While there are powerful keyword search systems that index all kinds of resources including emails and web pages, people have trouble recalling semantic facts such as the name, location, edit dates and keywords that uniquely identifies resources in their personal repositories. Reusing information exasperates this problem. A rarely used approach...
To users, mobile touchscreen devices have appealing characteristics; among these characteristics is intuitiveness, which leads to mobile devices being used almost everywhere by almost everyone to accomplish almost anything. This statement, to some degree, holds for children too. Despite touchscreen devices’ intuitiveness and popularity, we don’t know much about how...
Active participation and collaboration of community members are crucial to the continuation and expansion of open source software projects. Researchers have recognized the value of community in open source development and studied various aspects of it including structure of communities, motivations for participation, and collaboration among members. However, the majority...
Amorphous oxide semiconductor (AOS) thin-film transistors (TFTs) constitute the central theme of this thesis. Within this theme, three primary areas of focus are pursued.
The first focus is the realization of a transparent three-stage ring oscillator with buffered output and an output frequency in the megahertz range. This leads to...
Visual information presented in diagrams promotes information processing both in an individual and in collaborative work. Previous literature has identified the role of diagrams in
understanding information processing in a variety of disciplines. In software engineering, diagrams are a prevalent method involved in process development: diagrams are used for system...
Software systems are becoming an essential part of the lives of both individuals and organizations, and as a consequence, these systems are getting bigger and more complex. Because of this, the tasks of maintaining the quality in these complex software systems are becoming increasingly difficult. Furthermore, these systems are subject...
Merge conflicts have long plagued software development. With larger and more dispersed teams comes greater risk of developers working on the same code at the same time. While merge conflicts are known to be painful, their exact impact on software is still largely unknown. Are merge conflicts an isolated problem,...
Our confidence in software systems depends on our confidence in the exhaustiveness of our testing. As software systems get more complex, the task of exhaustive testing becomes more complex and even infeasible in some cases. In order to build less error prone systems, we therefore need to not only focus...
Beaversource provides both code-hosting tools and social networking in one place. Students and faculty at Oregon State University have been using Beaversource to host their projects, both for classwork and research. Several usability problems were reported in a survey conducted on Beaversource last year. Some of these issues were severe...
In the field of Human-Computer Interaction, provenance refers to the complete history and genealogy of a document. Provenance can be useful in identifying related resources, such as different versions of the same document or resources used in the creation of a new document. Though methods of provenance collection and applications...