Publications
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Considering the issues involved in developing a simplified new copyright law and associated administrative mechanisms.
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Personalization of services often has to cope with the conflicting goals of allowing cooperation and sharing, which require common data formats and services, and supporting individual use cases, which require as much personalization as possible. In this paper we present the ShaRef approach to personalization and sharing, which on the one hand allows users to cooperatively work with bibliographic…
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Myriad reasons can be proffered for undertaking a copyright reform project. For one thing, the current U.S. copyright law is much too long, now weighing in at approximately two hundred pages.' The statute is also far too complex, incomprehensible to a significant degree, and imbalanced in important ways.2 Moreover, it lacks normative heft-that is, the normative rationales for granting authors…
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An appealing solution for a networked end host to circumvent last mile congestion is to connect to multiple service providers simultaneously, which is known as multihoming. The differences in peering relationships among different service providers make it possible for multihomed hosts to use significantly different routes to the same destination. Therefore, multihoming can dynamically avoid…
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The Google Books Project has drawn a great deal of attention, offering the prospect of the library of the future and rendering many other library and digitizing projects apparently superfluous. To grasp the value of Google’s endeavor, we need among other things, to assess its quality. On such a vast and undocumented project, the task is challenging. In this essay, I attempt an initial…
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In communication networks, such as the Internet or mobile ad-hoc networks, the actions taken by intermediate nodes or links are typically hidden from the communicating endpoints; all the endpoints can observe is whether or not the end-to-end transmission was successful. Therefore, in the absence of incentives to the contrary, rational (i.e., selfish) intermediaries may choose to forward messages…
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The WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) recognized the need to maintain a balance between the rights of authors and the larger public interest in updating copyright law in light of advances in information and communications technologies. But the translation of this balance into the domestic laws of the United States and European Union has not been fully successful. In the DMCA, Congress achieved a…
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This paper presents the results of a pilot usability study of a novel approach to search user interfaces for bioscience journal articles. The main idea is to support search over figure captions explicitly, and show the corresponding figures directly within the search results. Participants in a pilot study expressed surprise at the idea, noting that they had never thought of search in this way.…
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In theory, multihomed Internet hosts, that is, hosts simultaneously connected to multiple Internet service providers (ISP) should see increased access capacity, be able to circumvent possible last-mile congestion problems, and experience improved end-to-end quality of service (QoS). In practice however, the advantages one can gain from multihoming are highly dependent on the path switching…
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The BioText Search Engine is a freely available Web-based application that provides biologists with new ways to access the scientific literature. One novel feature is the ability to search and browse article figures and their captions. A grid view juxtaposes many different figures associated with the same keywords, providing new insight into the literature. An abstract/title search and list view…
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In scientific literature, sentences that cite related work can be a valuable resource for applications such as summarization, synonym identification, and entity extraction. In order to determine which equivalent entities are discussed in the various citation sentences, we propose aligning the words within these sentences according to semantic similarity. This problem is partly analogous to the…
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Can shipment of one disk of software abroad give rise to worldwide liability for patent infringement? Is the Supreme Court ready to revisit the patentability of software?
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Library and Information Science (LIS) is centrally concerned with providing instruments (documents, organization, bibliographies, indexes) to enable people to become better informed through use of documents. The relationship between how people become informed and LIS intermediation, the Basic Relationship, is fundamental to the theory, practice, and professional education of LIS.
This…
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Spyware is an increasing problem. Interestingly, many programs carrying spyware honestly disclose the activities of the software, but users install the software anyway. We report on a study of software installation to assess the effectiveness of different notices for helping people make better decisions on which software to install. Our study of 222 users showed that providing a short summary…
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I/O Brush is our ongoing effort to empower people to create new expressions and meanings by painting with attributes of everyday objects and movements in their physical world. Using examples from our case studies with kindergarteners and artists, we discuss I/O Brush's most distinguishing features, its dynamic ink and history functions, and how they enable people to invent new expressions and…
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Software developers must modify their programs to keepup with changing requirements and designs. Often, aconceptually simple change can require numerous editsthat are similar but not identical, leading to errors andomissions. Researchers have designed programming environmentsto address this problem, but most of thesesystems are counter-intuitive and difficult to use.By applying a task-centered…