Integrating E-Commerce and Games

This paper investigates how many users of commercial interactive systems are not properly agents within the interactive narrative, largely due to the dynamics of branding in cyberspace. Parallels are drawn between the dynamic personalization of e-CRM engines and context aware computing systems. Several seminal games are discussed as examples of systems in which very different relationships exist between users and the system. Arguments are made for designing e-commerce interactive systems that install into games, inside the game narrative. Correspondence to: Ms N. Cummins, Preject Brand Communications Consultancy, Unit P, Carlton Works Studios, Asylum Road, London SE15 2SB, UK. Email: nizami@preject.com     

Rain-Dancing with Pseudo-Science

In this polemical essay the authors ask whether computerisation has become the neurosis of our age. By comparing the application of IT methodologies with ritual behaviour within human social institutions, they propose that the so-called rationality of management science, with its tidy benchmarking, auditing, categorisation and performance measurements etc., is actually a pseudo-science. They show that from the position of Nietzschean epistemology, this rationality is merely a false claim to the instrumental efficacy of data modelling, that is indistinguishable from the rain-dancing of primitive tribes.     

Knowledge Networking in Cross-Cultural Settings

Knowledge networking in the cross-cultural setting here focuses on promoting a culture of shared communication, values and knowledge, seeking cooperation through valorisation of diversity. The process is seen here in terms of creating new alliances of creators, users, mediators and facilitators of knowledge. At the global level, knowledge networking is seen as a symbiotic relationship between local and global knowledge resources. This focus is informed by the human-centred vision of the information society, which seeks a symbiotic relationship between technology and society. It explores the nature of the knowledge in transition, raising issues of technology and knowledge transfer in the local–global context. The notions of human–machine symbiosis and of diversity and coherence provide a handle to explore the role of technology for sustainable development. The centrality of knowledge in stimulating knowledge networking for cross-cultural collaboration is illustrated through an exemplar of an EU–India Cross-Cultural Innovation Network project, a collaboration between European and Indian universities and institutes.     

Taxonomy of interpolation constraints on recursive subdivision surfaces

Published online: 14 May 2002     

Information and Communication Technologies,Organisations and Skills: Convergence and Persistence

This article, first of all, supports the idea that the undeniable process of ICT-based technological convergence implies the social, cultural and business unification of the world of media and culture. The poor performance of the megamerger is a clear indicator of the unstable ground of the convergence hypothesis. Secondly, it argues in favour of cooperation between different expertise, skills and cultures to make multimedia products or to supply multimedia services, instead of creating from scratch a brand new class of hybrid skills and professions. Thirdly, a variety of new possible and realistically achievable professional profiles in cultural industries and institutions are illustrated. Eventually a set of public policies, in the light of a new role for cities and regions, is developed. Correspondence and offprint requests to: Francesco Garibaldo, Fondazione ‘Istituto Per il Lavoro (IPL)’, via Marconi 8, 40122 Bologna, Italy. Email: f.garibaldo@ipielle.emr.it     

Designing wrapper components for e-services in integrating heterogeneous systems

Component-based approaches are becoming more and more popular to support Internet-based application development. Different component modeling approaches, however, can be adopted, obtaining different abstraction levels (either conceptual or operational). In this paper we present a component-based architecture for the design of e-applications, and discuss the concept of wrapper components as building blocks for the development of e-services, where these services are based on legacy systems. We discuss their characteristics and their applicability in Internet-based application development. Received: 30 October 2000 / Accepted: 9 January 2001 Published online: 28 June 2001     

Causality and atomicity in distributed computations

Summary. In a distributed system, high-level actions can be modeled by nonatomic events. This paper proposes causality relations between distributed nonatomic events and provides efficient testing conditions for the relations. The relations provide a fine-grained granularity to specify causality relations between distributed nonatomic events. The set of relations between nonatomic events is complete in first-order predicate logic, using only the causality relation between atomic events. For a pair of distributed nonatomic events X and Y, the evaluation of any of the causality relations requires integer comparisons, where and , respectively, are the number of nodes on which the two nonatomic events X and Y occur. In this paper, we show that this polynomial complexity of evaluation can by simplified to a linear complexity using properties of partial orders. Specifically, we show that most relations can be evaluated in integer comparisons, some in integer comparisons, and the others in integer comparisons. During the derivation of the efficient testing conditions, we also define special system execution prefixes associated with distributed nonatomic events and examine their knowledge-theoretic significance. Received: July 1997 / Accepted: May 1998     

