A compositional reasoning system for executing nonmonotonic theories of reasoning

In this paper the framework DESIRE for the design of compositional reasoning systems and multi‐agent systems was applied to build a generic nonmonotonic reasoning system. The outcome is a general reasoning system that can be used to model different nonmonotonic reasoning formalisms and that can be executed by a generic execution mechanism. The main advantages of using DESIRE (for example, compared to a direct implementation in a programming language such as PROLOG) are that the design is generic and has a transparent compositional structure, and the explicit declarative specification of both the static and dynamic aspects of the nonmonotonic reasoning processes, including their control. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

主动知识辅助系统中制动蹄设计知识库的构建

针对高额的设计成本和对人才资源的竞争影响高端CAE技术使用的现状,用汽车制动系统中制动蹄的设计为例,将专家设计领域的知识结构化分层,用产生式规则表示法和框架表示法相结合的混合表达方式构建相应设计领域知识库。通过"主动的机-人知识辅助系统"为设计人员快速提供欠缺的经验知识,使设计人员能够快速地利用知识,而不是学习知识,实现设计知识和经验的高效利用,缩短设计人员的预学习过程,降低了CAE的应用门槛,达到高端CAE技术低起点应用的目的。     

Failure in the technical user-interface design process

Despite readily accessible guidelines, user interfaces are often inappropriate for their users. How is it that the technical design process fails to take proper account of human factors? This paper presents a catalogue of plausible reasons, which might be used to promote awareness of these issues amongst designers. Unless human issues are made explicit, the human impact of computer systems will be unpredictable, and systems will generally have to rely for their effectiveness on the enforced adaptability and misplaced respect for technology in their users.     

Designing context-sensitive systems: An integrated approach

Context-sensitive systems (CSS) are computer systems that use context to provide more relevant services or information to support users performing their tasks, where context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation in which something exists or occurs. CSS demand that designers consider new aspects and challenges in comparison to traditional applications. In a preliminary experiment, we observed that developers find it difficult to include the concept of context in their applications. However, only few approaches offer integrated domain-independent support on developing CSS. This paper presents an integrated approach to assist the design of CSS. The originality of this work lies on the proposed way of thinking about context, on the proposed context metamodel and on the specification of a process for designing CSS. The metamodel supports building context models by making explicit the concepts related to context manipulation and by separating the context structure model from the CSS behavior model. The design process details the main activities related to context specification and the design of CSS, providing a systematic way to execute these tasks. This work also advances the state of the art related to the understanding of the concept of context (and its associated concepts). Three experimental studies were conducted to evaluate the proposal: its instantiation in the design of a context-sensitive Expert Recommender System, its usage by distinct designers on their CSS projects, and a qualitative evaluation of the overall proposal by experienced CSS developers. These studies showed a good acceptance of our approach and indicated the feasibility of using it on real projects.     

Involving users in expert system development

Abstract: The ultimate criterion of success for interactive expert systems is that they will be used, and used to effect, by individuals other than the system developers. A key ingredient of success in most systems is involving users in the specification and development of systems as they are being built. However, until recently, system designers have paid little attention to ascertaining user needs and to developing systems with corresponding functionality and appropriate interfaces to match those requirements. Although the situation is beginning to change, many developers do not know how to go about involving users, or else tackle the problem in an inadequate way. This paper discusses the need for user involvement and considers why many developers are still not involving users in an optimal way. It looks at the different ways in which users can be involved in the development process and describes how to select appropriate techniques and methods for studying users. Finally, it discusses some of the problems inherent in involving users in expert system development, and recommends an approach which incorporates both ethnographic analysis and formal user testing.     

User bias in online trust systems: aligning the system designers’ intentions with the users’ expectations

The advent of social networks opened a myriad opportunities for merging the social character of trust with the technical possibilities offered by the Internet and its availability as a mobile service. While most of the computational trust models aim to detect trustworthy entities, much less attention is paid to how these models are perceived by the users who are the core of the system. This paper delves into the workings of online trust systems under user bias and analyses the user behaviour through biases defined by Prospect theory. By performing empirical study on an existing system, we are able to demonstrate that there is a huge discrepancy between the aim of implementation of the online trust models and the users’ perception of those models. Understanding of this relation by the system designers can reduce complexity and improve the user experience and the system performance. The results imply that the tendency of the users to exhibit cognitive biases is not only the cause, but also the effect from the trust system design. These results and the analysis are then used to propose to the system designers a methodology for user bias identification and mitigation in the form of a Choice architecture for trust systems.     

