Contributions of Dichotomic View of plasticity to seamlessly embed accessibility and adaptivity support in user interfaces

Recent legal changes have increased the need for developing accessible user interfaces in computer-based systems. In this sense, previously existing user interfaces are intended to be modified and new user interfaces are intended to be designed taking accessibility guidelines into account. Typically, model-based approaches have been used when developing accessible user interfaces or redefining existing ones. But the use of static models leads to the development of not dynamically adaptable user interfaces. Dynamic adaptation in accessible user interfaces is important due to the fact that interaction difficulties on people with disabilities may change through use. In this paper, we present some contributions that can be obtained from the application of the Dichotomic View of plasticity in the personalization of user interfaces. With the double perspective defined in this approach, it is intended to go further from a mere adaptation to certain user stereotypes, offering also a dynamic support to real limitations or difficulties users can encounter during the use of the UI. This goal is achieved analyzing user logs by an inference engine that dynamically infers modifications in the user interface to adjust it to varying user needs. A case study is presented in order to show how the guidelines and software support defined in the Dichotomic View of plasticity can be applied to develop a component for a particular system aimed at performing dynamic user interface adaptations with accessibility purposes. This approach includes some innovations that make it different from conventional adaptable mechanisms applied to accessibility in some important aspects.     

Virtual user models for the elderly and disabled for automatic simulated accessibility and ergonomy evaluation of designs

This paper presents a framework for automatic simulated accessibility and ergonomy testing of virtual prototypes of products using virtual user models. The proposed virtual user modeling framework describes virtual humans focusing on the elderly and people with disabilities. Geometric, kinematic, physical, behavioral and cognitive aspects of the user affected by possible disabilities are examined, in order to create virtual user models able to represent people with various functional limitations. Hierarchical task and interaction models are introduced, in order to describe the user’s capabilities at multiple levels of abstraction. The use of alternative ways of a user task’s execution, exploiting different modalities and assistive devices, is supported by the proposed task analysis. Experimental results on the accessibility and ergonomy evaluation of different workplace designs for the use of a telephone and a stapler show how the proposed framework can be put into practice and demonstrate its significant potential.     

Sisl: Several Interfaces, Single Logic

Modern interactive services such as information and e-commerce services are becoming increasingly more flexible in the types of user interfaces they support. These interfaces incorporate automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding and include graphical user interfaces on the desktop and web-based interfaces using applets and HTML forms. To what extent can the user interface software be decoupled from the service logic software (the code that defines the essential function of a service)? Decoupling of user interface from service logic directly impacts the flexibility of services, or how easy they are to modify and extend. To explore these issues, we have developed Sisl, an architecture and domain-specific language for designing and implementing interactive services with multiple user interfaces. A key principle underlying Sisl is that all user interfaces to a service share the same service logic. Sisl provides a clean separation between the service logic and the software for a variety of interfaces, including Java applets, HTML pages, speech-based natural language dialogue, and telephone-based voice access. Sisl uses an event-based model of services that allows service providers to support interchangeable user interfaces (or add new ones) to a single consistent source of service logic and data. As part of a collaboration between research and development, Sisl is being used to prototype a new generation of call processing services for a Lucent Technologies switching product.     

User value design for cloud courseware system

A cloud learning environment enables an enriched learning experience compared to conventional methods of learning. Employing a value-sensitive approach, we undertook theoretical and empirical analyses to explore the values that influence potential users’ adoption of cloud courseware, by integrating cognitive motivations and user values as primary determining factors. We found that users’ intentions and behaviours are largely influenced by their perceptions of what is valuable about the cloud courseware in terms of sociability, learnability, and usability. These evaluations were found to be significant antecedents of cloud-computing intentions. This study makes a contribution to theory development as our model extends existing technology acceptance models and can be used to design user interfaces and promote the acceptance of cloud computing. For practical applications, the study findings can be used by industries promoting cloud services to increase user acceptance by addressing user values and incorporating them into cloud-computing design.     

