An approach towards the design of intelligent man-machine interfaces used in process control

This paper is related to improvements carried out n the field of human-machine communication in complex industrial processes, using the concept of the ‘intelligent’ interface. Following a review of literature on this subject, an ‘intelligent’ interface design based on ergonomical concepts is described. Finally, we present our approach to the design of an ‘intelligent’ interface. The Decisional Module of Imagery (D.M.I.) as it is called, is based on two models: a task model and a user model. The D.M.I.'s structure and its integration in an experimental platform are described in the last part of this paper.     

Treatment of skew boundary conditions in finite element analysis

Finite element analyses in both structural and geotechnical applications sometimes require the freedom directions at certain nodes to differ from the global Cartesian directions. Examples of this include modelling of oblique interface behaviour and implementation of ‘skew’ boundary conditions. A simple method is described for performing the transformations at the element level, and a FORTRAN 77 subroutine is included to perform the operations.     

The challenge of interface design for communication theory: from interaction metaphor to contexts of discovery

Those who study interface design still have not resolved the issue of whether the computer is a passive medium or a communicative participant with which we can hope to ‘engage in conversation’. The authors think that this controversy reflects an inadequate philosophy of interface design, which cannot account for what purpose a medium serves in a human communication. In a short history of humancomputer interface research, we trace the development of this philosophy through three generations of computer interface technology and find that its failure lies in the conceptual limitations of its driving concept of interaction.

Just as the concept of interaction provided the transition from the past (command-line interface) to the present (desktop metaphor interface), perhaps, the concept of engagement can provide the transition from our present understanding of the ‘interactive desktop’ interface to multimedia's ‘contexts of discovery’.

The development of multimedia gives interface designers the ultimate challenge to develop interface technology that will simulate human-to-human communication. Should human communication theory be able to treat the conceptual deficiencies of interface design philosophy? The authors find fundamental challenges here and briefly indicate what Charles S. Peirce's semiotic might offer as an age-old remedy.     

A vapor extraction teaching module based on AIRFLOW/SVE

This is the fourth in a series of papers exploring the application of professional quality software to environmental engineering education. Jennings (1997) discussed how the differences between ‘professional’ and ‘educational’ software should translate into software attributes and illustrated many of these attributes using the bioremediation package BIO1D (Srinivasan and Mercer, 1989). Jennings and Kuhlman (1997) illustrated more of these attributes using the MATHCAD 6.0 (Mathsoft, Inc., 1995) electronic book air pollution modeling package GAUSSIAN MODELS 1.1 (Zannetti, 1995). Most recently, Mesania and Jennings (1997) illustrated the power of a ‘pseudo-CAD’ user interface using the landfill hydraulic analysis program Help Model for Windows—HMfW v2.05 (Grace Dearborne, Inc., 1993). This paper concentrates on the power of using a true CAD user interface. This is done using the AIRFLOW/SVE (Guiguer et al., 1995) which evaluates vapor extraction soil remediation. Example simulations are presented to illustrate the power of CAD interfaces to express complex problems and to present results in easily comprehended graphics. Examples are also presented to illustrate how this package can help students identify successful applications of vapor extraction remediation.     

HCI ‘Intraface Model’ for System Design

We outline an alternative model of the interface in HCI, the ‘intraface’, in response to design issues arising from navigational and learning problems in hypertext domains. Ours is a model of general application to computer systems. It is composed of four key elements, identifiable within a dynamic interconnected context. These are the user; his/her interests; the tools employed and the ‘ensemble’ of representations brought to bear. In this paper we sketch the present shortcomings of HCI design before outlining the background for the model which draws upon two themes in contemporary psychology, conversational analysis and ‘affordance’ realist theories in perception. This framework allows for the development of principles of cooperation, user engagement and learning in HCI environments.     

What Semiotics can and cannot do for HCI

Semiotics is ‘the mathematics of the humanities’ in the sense that it provides an abstract language covering a diversity of special sign-usage (language, pictures, movies, theatre, etc.). In this capacity, Semiotics is helpful for bringing insights from older media to the task of interface design, and for defining the special characteristics of the computer medium. However, Semiotics is not limited to interface design but may also contribute to the proper design of program texts and yield predictions about the interaction between computer systems and their context of use.     

Heuristic approach to allocation of trucks in a transportation system

This paper considers the problem of how luggages should be assign to each truck for the transportation system consists of a depot, a fixed area and two types of luggages, called schedule problem. The main purpose of this paper is to propose a procedure for the problem subject to keep the balance of work loads among truck drivers. The procedure is based on 3 (heuristic) rules for replacing the addresses of each luggage with the ‘conventional address,’ converting size of each luggage into ‘weight’ and introducing a measure to keep the balance of work loads. The procedure consists of three stages according to ‘priority’ of the types of luggages. A case study is presented that demonstrate the practical usefulness of the procedure.     