Negotiating and Understanding Information Systems Requirements: The Use of Set Diagrams

A major contributor to the failure of information technology-based systems is the problem of understanding user or customer requirements in the initial analysis and requirements identification stage of development. This paper identifies and describes an approach to help overcome some of these problems, particularly the mismatch or understanding gap between the customer and the developer. The approach is intended to be used at the early stages of requirement determination and introduces techniques from operational research into the process. In particular set theory and Venn diagrams are used as a way of graphically representing the relationships and gaps in understanding that may exist. The benefit obtained from the use of the technique is partly in the graphical representations themselves but mainly in the dialogue and negotiation that result from the construction of the diagrams. The technique has been developed in a research study of retail organisations’ use of information technology in the UK and an example case study from the sector is used to illustrate and discuss the technique.     

Linguistic Problems with Requirements and Knowledge Elicitation

Human and conversational aspects of requirements and knowledge identification are employed to show that requirements ‘engineering’ is not the same as civil engineering or scientific problem solving. Not only can requirements not be made fully explicit at the start of a project, they cannot be made fully explicit at all. A need is identified to enhance computer-based information systems (CBIS) development methods to accommodate: plurality of incommensurable perspectives, languages and agendas; dynamic representations of system features that can be experienced rather than abstracted and forced into an abstract paper-based representation; recognition that CBIS development is in general a continuous process where users changing their minds is a natural and necessary indication or organisational vitality.  It is suggested that prototyping and rapid application development go some way to addressing these requirements but that they require further development in the light of the theoretical light thrown on the nature of the problem.     

The New Frontier Issues for Cognition Technology

Cognitive engineering has developed enormously over the last fifteen years. Yet, despite many excellent research projects and publications, its full potential has not been embraced into mainstream system design. This paper will examine the reasons for this failure and argue that the problem is not simply inertia or lack of education. There are strong organisational influences that cause resistance to this particular approach. The discipline itself has characteristics that make it fragile in the modern corporate structure. In addition, the cognitive engineers themselves are not blameless in the equation. They appear to have done exactly what they criticise the engineering community for doing: they have packaged their product in a manner that is not ‘user friendly’ to its target population, not structured to suit its application, and not output in the format required. Suggestions will be made to rectify the situation: a list of actions is proposed for practising cognitive engineers to make their product more likely to enjoy widespread uptake.     

The Design of Human–Machine Interface for Accident Support in Nuclear Power Plants

As feedback from Three Mile Island No. 2, a large amount of human–machine interface (HMI) design has been proposed to support operators during accidents by presenting information on plant status, some of which is implemented in commercial nuclear power plants (NPPs). However, it has not yet been discussed what role HMI should play under conditions where operators must take action as instructed under emergency operating procedure. Regarding this principal issue, an HMI design is proposed together with specific screen images. The advantage of this design is based on the involvement of an ex-operator in NPP in this paper. The participation of users in the design of HMI has been rare. Accordingly the proposed HMI is comprehensive for average operators and is expected to be acceptable for future implementation in commercial NPPs. The effectiveness of the proposed HMI has been examined in a small experiment.     

Polygonal mesh regularization for subdivision surfaces interpolating meshes of curves

Published online: 14 February 2003     

Model checking JAVA programs using JAVA PathFinder

This paper describes a translator called Java PathFinder (Jpf), which translates from Java to Promela, the modeling language of the Spin model checker. Jpf translates a given Java program into a Promela model, which then can be model checked using Spin. The Java program may contain assertions, which are translated into similar assertions in the Promela model. The Spin model checker will then look for deadlocks and violations of any stated assertions. Jpf generates a Promela model with the same state space characteristics as the Java program. Hence, the Java program must have a finite and tractable state space. This work should be seen in a broader attempt to make formal methods applicable within NASA’s areas such as space, aviation, and robotics. The work is a continuation of an effort to formally analyze, using Spin, a multi-threaded operating system for the Deep-Space 1 space craft, and of previous work in applying existing model checkers and theorem provers to real applications.     