Universal Remote Console-based next-generation accessible television

This paper presents a new approach to make current and future television universally accessible. The proposed approach provides a means of universal accessibility both for remotely operating the TV set and for interacting with online services delivered through the TV. This proposal is based on the ISO/IEC 24752 “Universal Remote Console” (URC) standard. This standard defines an abstract user interface layer called the “user interface socket” and allows the development of pluggable (plug-in) user interfaces for any type of user and any control device. The proposed approach lays the foundation for the development of advanced user interfaces that can be interacted within various modalities. Different prototypes have been developed based on this approach and tested with end users. The user tests have shown this approach to be a viable option for the proposed scenarios. Based on the experience gathered with the prototypes, recommendations and implementation options are suggested for commercial adoption.     

Evaluating the effectiveness of customers’ communication experiences with online retailers – A study of e-mortgages

Retailers increasingly use the Internet for supporting customer interaction in the delivery of products and services online, whilst simultaneously displacing direct communication to a seller with ‘faceless’ technology. Research has tended to marginalise the importance of this communication change, possibly because of the lack of appropriate models for evaluating communication effectiveness. This paper therefore seeks to develop and apply such an evaluative model, which is underpinned by communication theory. The context of application is e-mortgage lending – based on the selection of two banks’ interfaces – as evidence suggests that this type of e-commerce activity presents difficulties in electronic communication where, for example, the customer need for face-to-face mortgage advice prevails. Findings from the model’s application reveal that whilst users respond socially to the interfaces, a number of communication problems can be identified by theme. Reflection is provided on the model’s usefulness for evaluating the effectiveness of customers’ online communication experiences.     

Design Strategies for Idle Screens of Smartphones Based on Service Usages

Linking specific smartphone services to user characteristics can inform design guidelines and improve the competitive edge of smartphone models. A key component in the design of the user interface is the idle screen, as it is the starting point for all smartphone services. The focus of this study is to elicit insights for establishing strategies for improving idle screen design by relating user behaviors and smartphone services. Benefit segmentation is employed for users’ responses to questionnaire items about service usages. Smartphone services are identified through a factor analysis and user segments are obtained by a cluster analysis. The findings can contribute to classifying smartphone services according to users’ behaviors and preferences for them and to suggesting a design alternative for idle screens, depending on the features of user groups for improved market segmentation.     

Teallach: a model-based user interface development environment for object databases

Model-based user interface development environments show promise for improving the productivity of user interface developers, and possibly for improving the quality of developed interfaces. While model-based techniques have previously been applied to the area of database interfaces, they have not been specifically targeted at the important area of object database applications. Such applications make use of models that are semantically richer than their relational counterparts in terms of both data structures and application functionality. In general, model-based techniques have not addressed how the information referenced in such applications is manifested within the described models, and is utilised within the generated interface itself. This lack of experience with such systems has led to many model-based projects providing minimal support for certain features that are essential to such data intensive applications, and has prevented object database interface developers in particular from benefiting from model-based techniques. This paper presents the Teallach model-based user interface development environment for object databases, describing the models it supports, the relationships between these models, the tool used to construct interfaces using the models and the generation of Java programs from the declarative models. Distinctive features of Teallach include comprehensive facilities for linking models, a flexible development method, an open architecture, and the generation of running applications based on the models constructed by designers.     

HOPE: a hybrid deep neural model for out-of-town next POI recommendation

Next Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has been recognized as an important technique in location-based services, and existing methods aim to utilize sequential models to return meaningful recommendation results. But these models fail to fully consider the phenomenon of user interest drift, i.e. a user tends to have different preferences when she is in out-of-town areas, resulting in sub-optimal results accordingly. To achieve more accurate next POI recommendation for out-of-town users, an adaptive attentional deep neural model HOPE is proposed in this paper for modeling user’s out-of-town dynamic preferences precisely. Aside from hometown preferences of a user, it captures the long and short-term preferences of the user in out-of-town areas using “Asymmetric-SVD” and “TC-SeqRec” respectively. In addition, toward the data sparsity problem of out-of-town preference modeling, a region-based pattern discovery method is further adopted to capture all visitor’s crowd preferences of this area, enabling out-of-town preferences of cold start users to be captured reasonably. In addition, we adaptively fuse all above factors according to the contextual information by adaptive attention, which incorporates temporal gating to balance the importance of the long-term and short-term preferences in a reasonable and explainable way. At last, we evaluate the HOPE with baseline sequential models for POI recommendation on two real datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed solution outperforms the state-of-art models significantly.