Computer-aided ergonomics: a case study of incorporating ergonomics analyses into workplace design

One of the primary goals of computer-aided ergonomics is to develop software tools that allow ergonomics information to be accessed at the earliest stages of design. This case study discusses a PC-based software program that allows a designer to quantify a worker's biomechanical risk for injury based on a proposed workplace design. The program couples an established software tool for biomechanical analysis, the Three-Dimensional Static Strength Prediction Program (3DSSPP), with a widely used computer-aided design software package, AutoCAD. The use of this "3DSSPP/AutoCAD interface" in the proactive analysis of an automotive assembly task is described and the results compared with an independent assessment using observations of workers performing the same task. Both studies yield similar conclusions, suggesting that proactive use of software such as the 3DSSPP/AutoCAD interface may be a valid tool in evaluating proposed workplace designs. In this context, issues in the analysis of workplace designs regarding the use of supporting ergonomic tools, assumptions, and posture selection are discussed.     

An ethnographic, action-based approach to human experience in virtual environments

This paper addresses a sensitive issue, of presence experienced by people interacting with a virtual environment (VE). Understanding ‘presence’, both theoretically and empirically, is important for designers interested in building effective computer-mediated environments for learning and work activities. The concept of presence has been treated mostly as a state of mind, to be investigated through ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ measurement devices. The authors propose to add a different approach, which can address presence as an action-based process. This approach considers presence as the ongoing result of the actions performed in an environment and the local and cultural resources deployed by actors. In this sense, ‘presence’ can be captured by monitoring the sequence of participants’ actions and the aspects of the environment that are involved in this process; discourse/interaction analysis represents a fitting method for this goal. Sequences of interaction with a virtual library are used to illustrate some core aspects of an ethnographic, action-based approach to presence, such as the action possibilities envisaged by participants, the configuration of the virtual objects, the norms that regulate the interaction, the resources that are imported in the VE. These aspects are a necessary step to understand users’ presence in the VE and to plan consequent interventions to ameliorate the design of the interface.     

‘Best’ for whom?: the tension between ‘best practice’ ERP packages and diverse epistemic cultures in a university context

The idea that so-called ‘best’ business practices can be transferred to organizations when they purchase enterprise resource planning (ERP) software packages is a major selling point of these packages. Yet recent research has illustrated a gap between the espoused theory of a best practice solution and the theory-in-use experienced by those who install software with such a design. As researchers begin to examine the difficult process by which organizations recast the best practices model handed down to them by consultancies and software vendors in an effort to make the software ‘work for them’ in practice, it is equally important that we begin to understand the reasons that such a gap exists. To this end, we analyze the strategic partnership between a multinational software vendor and a university who together designed a ‘best practice’ ERP package for the higher education industry. Through the theoretical lens of ‘epistemic cultures’ we argue that in organizational contexts made up of more than one epistemic culture, the use of a best practice model will be problematic because, by definition, the model mandates one epistemological position through the software design. This is counter to a university's loosely coupled organizational form.     

Designing for operations: Towards a sociotechnical systems and cognitive engineering approach to concurrent engineering

In the practice of concurrent engineering, the factors that are considered early in the product design process include manufacturability, assembly, and cost. A set of issues that are not typically considered revolve around the operational requirements for human workers in the manufacturing system. What tasks will human workers accomplish? How will these tasks be organized and coordinated? What information and resources need to be shared? Will the workers have a coherent set of job responsibilities? How should the manufacturing environment be designed to support effective work practices? How can a manufacturing process be designed that also informs organizational structure and takes into account the quality of working life?

The field of sociotechnical systems theory (STS) focuses on exactly these kinds of issues. Rather than subscribing to the usual view of technological determinism — that a complex human-machine system is designed solely with respect to optimization of technical criteria — the goal of STS is to jointly optimize both human and technological considerations in system design and operation. The spirit of STS has much in common with recent work in cognitive systems engineering that advocates the design of joint cognitive systems in which machines serve as flexible, context-sensitive resources for human problem solving. Furthermore, a focus on design teams necessitates the study of the relationship between group work and technology as studied in the field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). This paper briefly reviews current research in sociotechnical systems theory, computer-supported cooperative work, and cognitive systems engineering and proposes a framework for integrating operational concerns into the concurrent engineering process. Relevance to industry

To be competitive, organizations need to effectively manage human and technological resources. A key issue is the nature of the information and technological infrastructure that both enables and supports ‘best practice’ across the enterprise. This paper describes such an approach in the context of the ‘operational enterprise’ and provides both a philosophical stance as well as specific examples of software support.     