Proving refinement using transduction

Summary. When designing distributed systems, one is faced with the problem of verifying a refinement between two specifications, given at different levels of abstraction. Suggested verification techniques in the literature include refinement mappings and various forms of simulation. We present a verification method, in which refinement between two systems is proven by constructing a transducer that inputs a computation of a concrete system and outputs a matching computation of the abstract system. The transducer uses a FIFO queue that holds segments of the concrete computation that have not been matched yet. This allows a finite delay between the occurrence of a concrete event and the determination of the corresponding abstract event. This delay often makes the use of prophecy variables or backward simulation unnecessary. An important generalization of the method is to prove refinement modulo some transformation on the observed sequences of events. The method is adapted by replacing the FIFO queue by a component that allows the appropriate transformation on sequences of events. A particular case is partial-order refinement, i.e., refinement that preserves only a subset of the orderings between events of a system. Examples are sequential consistency and serializability. The case of sequential consistency is illustrated on a proof of sequential consistency of a cache protocol.     

An Approach to Security Requirements Engineering for a High Assurance System*

Requirements specifications for high-assurance secure systems are rare in the open literature. This paper examines the development of a requirements document for a multilevel secure system that must meet stringent assurance and evaluation requirements. The system is designed to be secure, yet combines popular commercial components with specialised high-assurance ones. Functional and non-functional requirements pertinent to security are discussed. A multidimensional threat model is presented. The threat model accounts for the developmental and operational phases of system evolution and for each phase accounts for both physical and non-physical threats. We describe our team-based method for developing a requirements document and relate that process to techniques in requirements engineering. The system requirements document presented provides a calibration point for future security requirements engineering techniques intended to meet both functional and assurance goals. RID="*" ID="*"The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and should not be construed to reflect those of their employers or the Department of Defense. This work was supported in part by the MSHN project of the DARPA/ITO Quorum programme and by the MYSEA project of the DARPA/ATO CHATS programme. Correspondence and offprint requests to: T. Levin, Department of Computer Science, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA 93943-5118, USA. Tel.: +1 831 656 2339; Fax: +1 831 656 2814; Email: levin@nps.navy.mil     

Effects of Airborne Data Link Communication on Demands, Workload and Situation Awareness

An airborne air-to-ground data link communication interface was evaluated in a multi-sector-planning scenario using an Airbus A 340 full flight simulator. In a close-to-reality experimental setting, eight professional crews performed a flight mission in a mixed voice/data link environment. Experimental factors were the medium (voice vs. data link), workload (low vs. high) and the role in the cockpit (pilot flying vs. pilot non-flying). Data link communication and the usability of the newly developed communication interface were rated positively by the pilots, but there is a clear preference for using a data link only in the phase of cruise. Cognitive demands were determined for selected sections of en-route flight. Demands are affected mainly by increased communication needs. In the pilots’ view, although a data link has no effect on safety or the possibilities of intervention, it causes more problems. The subjective workload, as measured with the NASA Task Load Index, increased moderately under data link conditions. A data link has no general effect on pilots’ situation awareness although flight plan negotiations with a data link cause a distraction of attention from monitoring tasks. The use of a data link has an impact on air-to-ground as well as intra-crew communication. Under data link conditions the pilot non-flying plays a more active role in the cockpit. Before introducing data link communication, several aspects of crew resource management have to be reconsidered. Correspondence and offprint requests to: T. Müller, Technical University of Berlin, Institute of Psychology and Ergonomics, Department of Human–Machine Systems, Jebensstrasse 1, 10623 Berlin, Germany.     

Universal Access in the Information Society: Methods, Tools, and Interaction Technologies

Accessibility and high quality of interaction with products, applications, and services by anyone, anywhere, and at any time are fundamental requirements for universal access in the emerging Information Society. This paper discusses these requirements, and their relation to the concept of automated adaptation of user interfaces. An example application is presented, showing how adaptation can be used to accommodate the requirements of different user categories and contexts of use. This application is then used as a vehicle for discussing a new engineering paradigm appropriate for the development of adaptation-based user interfaces. Finally, the paper investigates issues concerning the interaction technologies required for universal access. Published online: 23 May 2001