The ALIVE system: wireless, full-body interaction with autonomous agents

The cumbersome nature of wired interfaces often limits the range of application of virtual environments. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of a novel system, called ALIVE, which allows unencumbered full-body interaction between a human participant and a rich graphical world inhabited by autonomous agents. Based on results obtained with thousands of users, the paper argues that this kind of system can provide more complex and very different experiences than traditional virtual reality systems. The ALIVE system significantly broadens the range of potential applications of virtual reality systems; in particular, the paper discusses novel applications in the area of training and teaching, entertainment, and digital assistants or interface agents. We give an overview of the methods used in the implementation of the existing ALIVE systems.     

Adapting paper prototyping for designing user interfaces for multiple display environments

A multiple display environment (MDE) networks personal and shared devices to form a virtual workspace, and designers are just beginning to grapple with the challenges of developing interfaces tailored for these environments. To develop effective interfaces for MDEs, designers must employ methods that allow them to rapidly generate and test alternative designs early in the design process. Paper prototyping offers one promising method, but needs to be adapted to effectively simulate the use of multiple displays and allow testing with groups of users. In this paper, we share experiences from two projects in which paper prototyping was utilized to explore interfaces for MDEs. We identify problems encountered when applying the traditional method, describe how these problems were overcome, and distill our experiences into recommendations that others can draw upon. By following our recommendations, designers need only make minor modifications to the existing method to better realize benefits of paper prototyping for MDEs.     

实时图案协同设计中冲突问题的研究

在Internet环境中,允许多个用户同时对同一图案的任意绘图区进行设计是图案协同设计系统应满足的基本要求．然而不同设计者在协同设计过程中由于设计意图的不同而引起的操作冲突是不可避免的,因此冲突问题是图案协同设计系统的关键问题之一．着重讨论了冲突的定义,冲突的多种避免方式,提出了高效的冲突检测算法和一种能保护用户协同设计意图的冲突解决方法——基于冲突操作锁定的冲突解决方法．这些方法和算法的实现使得在分布式计算环境下协同设计的冲突问题得到了较完善的解决．     

TAPAS: A tangible End-User Development tool supporting the repurposing of Pervasive Displays

These days we are witnessing a spread of many new digital systems in public spaces featuring easy to use and engaging interaction modalities, such as multi-touch, gestures, tangible, and voice. This new user-centered paradigm — known as the NUI — aims to provide a more natural and rich experience to end users; this supports its adoption in many ubiquitous domains, as it naturally holds for Pervasive Displays: these systems are composed of variously-sized displays and support many-to-many interactions with the same public screens at the same time. Due to their public and moderated nature, users need an easy way of adapting them to heterogeneous usage contexts in order to support their long-term adoption. In this paper, we propose an End-User Development approach to this problem introducing TAPAS, a system that combines a tangible interaction with a puzzle metaphor, allowing users to create workflows on a Pervasive Display to satisfy their needs; its design and visual syntax stem from a study we carried out with designers, whose findings are also part of this work. We then carried out a preliminary evaluation of our system with second year university students and interaction designers, gathering useful feedback to improve TAPAS and employ it in many other domains.     

Object-oriented specification of automated manufacturing systems

The design of automated manufacturing systems (AMSs) requires an effective system specification that helps designers to deal with the changes in system requirements. This paper presents an object-oriented rule-based methodology for the specification of AMSs, which extends the capability of the existing object-oriented specification methods to support system integration and the explicit representation of control policies. The methodology is characterised by the use of rule-based modelling techniques to specify object behaviours in terms of processes. The application of the methodology is illustrated by the specification of a flexible manufacturing system.     

