The Perfect Search Engine is Not Enough: A Study of Orienteering Behavior in Directed Search (2009)
Mark S. Ackerman, Christine Alvarado, David Karger, Jaime Teevan
What: Sometimes, searching for electronic information can be a complex, multistage process, where a user’s information need evolves throughout the course of the search. On the other hand, often a...
Aaron Wolin, Devin Smith, Christine Alvarado
High quality labeled data is essential for developing and evaluating sketch recognition algorithms. Unfortunately, labeling freely-drawn sketches is time-consuming and difficult, if not impossible,...
Multi-Domain Sketch Recognition (2008)
Metin Sezgin, Olya Veselova, Aaron Adler, Michael Oltmans, Christine Alvarado, Rebecca Hitchcock
In this paper, we describe a new framework for multi-domain sketch recognition which is being developed by the Design Rationale Group at the MIT AI laboratory. The framework uses a blackboard...
Senior Honors Thesis: Distributed Route Planning Using Partial Map Building (2008)
Christine Alvarado, Minor Psychology, Research Interests
The conjunction of artificial intelligence and human computer interaction. Particularly interested in the technical challenges of building intelligent interfaces, evaluating the effect and utility of...
Interfaces to mechanical design systems seriously limit the user’s creativity, while freehand drawing does not allow the user to interact with his sketch as a mechanical system. We would like to...
Sketch Recognition for Digital Circuit Design in the Classroom 1 Research Overview (2008)
Digital circuit simulation programs are powerful in education because, unlike paper, they allow students to explore and verify the behavior of a physical system. Unfortunately, learning to navigate...
Current computer-based design tools for mechanical engineers are not tailored to the early stages of design. Most designs start as pencil and paper sketches, and are entered into CAD systems only...
Paul Wais, Aaron Wolin, Christine Alvarado
Programs that can recognize students ’ hand-drawn diagrams have the potential to revolutionize education by breaking down the barriers between diagram creation and simulation. Much recent work...
Surviving the Information Explosion (2008)
Mark Ackerman, Christine Alvarado, David Karger, Jaime Teevan
The Problem: A typical person deals with a great deal of electronic information, and it can be overwhelming to keep track of it all. The problems that people have in interacting with large amounts of...
Explosion: How People Find Their Electronic Information (2007)
Christine Alvarado, Jaime Teevan, Mark S. Ackerman, David Karger
Abstract: We report on a study of how people look for information within email, files, and the Web. When locating a document or searching for a specific answer, people relied on their contextual...
Robust Recognition and Interpretation of Mechanical Design Sketches (2007)
Current computer-based design tools for mechanical engineers are not tailored to early stages of design. Most designers use pencil and paper at first, and only input their design into CAD systems...
Despite the growing number of sketch recognition systems for education, little attention has been paid to how students actually draw in practice. We examine freely-drawn digital logic diagrams...
Todd Brashears, Scott Burris, Cindy Akers, Christine Alvarado, Fred Hartmeister
This thesis project has become one of the biggest projects that I have ever taken on. I have learned a lot not only about research but I have gained life lessons that I will take with me from this...
Etcha sketches: Lessons learned from collecting sketch data (2004)
Mike Oltmans, Christine Alvarado, Randall Davis
We present ETCHA Sketches–an Experimental Test Corpus of Hand Annotated Sketches–with the goal of facilitating the development of a standard test corpus for sketch understanding research. To date...
Sketchread: a multi-domain sketch recognition engine (2004)
We present SketchREAD, a multi-domain sketch recognition engine capable of recognizing freely hand-drawn diagrammatic sketches. Current computer sketch recognition systems are difficult to construct,...
The perfect search engine is not enough: A study of orienteering behavior in directed search (2004)
Jaime Teevan, Christine Alvarado, Mark S. Ackerman, David R. Karger
This paper presents a modified diary study that investigated how people performed personally motivated searches in their email, in their files, and on the Web. Although earlier studies of directed...
The perfect search engine is not enough: A study of orienteering behavior in directed search (2004)
Jaime Teevan, Christine Alvarado, Mark S. Ackerman, David R. Karger
This paper presents a modified diary study that investigated how people performed personally motivated searches in their email, in their files, and on the Web. Although earlier studies of directed...
Sketchread: a multi-domain sketch recognition engine (2004)
We present SketchREAD, a multi-domain sketch recognition engine capable of recognizing freely hand-drawn diagrammatic sketches. Current computer sketch recognition systems are difficult to construct,...
Surviving the Information Explosion: How People Find Their Electronic Information (2003)
Alvarado, Christine, Teevan, Jaime, Ackerman, Mark S., Karger, David
We report on a study of how people look for information within email, files, and the Web. When locating a document or searching for a specific answer, people relied on their contextual knowledge of...
Surviving the Information Explosion: How People Find Their Electronic Information (2003)
Alvarado, Christine, Teevan, Jaime, Ackerman, Mark S., Karger, David
We report on a study of how people look for information within email, files, and the Web. When locating a document or searching for a specific answer, people relied on their contextual knowledge of...
Dynamically constructed bayesian networks for sketch understanding (2003)
People sketch to express their early design ideas in many domains, but current computer tools offer few advantages to designers during this sketching phase. Our goal is to construct a general...
Surviving the information explosion: how people find their electronic information (2003)
Christine Alvarado, Jaime Teevan, Mark S. Ackerman, David Karger
Abstract: We report on a study of how people look for information within email, files, and the Web. When locating a document or searching for a specific answer, people relied on their contextual...
A framework for multi-domain sketch recognition (2002)
Christine Alvarado, Michael Oltmans, All Davis
People use sketches to express and record their ideas in many domains, including mechanical engineering, software design, and information architecture. Unfortunately, most computer programs cannot...
Multi-domain sketch recognition (2002)
Tracy Hammond, Aaron Adler, Michael Oltmans, Christine Alvarado, Rebecca Hitchcock
In this paper, we describe a new framework for multi-domain sketch recognition which is being developed by the Design Rationale Group at the MIT AI laboratory. The framework uses a blackboard...
A framework for multi-domain sketch recognition (2002)
Christine Alvarado, Michael Oltmans, All Davis
People use sketches to express and record their ideas in many domains, including mechanical engineering, software design, and information architecture. Unfortunately, most computer programs cannot...
A framework for multi-domain sketch recognition (2002)
We present a multi-domain architecture for sketch recognition systems that we believe will make these systems both easier to construct and more robust in operation.
Resolving ambiguities to create a natural computer-based sketching environment (2001)
Current computer-based design tools for mechanical engineers are not tailored to the early stages of design. Most designs start as pencil and paper sketches, and are entered into CAD systems only...
All Davis, Aaron Adler, Christine Alvarado, Tracy Hammond, Rebecca Hitchcock, Michael Oltmans, ...
The Problem: Computer aided design tools built to date have typically shared three important characteristics: (i), they are intended for use relatively late in the design process, (ii) they typically...