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Whether figuring out where to eat in an unfamiliar city or deciding which apartment to live in, consumer generated data (ie reviews and forum posts) are often an important influence in online decision making. To make sense of these rich repositories of diverse opinions, searchers need to sift through a large number of reviews to characterize each item based on aspects that they care about. We introduce a novel system, SearchLens, where searchers build up a collection of “Lenses” that reflect their different latent interests, and compose the Lenses to find relevant items across different contexts. Based on the Lenses, SearchLens generates personalized interfaces with visual explanations that promotes transparency and enables deeper exploration. While prior work found searchers may not wish to put in effort specifying their goals without immediate and sufficient benefits, results from a controlled lab study suggest that our approach incentivized participants to express their interests more richly than in a baseline condition, and a field study showed that participants found benefits in SearchLens while conducting their own tasks. 

Developers spend a significant portion of their time searching for solutions and methods online. While numerous tools have been developed to support this exploratory process, in many cases the answers to developers’ questions involve trade-offs among multiple valid options and not just a single solution. Through interviews, we discovered that developers express a desire for help with decision-making and understanding trade-offs. Through an analysis of Stack Overflow posts, we observed that many answers describe such trade-offs. These findings suggest that tools designed to help a developer capture information and make decisions about trade-offs can provide crucial benefits for both the developers and others who want to understand their design rationale. In this work, we probe this hypothesis with a prototype system named Unakite that collects, organizes, and keeps track of information about tradeoffs and builds a comparison table, which can be saved as a design rationale for later use. Our evaluation results show that Unakite reduces the cost of capturing tradeoff-related information by 45%, and that the resulting comparison table speeds up a subsequent developer’s ability to understand the trade-offs by about a factor of three. 

The solvation shell structures of Ca 2+ in aqueous and organic solutions probed by calcium L-edge soft X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and DFT/MD simulations show the coordination number of Ca 2+ to be negatively correlated with the electrolyte concentration and the steric hindrance of the solvent molecule. In this work, the calcium L-edge soft XAS demonstrates its sensitivity to the surrounding chemical environment. Additionally, the total electron yield (TEY) mode is surface sensitive because the electron penetration depth is limited to a few nanometers. Thus this study shows its implications for future battery studies, especially for probing the electrolyte/electrode interface for electrochemical reactions under in situ /operando conditions. 

UNAKITE is a new system that supports developers in collecting, organizing, consuming, and persisting design rationales while solving problems using web resources. Understanding design rationale has widely been recognized as significant for the success of a software engineering project. However, it is currently both time and labor intensive for little immediate payoff for a developer to generate and embed a useful design rationale in their code. Under this cost structure, there is very little effective tool support to help developers keep track of design rationales. UNAKITE addresses this challenge for some design decisions by changing the cost structure: developers are incentivized to make decisions using UNAKITE’s collecting and organizing mechanisms as it makes tracking and deciding between alternatives easier than before; the structure thus generated is automatically embedded in the code as the design rationale when the developer copies sample code into their existing code. In a preliminary usability study, developers found UNAKITE to be usable for capturing design rationales and effective for interpreting the rationale of others.