Ali Sarvghad | Victoria University of Wellington (original) (raw)

Papers by Ali Sarvghad

Fig.1. Examples of note taking activities during our observational study. Note-takers are disconn... more Fig.1. Examples of note taking activities during our observational study. Note-takers are disconnected from the group activities. Abstract—This paper focuses on the significant role that note taking plays in collaborative data analysis within the business domain. The discussion of note taking is based on preliminary observations from a user study in which co-located teams of business users worked on collaborative visualization tasks using large interactive surfaces. We propose an initial categorization of note taking activities and propose a list of research questions that need to be discussed and investigated in order to better understand note taking process in the context of collaborative visualization and analysis activities. Index Terms—collaboration, computer supported cooperative work, Information visualization, note taking 1

Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact., 2020

Local governments still depend on traditional town halls for community consultation, despite prob... more Local governments still depend on traditional town halls for community consultation, despite problems such as a lack of inclusive participation for attendees and difficulty for civic organizers to capture attendees' feedback in reports. Building on a formative study with 66 town hall attendees and 20 organizers, we designed and developed CommunityClick, a communitysourcing system that captures attendees' feedback in an inclusive manner and enables organizers to author more comprehensive reports. During the meeting, in addition to recording meeting audio to capture vocal attendees' feedback, we modify iClickers to give voice to reticent attendees by allowing them to provide real-time feedback beyond a binary signal. This information then automatically feeds into a meeting transcript augmented with attendees' feedback and organizers' tags. The augmented transcript along with a feedback-weighted summary of the transcript generated from text analysis methods is incor...

In the context of collaborative data visualization and analysis, history tools can play an import... more In the context of collaborative data visualization and analysis, history tools can play an important role. We present a compilation that characterizes usersʼ probable objectives when using history tools for collaborative work, as well as operations commonly performed on histories. We further characterize user objectives according to the likely time/space setting in which they would be used, and whether they are likely to be used by individuals, groups, or both. We conclude by compiling a list of design and implementation challenges and research questions that need to be discussed and investigated in order to make history tools adequately support collaborative visualization activities.

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2020

Designing technology for sociotechnical problems is challenging due to the heterogeneity of stake... more Designing technology for sociotechnical problems is challenging due to the heterogeneity of stakeholders’ needs, the diversity among their values and perspectives, and the disparity in their technical skills. Careful considerations are needed to ensure that data collection is inclusive and representative of the target populations. It is also important to employ data analysis methods that are compatible with users’ technical skills and are capable of drawing a representative picture of people's values, priorities, and needs. However, current technical solutions often fail to meet these critical requirements. In this article, we present a set of empirically-driven design considerations for building technological interventions to address sociotechnical issues. We then discuss open challenges and tradeoffs around privacy, ethics, bias, uncertainty, and trust. We conclude with a call to action for researchers to advance the domain knowledge and improve our technological arsenal for a...

Coordination is critical in distributed collaborative analysis of multidimensional data. Collabor... more Coordination is critical in distributed collaborative analysis of multidimensional data. Collaborating analysts need to understand what each person has done and what avenues of analysis remain uninvestigated in order to effectively coordinate their efforts. Although visualization history has the potential to communicate such information, common history representations typically show sequential lists of past work, making it difficult to understand the analytic coverage of the data dimension space (i.e. which data dimensions have been investigated and in what combinations). This makes it difficult for collaborating analysts to plan their next steps, particularly when the number of dimensions is large and team members are distributed. We introduce the notion of representing past analysis history from a dimension coverage perspective to enable analysts to see which data dimensions have been explored in which combinations. Through two user studies, we investigated whether 1) a dimension ...

With the advent of digitization of text documents and digital communication technologies, an enor... more With the advent of digitization of text documents and digital communication technologies, an enormous quantity of information can be stored and transferred. However, digesting this huge amount of information is becoming an increasingly difficult task due to the time needed to read them. Furthermore, it is observed that people who searched for information does not necessary read all the information retrieved and this is especially true during the initial search for information. During the initial phase, people are keen to find out how relevant is the information retrieved. This research describes SmartView, a system that displays only a portion of a text file which is of interests to the reader. SmartView opens a text file, extracts and displays a list of useful words contained in the file. It then compiles and displays its initial view of the file. A view of the file is compiled based upon sentences that contain the words of interests and their anaphors and their lexical chains. Ini...