Automated High Throughput Screening of Fluorescent Imaging Plate Reader (FLIPR) Assays Using Assay Platform™ Integrated with Activity Base for ‘on the fly’ Compound Reconfirmation

Advances in the field of automation have meant hitherto complex manual cell-based assays can now be automated. These improvements have brought significant enhancements in throughput, data fidelity and consistency, and allowed a reallocation of constrained resources.Building upon these improvements, we have linked our automated cell-based screening system, Assay Platform™, to Activity Base (IDBS), a software package designed to automate the analysis of HTS data. Customisation of this package has resulted in software that can identify ‘active’ compounds and re-pick them ‘on the fly’ from the original compound plates for triplicate re-testing without operator intervention.Based on an operator initially defining ‘normal’ parameters for assay activity in Activity Base, combined with an automated quality control software module that checks data fidelity, wells containing ‘active’ compounds can be re-picked and re-tested at the end of an automated screening run. Automating cell-based assays has significantly improved productivity, and, with the synergism of Activity Base, has given us greater power to complete each screening run and report ‘active’ compounds to Chemistry more rapidly. This article presents our approach to the automation of cell-based Fluorescent Imaging Plate Reader (FLIPR) screening together with automated active re-test confirmation using Activity Base.     

Crimes analysis software: ‘pins in maps’, clustering and Bayes net prediction

The OVER Project was a collaboration between West Midlands Police, UK, the Centre for Adaptive Systems, and Psychology Division, from the University of Sunderland. The Project was developed primarily to assist the Police with the high volume crime, burglary from dwelling houses. A developed software system enables the trending of historical data, the testing of ‘short term’ hunches, and the development of ‘medium’ and long term’ strategies to burglary and crime reduction, based upon victim, offender, location and details of victimisations. The software utilises mapping and visualisation tools and is capable of a range of sophisticated predictions, tying together statistical techniques with theories from forensic psychology and criminology.

The statistical methods employed (including multi-dimensional scaling, binary logistic regression) and ‘data-mining’ technologies (including neural networks) are used to investigate the impact of the types of evidence available and to determine the causality in this domain. The final predictions on the likelihood of burglary are calculated by combining all of the varying sources of evidence into a Bayesian belief network. This network is embedded in the developed software system, which also performs data cleansing and data transformation for presentation to the developed algorithms.

It is important that derived statistics from the software and predictions are interpretable by the intended users of the decision support system, namely Police sector managers, and this paper includes some of the design decisions based upon the forensic psychology and criminology literature, including the graphical representation of geographic data and presentation of results of analyses.     

Real-time integrated model for visual perception and fuzzy control

Current state-of-the-art security systems incorporate ‘passive’ and/or ‘human’ elements, the effectiveness of which can only be measured by their ability to ‘deter’ intruders. However, rapidly changing economic and cultural conditions have weakened the strengths associated with such systems. In the not too distant future, the need for an ‘active’ security system will become necessary in order to reduce the onslaught of crime.

This paper presents a conceptual basis for the incorporation of artificial intelligence concepts in the design and implementation of ‘active’ security systems. Specifically, the paper discusses issues pertaining to a real-time model for visual perception and tracking of possible intruders.     

Consumer-oriented versus technology-oriented systems: designing services for people

Current computer systems providing consumer services seem to be designed primarily on ‘technology-oriented’ thinking, based on the ‘efficiency’ and the operating methods of the computer. To be of benefit to a wider variety of consumers, the system design may have to reflect a more ‘consumer-oriented’ approach, based on factors such as the needs, preferences, skills and knowledge of the user. This article demonstrates the differences between user evaluations of two computer systems designed to help in house-hunting, modelled on (a) consumer-oriented, and (b) technology-oriented approaches. Although particularly relevant to consumer systems, the article may have important implications for consumer and public services in general.     

The ergonomics of information presentation

This article is restricted to the human aspects of information presentation. Clearly any practical problem of display design must be solved in the context of current instrumentation and the final choice may well be dominated by relative availability and cost. It could be argued that ergonomics as a technology distinct from the human sciences must incorporate these wider factors but it seems justifiable, for the present purpose, to use the term ergonomics to signify an approach to information presentation based entirely on the limitations and advantages of the human operator.

