scope. The only area which did not develop as we had expected involved our concept for involving undergraduates in activities at the frontiers of Human-Computer interaction. However, as we discussed in last year's report, our intent was largely achieved through other means. Through our courses and through a number of REU grants from NSF, many students have had opportunities that we did not envision at the beginning of the project.

One other area of concern is that we have not discovered a good way to fund continuing support staff for a laboratory as complex and demanding as that which we have assembled. Very likely these support tasks will be distributed across the numerous students who make use of the facilities.

Outcome.
This project has provided a mechanism for great cohesion and focused research among many faculty members in Computer Science and Industrial & Systems Engineering. Across campus, researchers in education and in engineering are becoming project collaboratiors, individually and through the Center for Human- Computer Interaction. Researchers in software engineering, modeling and simulation, Web-based applications, and many other areas are finding unique and rewarding opportunities through this new infrastructure and collaboration with each other. Researchers across the University are gaining a greater awareness of the importance of the user interface in interactive systems.

Impact.
The products of our research - new methods for ensuring usability, educational technology advances, virtual environment research and development, and digital libraries contributions - are, indeed, breaking barriers for users to the power of computing. Our work in educational technologies is right at the frontier and addresses vexing questions about how best to improve education through networked computing. The work in digital libraries, including ETD, is making vast changes in the way we access and work with information. Not the least, our understanding of the usability of computing and information systems has deepened, and we look to increased productivity and human performance in the future.

We look forward, not to the end of the RI project, but to a new beginning as the forthcoming ACITC building provides a campus-wide physical infrastructure dedicated to the expansion of the activities of the past five years.

3. Publications

Most significant publications.

Carroll, J.M. (Ed.) (1998). Minimalism beyond the Nurnberg funnel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Carroll, J.M. (1997). Scenario-based design. In M. Helander and T.K. Landauer (Eds.) Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, Second Edition. Amsterdam: North Holland, 383-406.

Carroll, J.M., Rosson, M.B., Chin, G., and Koenemann, J. (1997). Requirements development: stages of opportunity for collaborative needs discovery. Proceedings of DIS'97: Second ACM Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems (Amsterdam, 18-20 August). New York: ACM Press/Addison-Wesley, 55-64.

Castillo, J.C., Hartson, H. R., and Hix, D. (April 1998). Remote usability evaluation: can users report their own critical incidents? Proc. SIGCHI'98. Los Angeles, CA.

Darken, R. and Hix, D. (March 1998). Usability evaluation methods in a new medium. Proc. Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (VRAIS) 98. Atlanta, GA.

Ehrich, R.W., McCreary, F., Reaux, R., Lisanti, M., Rowland, K., and Ramsey, A. (June 1998). Design of technology-based learning environments that support both teachers and students. Proc. 1988 National Educational Computing Conference. San Diego, CA.

Fox, E.A. and Marchionini, G. (April 1998). Toward a worldwide digital library. CACM 41(4), 28-32.

Fox, E.A., Eaton, J., McMillan, G., Kipp, N., Mather, P., McGoigle, T., Schweiker, W., and DeVane, B. (September 1997). Networked digital library of theses and dissertations: an international effort unlocking university resources. D-Lib Magazine, The Magazine of Digital Library Research, ISSN 1082-9873.

Han, S.H., Williges, B.H., and Williges, R.C. (1997). A paradigm for sequential experimentation. Ergonomics, 40(7), 737-760.

Hartson, H. R. (1997). Trends in human-computer interaction research and development. In More Than Screen Deep: Toward Every-Citizen Interfaces to the Nation's Information Infrastructure, National Research Council, National Academy Press, pp. 221-240.

Kies, J.K., Williges, R.C., and Williges, B.H. (1997). Desktop video conferencing: a systems approach. In M.G. Helander, T.K. Landauer, and P.V. Prabhu (Eds.), Handbook of human-computer interaction (2nd. Edition). (pp. 979-1002) Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.

Koenemann, J., Carroll, J.M., Shaffer, C.A., Rossen, M.B., and Abrams, M.A. (in press). Designing collaborative applications for classroom use: The LiNC Project. In The Design of Children's Technology, Allison Druin, ed. New York: Morgan Kaufmann.

McGee, M.K., Amento, B., Brooks, P., Harley, H. D. (1997). Fitts and virtual reality: evaluating display and input devices with Fitts' law. Proceedings of the 41st Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting. Santa Monica, CA.

Neale, D.C. And Carroll, J.M. (1997). The role of metaphors in user interface design. In M. Helander and T.K. Landauer (Eds.) Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, Second Edition. Amsterdam: North Holland, 441-462.

Snow, M.P. and Williges, R.C. (in press). Empirical models of perceived presence in virtual environments based on free-modulus magnitude estimation. Human Factors.

4. Students Supported by Award

MS Degrees in Progress

Kevin Curry, Hope Doe, Lizann Epley, Ahsan Habib, Rajat Gupta, Win Heagy, Jae Kim, Chung-Tzu Mou, Zaodat Rahman, Jianxin Zhao

PhD Degrees in Progress

James Begole, Brian Amento, Terrence Andre, George Chin, Junni Fan, Joey Gabbard, Craig Ganoe, Hope Harley, Tommy Johnson, Neill Kipp, Suzanne Lee, Paul Mather, Faith McCreary, Sornil Ohm, Constantinos Phanouriou, Ray Reaux, Cheryl Seals, Hussein Suleman, Stephen Van Aken, William Wake, Chang Zhang

Degrees Completed

Gahleb Abdulla, PhD, Digital library and web scalability through characterization and modelling

Jose Castillo, MS, User-reported critical incident method for remote usability evaluation

Laura Clark, PhD, Design and testing of a quick-connect wheelchair power add-on unit

Philip Isenhour, MS, Sieve: a Java-based framework for collaborative component composition

Binzhang Liu, MS, Analyzing the spread of CS education innovation

Faith McCreary, MS, Adult-child differences in spatial learning in an immersive virtual environment as a function of field of view

Lucy Nowell, PhD, Graphical encoding for information visualization: using icon color shape, and size to convey nominal and quantitative data

Michael McGee, MS, Assessing negative side effects in a virtual reality maze environment

Jose Pesante, PhD, Applications of the theory of signal detectability to mutitasking and industrial quality inspection in manufacturing

Brandon Satanek, MS, The effects of multidimensional navigational aids and individual differences on WWW hypertext navigation

Paige Smith, MS, Human-centered communication technologies to enhance the tutoring of minorities

Linda Van Rens, MS, Usability problem classification methodology

Samthongs Thevongs, MS, Use of integrated displays in work system design

Roland Wooster, MS, Optimizing response time, rather than hit rates, of WWW proxy caches