Despite the lack of inclusive participation from attendees and civic organizers struggle to captu... more Despite the lack of inclusive participation from attendees and civic organizers struggle to capture their feedback in reports, local governments continue to depend on traditional methods such as town halls for community consultation. We present CommunityClick, a community-sourcing system that uses modified iClickers to enable silent attendees' to provide real-time feedback and records meeting audio to capture vocal attendees' feedback. These feedbacks are combined to generate an augmented meeting transcript and feedback-weighted summary, incorporated into an interactive tool for organizers to author reports. Our field deployment at a town hall and interviews with 8 organizers demonstrate CommunityClick's utility in improving inclusivity and authoring more comprehensive reports.

Advancement in digital civics and the emergence of online platforms have enabled vast amounts of ... more Advancement in digital civics and the emergence of online platforms have enabled vast amounts of community members to share their input on various civic proposals. The intricacy of the community input analysis process, coupled with the increased scale of community engagement, makes community input analysis particularly challenging. Civic leaders, who gather, analyze, and make critical decisions based on community input, struggle to make sense of large-scale unstructured community input due to lack of time, analytical skills, and specialized technologies. In this qualitative study, we investigated civic leaders' requirements that can accelerate the community input analysis process and help them to gain actionable insights to make better decisions. Our interviews conducted with 14 civic leaders revealed a dichotomous nature of requirements based on their roles and analysis practices. The interviews also revealed the civic leaders' desire to understand the community's opini...

Digital Government: Research and Practice

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted academic life in the United States and beyond. T... more The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted academic life in the United States and beyond. To gain a better understanding of its impact on the academic community, we conducted a large-scale survey at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. We collected multifaceted data from students, staff, and faculty on several aspects of their lives, such as mental and physical health, productivity, and finances. All our respondents expressed mental and physical issues and concerns, such as increased stress and depression levels. Financial difficulties seem to have the most considerable toll on staff and undergraduate students, while productivity challenges were mostly expressed by faculty and graduate students. As universities face many important decisions with respect to mitigating the effects of this pandemic, we present our findings with the intent of shedding light on the challenges faced by various academic groups in the face of the pandemic, calling attention to the differences betw...

Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

ABSTRACT Record-keeping is known to facilitate visual data analysis in single user and asynchrono... more ABSTRACT Record-keeping is known to facilitate visual data analysis in single user and asynchronous collaborative settings. We Implemented Co Spaces, a tool for collaborative visual data analysis with a record-keeping mechanism that enables tracking of analysis history. Then we conducted an observational study with ten pairs analyzing a sales dataset, to study how collaborators use visual record-keeping during co-located work on a tabletop. We report actions on visual record-keeping and inferred key user intentions for each action. Actions and intentions varied depending on the analytical phase and collaboration style. Based on our findings, we suggest providing various views of recorded material, showing manually saved rather than automatically saved items by default, enabling people to review collaboratorsâ work unobtrusively and automatically recommending items related to a userâs analytical task.

This paper highlights the important role that record-keeping (i.e. taking notes and saving charts... more This paper highlights the important role that record-keeping (i.e. taking notes and saving charts) plays in collaborative data analysis within the business domain. The discussion of record-keeping is based on observations from a user study in which co-located teams worked on collaborative visual analytics tasks using large interactive wall and tabletop displays. Part of our findings is a collaborative data analysis framework that encompasses note taking as one of the main activities. We observed that recordkeeping was a critical activity within the analysis process. Based on our observations, we characterize notes according to their content, scope, and usage, and describe how they fit into a process of collaborative data analysis. We then discuss implications for the design of collaborative visual analytics tools.

Information Visualization, 2012

In an observational study, we noticed that record-keeping plays a critical role in the overall pr... more In an observational study, we noticed that record-keeping plays a critical role in the overall process of collaborative visual data analysis. Record-keeping involves recording material for later use, ranging from data about the visual analysis processes and visualization states to notes and annotations that externalize user insights, findings, and hypotheses. In our study, co-located teams worked on collaborative visual analytics

By design, interactive tabletops and surfaces provide numerous opportunities for data visualizati... more By design, interactive tabletops and surfaces provide numerous opportunities for data visualization and analysis. In information visualization, scientific visualization, and visual analytics, useful insights primarily emerge from interactive data exploration. Nevertheless, interaction research in these domains has largely focused on mouse-based interactions in the past, with little research on how interactive data exploration can benefit from interactive surfaces. These proceedings represent the results of the DEXIS 2011 Workshop on Data Exploration for Interactive Surfaces. It was held in conjunction with the ACM International Conference on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces (ITS) in Kobe, Japan on November 13, 2011. The introduction summarizes the published papers of the workshop and points to results from workshop discussions. The remainder of the proceedings is made up of the position papers submitted to the workshop.