利用UML映射工具实现系统可靠性建模

许多可靠性建模技术是基于可靠性框图、故障树、Markov链等表示方法,但系统架构师、产品经理和软件开发者往往对这些表示方法不太熟悉,他们通常使用统一建模语言(UML)来对系统进行描述,因此系统设计者不得不面对设计过程与可靠性建模间的缺陷。为了弥补这一缺陷,本文提出了一个利用UML映射工具实现可靠性建模的方法,同时以实际的例子演示了该方法的可行性。     

Designing with Care: The Future of Pervasive Healthcare

Humane care—which is an important design paradigm relevant for pervasive healthcare—means designing systems with care, keeping in mind both users and other stakeholders. Understanding human values is a key factor in creating any successful healthcare application and is essential to avoid dehumanizing and stigmatizing users. By considering human values, designers and developers can create pervasive healthcare applications that better fit users' needs and desires. The Designing with Care 09 workshop aimed to bring together researchers, designers, and practitioners to share their experiences with incorporating values into the design of pervasive healthcare systems and to help understand the sensitive issues involved in designing for healthcare. Based on the findings from the workshop, the present state of the art is discussed, and a research agenda is presented.     

RASES: A database supported framework for structured model base management

Structured management of model base has placed demands on some kind of computer based frameworks with highly structured formalisms. This paper proposes a new framework, called the relational algebraic system entity structure (RASES), which is based on the system entity structure (SES) formalism and the relational algebra (RA) formalism. These formalisms provide a conceptual basis for the structured model base management. Within the framework, structural knowledge of a system is represented in a hierarchical structure and saved in a database. Furthermore, several operations can be formulated in terms of relational algebra which can be coded in a standard query language such as the SQL. The framework can be easily implemented on, and fully utilize the functionality of, relational database management system (RDBMS). With the help of the implemented framework, simulation models can be systematically synthesized from the models in the model base through the following processes. First, a family of hierarchical structures of a system is organized in the form of entity structure by the entity structuring process. Then, candidate models of the system which meet design objectives are synthesized from the entity structure through the pruning process. Finally, designers can conduct appropriate experiment with the models for design verification and performance measure.     

Towards a communication model applied to the interface design process

The design of computational artifacts involves many communication acts occurring through different channels; usability tests, for example, have been used as a main communication channel between designers and users. Other channels used during the design process include requirement analysis, scenario construction, prototyping, etc. This work takes the Westley and MacLehan communication model and projects it into the context of interactive artifact design, resulting in a model of fractal nature. Some channels already present during the design process fit in well with the model we are proposing. It also reveals that other channels have not been explored in the global process of communication. Thus, we show how a semiotic-based analysis can unify techniques, methods and tools that support design, as well as make explicit the necessary interactions among designers, users and computers through different channels.     

An Exploratory Study: Supporting Collaborative Multimedia Systems Design

Multimedia systems design generally requires a collaborative effort from a group of designers with a variety of backgrounds and tasks, such as content experts, instructional designers, media specialists, users, and so forth. However, currently available design tools on the market are mainly designed for a single user. Tools intended to support a collaborative design process should coordinate independent activities of individual designers.This research investigated support for work groups engaged in designing multimedia systems. Specifically, it discussed a new collaborative design environment, called the KMS (Knowledge Management System)-based design environment, in which multimedia designers could share their design knowledge freely. Through two experimental groups, the research investigated impacts of the KMS-based design environment on their collaborative design activities (knowledge creating, knowledge securing, knowledge distributing, and knowledge retrieving activities). The research findings showed that the KMS-based design environment was a promising environment for collaborative multimedia systems design. More specifically, the research findings indicated that the KMS-based design environment supported creating, securing, and retrieving knowledge, but it did not support distributing knowledge. In addition, the research found that the social interactions between group members played important roles in the success of the collaborative multimedia systems design and that the KMS-based design environment did not support the socialization of group members. Furthermore, the research found that the inability of the KMS-based design environment to support the socialization was linked to its low performance level in supporting the knowledge distributing activity. The research explored the desired features of a collaborative support tool for multimedia systems design.     

一种协同并发控制策略的设计与实现

协同图形编辑系统使得地域分散的一个设计群体借助计算机及其网络,通过协调与协作来共同完成一项任务。在协同图形编辑系统中,并发控制是实现设计者之间自然、高效地协同工作的关键技术。本文针对面向图形对象的协同图形编辑系统,设计了一种在混合式系统结构下的基于协同服务器的并发控制策略,有效地维护了各站点副本的一致性,很好地解决了针对图形设计的并发控制问题。