     

A knowledge-based approach to user interface adaptation from preferences and for special needs

Moving between devices is omnipresent, but not for people with disabilities or those who require specific accessibility options. Setting up assistive technologies or finding settings to overcome a certain barrier can be a demanding task for people without technical skills. Context-sensitive adaptive user interfaces are advancing, although migrating access features from one device to another is very rarely addressed. In this paper, we describe the knowledge-based component of the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure that infers how a device shall be best configured at the operating system layer, the application layer and the web layer to meet the requirements of a user including possible special needs or disabilities. In this regard, a mechanism to detect and resolve conflicting accessibility policies as well as recommending preference substitutes is a main requirement, as elaborated in this paper. As the proposed system emulates decision-making of accessibility experts, we validated the automatic deduced configurations against manual configurations of ten accessibility experts. The assessment result shows that the average matching score of the developed system is high. Thus, the proposed system can be considered capable of making precise decisions towards personalizing user interfaces based on user needs and preferences.     

Designing for augmented attention: Towards a framework for attentive user interfaces

Attentive user interfaces are user interfaces that aim to support the user’s attentional capacities. By sensing the users’ attention for objects and people in their everyday environment, and by treating user attention as a limited resource, these interfaces avoid today’s ubiquitous patterns of interruption. Focusing upon attention as a central interaction channel allows development of more sociable methods of communication and repair with ubiquitous devices. Our methods are analogous to human turn taking in group communication. Turn taking improves the user’s ability to conduct foreground processing of conversations. Attentive user interfaces bridge the gap between the foreground and periphery of user activity in a similar fashion, allowing users to move smoothly in between.We present a framework for augmenting user attention through attentive user interfaces. We propose five key properties of attentive systems: (i) to sense attention; (ii) to reason about attention; (iii) to regulate interactions; (iv) to communicate attention and (v) to augment attention.     

Propagating experience-based accessibility guidelines to user interface development

This paper presents a methodological approach towards the integration of accessibility guidelines into the user interface development life cycle. The term accessibility guidelines refers to the consolidated design wisdom, as documented in general recommendations, principles of good practice, experience-based heuristics or otherwise ‘blessed’ rules, regarding the construction of interactive computer-based software for people with disabilities. At the core of the proposed method is the use of a design repository and a supporting tool environment capable of encapsulating, customizing and reusing experience-based accessibility wisdom, so as to facilitate the integration of previously generated, tested and agreed, accessibility recommendations into new design cases and user interface implementations. It is argued that the proposed approach eliminates some of the limitations or shortcomings associated with more conventional methods, such as the use of paper-based guidelines, or reviews by experts, while it facilitates more effective communication amongst designers and developers of user interfaces.     

Interactive Information Retrieval Using Clustering and Spatial Proximity

A web-based search engine responds to a user’s query with a list of documents. This list can be viewed as the engine’s model of the user’s idea of relevance—the engine ‘believes’ that the first document is the most likely to be relevant, the second is slightly less likely, and so on. We extend this idea to an interactive setting where the system accepts the user’s feedback and adjusts its relevance model. We develop three specific models that are integrated as part of a system we call Lighthouse. The models incorporate document clustering and a spring-embedding visualization of inter-document similarity. We show that if a searcher were to use Lighthouse in ways consistent with the model, the expected effectiveness improves—i.e., the relevant documents are found more quickly in comparison to existing methods.     

iMashup: a mashup-based framework for service composition

The Web has undergone a tremendous change from a primarily publication platform towards a participatory and"programmable"platform,where a large number of heterogeneous Web-delivered services(including SOAP and RESTful Web services,RSS and Atom feeds)are emerging.It results in the creation of Web mashup applications with rich user experiences.However,the integration of Web-delivered services is still a challenging issue.It not only requires the developers’tedious eforts in understanding and coordinating heterogeneous service types,but also results in the time-consuming development of user interfaces.In this paper,we propose the iMashup composition framework to facilitate mashup development and deployment.We provide a unified mashup component model for the common representation of heterogeneous Web-delivered service interfaces.The component model specifies necessary properties and behaviors at both business and user interface level.We associate the component model with semantically meaningful tags,so that mashup developers can fast understand the service capabilities.The mashup developers can search and put the proper mashup components into the Web browser based composition environment,and connect them by data flows based on the tag-based semantics.Such an integration manner might prevent some low-level programming eforts and improve the composition efciency.A series of experimental study are conducted to evaluate our framework.     