Fig.1. Examples of note taking activities during our observational study. Note-takers are disconn... more Fig.1. Examples of note taking activities during our observational study. Note-takers are disconnected from the group activities. Abstract—This paper focuses on the significant role that note taking plays in collaborative data analysis within the business domain. The discussion of note taking is based on preliminary observations from a user study in which co-located teams of business users worked on collaborative visualization tasks using large interactive surfaces. We propose an initial categorization of note taking activities and propose a list of research questions that need to be discussed and investigated in order to better understand note taking process in the context of collaborative visualization and analysis activities. Index Terms—collaboration, computer supported cooperative work, Information visualization, note taking 1

Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact., 2020

Local governments still depend on traditional town halls for community consultation, despite prob... more Local governments still depend on traditional town halls for community consultation, despite problems such as a lack of inclusive participation for attendees and difficulty for civic organizers to capture attendees' feedback in reports. Building on a formative study with 66 town hall attendees and 20 organizers, we designed and developed CommunityClick, a communitysourcing system that captures attendees' feedback in an inclusive manner and enables organizers to author more comprehensive reports. During the meeting, in addition to recording meeting audio to capture vocal attendees' feedback, we modify iClickers to give voice to reticent attendees by allowing them to provide real-time feedback beyond a binary signal. This information then automatically feeds into a meeting transcript augmented with attendees' feedback and organizers' tags. The augmented transcript along with a feedback-weighted summary of the transcript generated from text analysis methods is incor...

In the context of collaborative data visualization and analysis, history tools can play an import... more In the context of collaborative data visualization and analysis, history tools can play an important role. We present a compilation that characterizes usersʼ probable objectives when using history tools for collaborative work, as well as operations commonly performed on histories. We further characterize user objectives according to the likely time/space setting in which they would be used, and whether they are likely to be used by individuals, groups, or both. We conclude by compiling a list of design and implementation challenges and research questions that need to be discussed and investigated in order to make history tools adequately support collaborative visualization activities.

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2020

Designing technology for sociotechnical problems is challenging due to the heterogeneity of stake... more Designing technology for sociotechnical problems is challenging due to the heterogeneity of stakeholders’ needs, the diversity among their values and perspectives, and the disparity in their technical skills. Careful considerations are needed to ensure that data collection is inclusive and representative of the target populations. It is also important to employ data analysis methods that are compatible with users’ technical skills and are capable of drawing a representative picture of people's values, priorities, and needs. However, current technical solutions often fail to meet these critical requirements. In this article, we present a set of empirically-driven design considerations for building technological interventions to address sociotechnical issues. We then discuss open challenges and tradeoffs around privacy, ethics, bias, uncertainty, and trust. We conclude with a call to action for researchers to advance the domain knowledge and improve our technological arsenal for a...

Coordination is critical in distributed collaborative analysis of multidimensional data. Collabor... more Coordination is critical in distributed collaborative analysis of multidimensional data. Collaborating analysts need to understand what each person has done and what avenues of analysis remain uninvestigated in order to effectively coordinate their efforts. Although visualization history has the potential to communicate such information, common history representations typically show sequential lists of past work, making it difficult to understand the analytic coverage of the data dimension space (i.e. which data dimensions have been investigated and in what combinations). This makes it difficult for collaborating analysts to plan their next steps, particularly when the number of dimensions is large and team members are distributed. We introduce the notion of representing past analysis history from a dimension coverage perspective to enable analysts to see which data dimensions have been explored in which combinations. Through two user studies, we investigated whether 1) a dimension ...

With the advent of digitization of text documents and digital communication technologies, an enor... more With the advent of digitization of text documents and digital communication technologies, an enormous quantity of information can be stored and transferred. However, digesting this huge amount of information is becoming an increasingly difficult task due to the time needed to read them. Furthermore, it is observed that people who searched for information does not necessary read all the information retrieved and this is especially true during the initial search for information. During the initial phase, people are keen to find out how relevant is the information retrieved. This research describes SmartView, a system that displays only a portion of a text file which is of interests to the reader. SmartView opens a text file, extracts and displays a list of useful words contained in the file. It then compiles and displays its initial view of the file. A view of the file is compiled based upon sentences that contain the words of interests and their anaphors and their lexical chains. Ini...