This article is based on a keynote address to the IEE Conference on ‘Display’ at Loughborough University, 7–10 September 1971.     

A natural language interpreter for plate girder design

One of the major problems in developing computeraided design software is the establishment of effective man-machine communication. This paper describes a computer-aided plate girder design software package and its man-machine interface using natural language processing techniques. The natural language interpreter takes advantage of the user's communication and technical skills and accepts commands in the user's native language. The user can verify the correct interpretation of the commands from the responsive graphic display of the design.     

SUPRENUM: A trendsetter in modern supercomputer development

The designer of a numerical supercomputer is confronted with fundamental design decisions stemming from some basic dichotomies in supercomputer technology and architecture. On the side of the hardware technology there exists the dichotomy between the use of very high-speed circuitry or very large-scale integrated circuitry. On the side of the architecture there exists the dichotomy between the SIMD vector machine and the MIMD multiprocessor architecture. In the latter case, the ‘nodes’ of the system may communicate through shared memory, or each node has only private memory, and communication takes place through the exchange of messages. All these design decisions have implications with respect to performance, cost-effectiveness, software complexity, and fault-tolerance.

In the paper the various dichotomies are discussed and a rationale is provided for the decision to realize the SUPRENUM supercomputer, a large ‘number cruncher’ with 5 Gflops peak performance, in the form of a massively parallel MIMD/SIMD multicomputer architecture. In its present incorporation, SUPRENUM is configurable to up to 256 nodes, where each node is a pipeline vector machine with 20 Mflops peak performance, IEEE double precision. The crucial issues of such an architecture, which we consider the trendsetter for future numerical supercomputer architecture in general, are on the hardware side the need for a bottleneck-free interconnection structure as well as the highest possible node performance obtained with the highest possible packaging density, in order to accommodate a node on a single circuit board. On the side of the system software the design goal is to obtain an adequately high degree of operational safety and data security with minimum software overhead. On the side of the user an appropriate program development environment must be provided. Last but not least, the system must exhibit a high degree of fault tolerance, if for nothing else but for the sake of obtaining a sufficiently high MTBF.

In the paper a detailed discussion of the hardware and software architecture of the SUPRENUM supercomputer, whose design is based upon the considerations discussed, is presented. A largely bottleneck-free interconnection structure is accomplished in a hierarchical manner: the machine consists of up to 16 ‘clusters’, and each cluster consists of 16 working ‘nodes’ plus some organisational nodes. The node is accommodated on a single circuit board; its architecture is based on the principle of data structure architecture explained in the paper. SUPRENUM is strictly a message-based system; consequently, the local node operating system has been designed to handle a secured message exchange with a considerable degree of hardware support and with the lowest possible software overhead. SUPRENUM is organized as a distributed system—a prerequisite for the high degree of fault tolerance required; therefore, there exists no centralized global operating system. The paper concludes with an outlook on the performance limits of a future supercomputer architecture of the SUPRENUM type.     

FORTRAN routines with optional arguments

In designing a general purpose subroutine package to solve a class of problems, one often has to write subroutines with a large number of arguments. Although these arguments are required to cover a range of possibilities, many of these arguments have some commonly occurring values. The user is thus burdened with supplying a long list of arguments and making sure that the number and types match. An alternate solution is to write such subroutines in assembly language so that they could have a variable number of arguments. This approach is expensive and eliminates a large class of program designers who do not and do not want to know assembler language. This paper describes a facility which enables these program designers to write their routines completely in a higher level language (FORTRAN) and yet enjoy the ‘luxury’ of having a variable number of arguments in the calling sequence.     

Boundary matching algorithm for connected component labelling using linear quadtrees

A computationally fast top-down recursive algorithm for connected component labelling using linear quadtrees is presented. The input data structure used is a linear quadtree representing only black leaf nodes. The boundary matching approach used ensures that at most two adjacencies of any black leaf node are considered. Neighbour searching is carried out within restricted subsets of the input quadtree. The time and space complexities of the algorithm are O(Bn) and O(B) respectively for a linear quadtree with B black leaves constructed from a binary array of size 2ⁿ × 2ⁿ. Simulations show the algorithm to be twice as fast as an existing algorithm that uses an identical input data structure. The top-down algorithm presented can also be used to efficiently generate a linear quadtree representing all nodes — ‘grey’, ‘black’ and ‘white’ — in preorder when given an input linear quadtree representing only ‘black’ leaf nodes. The boundary matching algorithm is computationally fast and has low static and dynamic storage costs, making it useful for applications where linear quadtrees are held in main memory.