Intelligent front-ends and product models

Research efforts in two separate areas, intelligent user interfaces and product data models have in the past been carried out almost totally independently from each other. It would, however, seem that product models could be integrated into Intelligent Front-Ends and that results from Intelligent Front-End research could be used for building the user interfaces to database information stored according to product model schemas.The paper starts with an introduction to data base theory and then moves on to present general features of product models. The presentation is on a general level but the examples are picked from the building domain. The international effort to define a standardized basic product model framework, the PDES/STEP project, and the data modeling methods used in it are also described. Work with prototype interfaces to product data models for the building domain is described as an example of the role Intelligent Front-Ends could play in product model based applications. The paper ends with a short discussion of the role product models could have in Intelligent Front-Ends.     

A psychometric user experience model based on fuzzy measure approaches

User experience (UX) is considered a key quality of interactive products in today’s competitive mass markets and is of growing interest in both academia and industry. UX concerns the encounters a user has while interacting with products, systems, and services. It is ubiquitous, omnipresent, and dynamic in nature, referring to the non-quantifiable, subjective, affective-based, and context-dependent processes. UX is difficult for researchers to objectively and uniformly measure as it involves complex human perceptual interpretations of experiential responses with a certain degree of uncertainty, imprecision, and vagueness. Based on the user experience questionnaire (UEQ), this paper presents a psychometric UX model using fuzzy measure approaches, the purpose of which is to develop a metric for quantitative assessment of certain product UXs through a user experience index (UXI). This model enables researchers to understand users’ perceptions of the interactions that constitute qualities of using a specific product. An empirical study concerning the episodic UX measures of using a set of touch mice was conducted to verify the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed UX model. The theoretical and practical implications of the UX model are also discussed.     

Optimal configuration of cluster supply chains with augmented Lagrange coordination

Enterprises in an industrial cluster could dynamically alliance in the form of cluster supply chains to share inner-cluster resources and services, and respond to the ever-fluctuating customer demands in a cost-effective way. However, an effective and feasible method enabling such dynamic cluster supply chain configuration (CSCC) lags behind practice due to the conflict of interests. Researchers are designing All-in-One theoretic models to optimize CSCC with the assumed decision details of all enterprises, while in fact clustered enterprises are seeking effective decentralized decision mechanisms which protect their decision autonomy in the frequently re-configured CSC. A newly emerged multi-disciplinary optimization method, Augmented Lagrangian Coordination (ALC), which supports the open-structure collaboration with strict optimization convergence, is thoroughly investigated in this paper and applied to solve the conflict. Through a complete analysis of CSC’s configuration policies in typical stages, a generic CSCC model is proposed and then partitioned into an ALC-based decentralized decision model by the typical decision autonomy distribution in clusters. Clustered enterprises collaborate vertically and laterally along the ALC model through multi-dimensional couplings to achieve the overall consistency and optimality. Results have proved the effectiveness of ALC for CSCC problem. A set of sensitivity analysis is also conducted to find out the condition in which an order has to be fulfilled in a CSC and the most appropriate configuration.     

Hybrid Clouds brokering: Business opportunities,QoS and energy-saving issues

Hybrid Clouds couple the scalability offered by public Clouds with the greater control supplied by private ones. A (hybrid) Cloud broker acting as an intermediary between users and providers of public Cloud services, may support customers in the selection of the most suitable offers, optionally adding the provisioning of dedicated services with higher levels of quality.The paper presents a Cloud brokering algorithm delivering services with different level of non-functional requirements, to the private or public resources, on the basis of different scheduling criteria. With the objective of maximize user satisfaction and broker’s revenues, the algorithm pursues profit increases by reducing energy costs, through the adoption of energy saving mechanisms. A simulation model is used to evaluate performance in terms of broker’s revenue, user satisfaction and energy behavior of various allocation policies. Simulation results show that differences among policies depend on system loads and that the use of turn on and off techniques greatly improves energy savings at low and medium load rates.