research projects | publications | demos | CV | ishak@koltatech.com    
  Ph.D. dissertation
  Columbia University Ph.D. defended on May 8, 2007.
 
 
 Content-Aware Interaction in User Interfaces
In this thesis, I present an approach to making user interfaces content-aware by augmenting existing interaction techniques. By content-aware, I mean that they take into account various physical and semantic attributes of the content, such as size, location and type. I designed, implemented, and evaluated content-aware versions of three existing user interface techniques: content-aware transparency, content-aware scrolling, and content-aware layout. I present quantitative user performance data gathered from formal experiments, as well as qualitative questionnaire feedback to show that interaction with content-aware techniques can provide an effective advantage over techniques that are not content-aware. I also describe a testbed environment, called CASTLE, for browsing and searching textual notes, which explores how all three content-aware techniques can be coordinated.
download thesis pdf (official desposited version is here)
 
 
  research projectsback to top   
  ongoing and past research projects
 
 
Patient Notes Application using a Content-Aware User Interface
This is an interdisciplinary project with Columbia University natural language researchers and medical doctors at the New York Presbyterian Hospital. I have developed a prototype application in which physicians can peruse patient daily status notes using CASTLE, a prototype user interface that incorporates my content-aware interaction techniques, including content-aware transparency (CAT), content-aware scrolling (CAS), and content-aware layout (CAL). Using my system, a physician is presented with patient status notes written by them (or other physicians) that allows them to easily make inferences about a patient's daily progress.
CHI 2007 poster: pdf, video  |  UIST 2006 technote: pdf, video  |  UIST 2004 technote: pdf, video  |  UIST 2003 poster: pdf
 
 
Entity Workspace
This is a project I worked on at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the Summer of 2005. Entity Workspace was originally designed for Government Intelligence analysts during an investigation to sift through hundreds (or even thousands) of documents very quickly. Based on the documents the agent had already read and the entities within those documents that s/he had marked as interesting, the system would propose new documents to read based on relationships between entities and documents. Entity Workspace is now being applied to other domains, such as medicine.
ISI 2006 paper: pdf  |  CHI 2006 poster: pdf
 
 
Computational Tools for Modeling, Visualizing and Analyzing Historic and Archaeological Sites
This is an interdisciplinary project between researchers in computer science, art history, and archaeology to provide a set of tools for digitally recording and visualizing historic and archaeological sites. The tools include a database component to organize the vast amount of data, a 3D modeling component built semi-automatically by robotics experts, and a mixed-reality application to visualize the data. My work (in collaboration with Hrvoje Benko) has focused on building a collaborative environment for archaeologists to visualize the data post-excavation.
VR 2005 paper: pdf, video  |  ISMAR 2004 paper: pdf, video  |  JCDL 2004 poster: pdf  |  3DPVT 2004 paper: pdf, video
 
 
SMiRT: Segmenting Movie Objects in Real Time
This was my Master's project in collaboration with Blaine Bell. SMiRT is a mixed-initiative application that allows a user to interactively segment video objects both spatially and temporally in near real-time using interaction techniques and optical flow algorithms. After segmentation, a user can annotate the video (e.g., labeling objects with text labels) without overlapping other objects in the same scene.
 
 
 
  publicationsback to top   
  peer-reviewed publications at international conferences
 
 
Ishak, E., Feiner, S.
Content-aware layout [poster]
CHI Work-in-progress (CHI 2007)
San Jose, CA, April 2007
download pdf   |    watch video
 
 
Ishak, E., Feiner, S.
Content-aware scrolling [technote]
Proceedings of User Interface Software & Technology (UIST 2006)
Montreux, Switzerland, October 2006
download pdf   |    watch video
 
 
Bier, E., Ishak, E., Chi, E.
Entity workspace: an evidence file that aids memory, inference, and reading [paper]
Proceedings of Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI 2006)
San Diego, CA, May 2006
download pdf   
 
 
Bier, E., Ishak, E., Chi, E.
Entity quick click: rapid text copying based on automatic entity extraction [poster]
CHI Work-in-progress (CHI 2006)
Montreal, Canada, April 2006
download pdf   
 
 
Benko, H., Ishak, E., Feiner, S.
Cross-dimensional gestural interaction techniques for hybrid immersive environments [paper]
Proceedings of Virtual Reality (VR 2005)
Bonn, Germany, March 2005
download pdf   |    watch video
 
 
Benko, H., Ishak, E., Feiner, S.
Collaborative mixed reality visualization of an archaeological excavation [paper]
Proceedings of International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2004)
Arlington, VA, November 2004
download pdf   |    watch video
 
 
Ishak, E., Feiner, S.
Interacting with hidden content using content-aware free-space transparency [technote]
Proceedings of User Interface Software & Technology (UIST 2004)
Sante Fe, NM, October 2004
download pdf   |    watch video
 
 
Allen, P., Feiner, S., Troccoli, A., Benko, H., Ishak, E., Smith, B.
Seeing into the past: Creating a 3D modeling pipeline for archaeological visualization [paper]
Proceedings of 3D Data Processing, Visualization & Transmission (3DPVT 2004)
Thessaloniki, Greece, September 2004
download pdf   |    watch video
 
 
Allen, P., Feiner, S., Meskell, L., Ross, K., Troccoli, A., Smith, B., Benko, H., Ishak, E., Conlon, J.
Digitally modeling, visualizing and preserving archaeological sites [poster]
Proceedings of Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2004)
Tuscon, AZ, June 2004
download pdf   
 
 
Ishak, E., Feiner, S.
Free-space transparency: exposing hidden content through unimportant screen space [poster]
User Interface Software & Technology (UIST 2003)
Vancouver, Canada, November 2003
download pdf   
 
 
 
  demos / workshopsback to top   
  demonstrations, workshop presentations, and position papers at international conferences
 
 
Ishak, E., Benko, H., Feiner, S.
Development and evaluation of mixed reality interaction techniques [position paper]
VR Workshop on New Directions in 3D User Interfaces (3DUI 2005)
Bonn, Germany, March 2005
download pdf   
 
 
Benko, H., Ishak, E., Feiner, S.
VITA: Visual interaction tool for archaeology [demo]
International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2004)
Arlington, VA, November 2004
 
 
Benko, H., Ishak, E., Feiner. S.
VITA: Visual interaction tool for archaeology [demo]
Workshop on Effective Telepresence at ACM Multimedia 2004 (ETP 2004)
New York, NY, October 2004
download pdf   
 
 
Benko, H., Ishak, E., Feiner, S.
Cross-dimensional gestural interaction techniques for hybrid immersive environments [technical report]
Columbia University Technical Report CUCS-029-04 (CU Tech Report)
New York, NY, August 2004
download pdf   
 
 
Benko, H., Ishak, E., Feiner, S.
Collaborative visualization of an archaeological excavation [workshop]
Workshop on Collaborative Virtual Reality and Visualization (CVRV 2003)
Lake Tahoe, CA, October 2003
download pdf   
 
 
  © 2008 E. W. Ishak. All rights reserved.