Despite the lack of inclusive participation from attendees and civic organizers struggle to captu... more Despite the lack of inclusive participation from attendees and civic organizers struggle to capture their feedback in reports, local governments continue to depend on traditional methods such as town halls for community consultation. We present CommunityClick, a community-sourcing system that uses modified iClickers to enable silent attendees' to provide real-time feedback and records meeting audio to capture vocal attendees' feedback. These feedbacks are combined to generate an augmented meeting transcript and feedback-weighted summary, incorporated into an interactive tool for organizers to author reports. Our field deployment at a town hall and interviews with 8 organizers demonstrate CommunityClick's utility in improving inclusivity and authoring more comprehensive reports.

Advancement in digital civics and the emergence of online platforms have enabled vast amounts of ... more Advancement in digital civics and the emergence of online platforms have enabled vast amounts of community members to share their input on various civic proposals. The intricacy of the community input analysis process, coupled with the increased scale of community engagement, makes community input analysis particularly challenging. Civic leaders, who gather, analyze, and make critical decisions based on community input, struggle to make sense of large-scale unstructured community input due to lack of time, analytical skills, and specialized technologies. In this qualitative study, we investigated civic leaders' requirements that can accelerate the community input analysis process and help them to gain actionable insights to make better decisions. Our interviews conducted with 14 civic leaders revealed a dichotomous nature of requirements based on their roles and analysis practices. The interviews also revealed the civic leaders' desire to understand the community's opini...

Digital Government: Research and Practice

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted academic life in the United States and beyond. T... more The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted academic life in the United States and beyond. To gain a better understanding of its impact on the academic community, we conducted a large-scale survey at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. We collected multifaceted data from students, staff, and faculty on several aspects of their lives, such as mental and physical health, productivity, and finances. All our respondents expressed mental and physical issues and concerns, such as increased stress and depression levels. Financial difficulties seem to have the most considerable toll on staff and undergraduate students, while productivity challenges were mostly expressed by faculty and graduate students. As universities face many important decisions with respect to mitigating the effects of this pandemic, we present our findings with the intent of shedding light on the challenges faced by various academic groups in the face of the pandemic, calling attention to the differences betw...

Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

ABSTRACT Record-keeping is known to facilitate visual data analysis in single user and asynchrono... more ABSTRACT Record-keeping is known to facilitate visual data analysis in single user and asynchronous collaborative settings. We Implemented Co Spaces, a tool for collaborative visual data analysis with a record-keeping mechanism that enables tracking of analysis history. Then we conducted an observational study with ten pairs analyzing a sales dataset, to study how collaborators use visual record-keeping during co-located work on a tabletop. We report actions on visual record-keeping and inferred key user intentions for each action. Actions and intentions varied depending on the analytical phase and collaboration style. Based on our findings, we suggest providing various views of recorded material, showing manually saved rather than automatically saved items by default, enabling people to review collaboratorsâ work unobtrusively and automatically recommending items related to a userâs analytical task.

This paper highlights the important role that record-keeping (i.e. taking notes and saving charts... more This paper highlights the important role that record-keeping (i.e. taking notes and saving charts) plays in collaborative data analysis within the business domain. The discussion of record-keeping is based on observations from a user study in which co-located teams worked on collaborative visual analytics tasks using large interactive wall and tabletop displays. Part of our findings is a collaborative data analysis framework that encompasses note taking as one of the main activities. We observed that recordkeeping was a critical activity within the analysis process. Based on our observations, we characterize notes according to their content, scope, and usage, and describe how they fit into a process of collaborative data analysis. We then discuss implications for the design of collaborative visual analytics tools.

Information Visualization, 2012

In an observational study, we noticed that record-keeping plays a critical role in the overall pr... more In an observational study, we noticed that record-keeping plays a critical role in the overall process of collaborative visual data analysis. Record-keeping involves recording material for later use, ranging from data about the visual analysis processes and visualization states to notes and annotations that externalize user insights, findings, and hypotheses. In our study, co-located teams worked on collaborative visual analytics

By design, interactive tabletops and surfaces provide numerous opportunities for data visualizati... more By design, interactive tabletops and surfaces provide numerous opportunities for data visualization and analysis. In information visualization, scientific visualization, and visual analytics, useful insights primarily emerge from interactive data exploration. Nevertheless, interaction research in these domains has largely focused on mouse-based interactions in the past, with little research on how interactive data exploration can benefit from interactive surfaces. These proceedings represent the results of the DEXIS 2011 Workshop on Data Exploration for Interactive Surfaces. It was held in conjunction with the ACM International Conference on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces (ITS) in Kobe, Japan on November 13, 2011. The introduction summarizes the published papers of the workshop and points to results from workshop discussions. The remainder of the proceedings is made up of the position papers submitted to the workshop.