面向服务构架的智能环境研究

介绍了智能环境的概念,分析了其研究的相关问题,提出一个面向服务架构的智能环境框架.结合面向服务架构的特点,具体分析了智能环境中的智能感知、服务的描述、服务注册和发现机制,以及服务的动态调度和集成等相关问题.     

面向服务构架的智能环境研究*

介绍了智能环境的概念,分析了其研究的相关问题,提出一个面向服务架构的智能环境框架。结合面向服务架构的特点,具体分析了智能环境中的智能感知、服务的描述、服务注册和发现机制,以及服务的动态调度和集成等相关问题。     

基于环绕智能的智能家居控制系统研究

绕智能(AmI)的概念体现在技术上是计算系统的高嵌入性、智能性和移动性，具体表现形式为嵌入式计算智能、网络通信和多通道传感等技术的智能环境。智能家居控制系统作为AmI的主要支撑子系统之一，它主要用于实现用户通过手持设备或联网电脑对冰箱、微波炉、电视机、空调、灯具等家用电器的控制和实时获取被控制家电的必要信息。该文重点讨论了基于AmI的智能家居控制系统的实现功能和体系结构以及在设计中解决的关键问题。     

Evolution towards smart home environments: empirical evaluation of three user interfaces

Smart home environments have evolved to the point where everyday objects and devices at home can be networked to give the inhabitants new means to control them. Familiar information appliances can be used as user interfaces (UIs) to home functions to achieve a more convenient user experience. This paper reports an ethnographic study of smart home usability and living experience. The purpose of the research was to evaluate three UIs—a PC, a media terminal, and a mobile phone—for smart home environments. The results show two main types of activity patterns, pattern control and instant control, which require different UI solutions. The results suggest that a PC can act as a central unit to control functions for activity patterns that can be planned and determined in advance. The mobile phone, on the other hand, is well suited for instant control. The mobile phone turned out to be the primary and most frequently used UI during the 6-month trial period in the smart apartment.     

环境智能中上下文推理方法研究综述

上下文推理是环境智能研究的核心问题之一,与环境智能系统的觉察、响应及适应能力紧密相关,近年来受到国内外研究者的广泛关注。文中分析介绍上下文推理的主要研究内容、研究方法和研究进展,并探讨目前存在的问题及未来的发展方向。     

An Approach to User Interface Specification with Attribute Grammars

An approach to supporting user interfaces using an attribute grammar combined with an event model is described.The main emphasis is how to represent a multi-thread dialogue model in direct manipulation user interfaces.It is shown that control sequence within dialogues,communication with other dialogues, and some computations for applications can be specified with a syntactic and semantic notation.The attribute grammar specification can be implemented using an attribute grammar intepreter embedded in the run-time structure supporting communication,synchronization,and dialogue executon.     

A systematic review of global research on natural user interface for smart home system

The smart home system (SHS) equipped with intelligent sensors and actuators aims at providing seamless services for users. The natural user interface (NUI) enables intuitive interaction between users and the SHS, significantly lowering the barrier to entry and enhancing user experience. However, a comprehensive evaluation of research on NUI for the SHS to provide a valuable synthesis of existing research and informing future research directions remains unavailable. This study attempts to address this gap by systematically evaluating 1979 relevant journal and conference articles from the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus, and those articles with a weak connection to the topic and poor data integrity were excluded. Finally, 1330 articles were chosen to for analysis in terms of contributions, critical papers, co-occurrence, and clustering using scientometric techniques. It was revealed that, with the help of advancing technologies, the research field of NUI aims to enrich the variety of interactive device types, improve the accuracy of interpreting and responding to user behavior, and optimize the compatibility with diverse user demographics. Besides, a conceptual framework summarizing typical types of NUI for the SHS was proposed, and strengths and weaknesses of each NUI were discussed for investigating specific future directions. Furthermore, four general research directions (strategies for promoting effective multimodal NUI, adoption of artificial intelligence for better performance, exploration of mixed reality applications in the SHS, and standardization of protocols in the smart home ecosystem) were also identified for academics and practitioners in their future research and practice.     

A meta-model for dataflow-based rules in smart environments: Evaluating user comprehension and performance

A considerable part of the behavior in smart environments relies on event-driven and rule specification. Rules are the mechanism most often used to enable user customization of the environment. However, the expressiveness of the rules available to users in editing and other tools is usually either limited or the available rule editing interfaces are not designed for end-users with low skills in programming. This means we have to look for interaction techniques and new ways to define user customization rules. This paper describes a generic and flexible meta-model to support expressive rules enhanced with data flow expressions that will graphically support the definition of rules without writing code. An empirical study was conducted on the ease of understanding of the visual data flow expressions, which are the key elements in our rule proposal. The visual dataflow language was compared to its corresponding textual version in terms of comprehension and ease of learning by teenagers in exercises involving calculations, modifications, writing and detecting equivalences in expressions in both languages. Although the subjects had some previous experience in editing mathematical expressions on spreadsheets, the study found their performance with visual dataflows to be significantly better in calculation and modification exercises. This makes our dataflow approach a promising mechanism for expressing user-customized reactive behavior in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments. The performance of the rule matching processor was validated by means of two stress tests to ensure that the meta-model approach adopted would be able to scale up with the number of types and instances in the space.     

GUIDS: A Graphical User Interface Development System in UniECAD

UniECAD is an integrated electronic CAD system,the user interface development system is the key of the integration of UniECAD.This paper presents the architecture of GUIDS,a graphical user interface development system in UniECAD,and then discusses a series of new techniques and methods in the design and the implementation of this system around the following aspects:the editing environment of interface elements,the implementation of dialogue control and the automatic generation of interface code.As an example,the generation of the main interfaces of UniECAD shows the procedure of the development of user interfaces with this development system.     

基于HMM的嵌入式语音交互在AmI中的应用

环绕智能的一个重要目的是实现人与环境的交互更加自然。该文通过语音识别技术体现环绕智能环境中的自然交互的理念,系统采用隐马尔可夫模型实现语音识别,同时为了保证嵌入式环境下交互的实时性,采用IP核来设计与实现算法,并进行仿真验证。实验数据表明系统具有较好的性能,对语音识别在环绕智能环境中的应用研究有一定的理论和实践意义。     

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.     

A methodological approach for user interface development of collaborative applications: A case study

In the last few years, the production of systems which support learning and group work has been high. However, the design and development of these types of systems are difficult, mainly due to the multidisciplinarity involved. Furthermore, the Graphic User Interface (GUI) of an application is receiving greater attention, since it can be decisive in determining if the application is accepted or rejected by users. Model-based design is a widespread technique in the user interface development process. While reviewing approaches that deal with the modeling and design of user interfaces supporting collaborative tasks, we have detected that there is no proposal that links interactive and collaborative issues. We have introduced a methodological approach to solve this shortcoming. This approach is called CIAM (Collaborative Interactive Application Methodology) and it is composed of several stages in which conceptual models are created using CIAN (Collaborative Interactive Application Notation). These models start by modeling the organization in which the application will be used, as well as the tasks that must be supported. In the initial stages, the organization and the collaborative tasks are modeled using high-level specifications. In the following stages, the level of detail increases and, finally, the interaction between the individual users and the application is modeled using ConcurTaskTrees (CTT) notation. The interaction model acts as a bridge between the design and the implementation of the Graphic User Interface. In this paper we present our methodological approach and an example of applying this method for user interface design of collaborative and interactive applications.     

Considerate home notification systems: A user study of acceptability of notifications in a living-room laboratory

Recent field experiments on acceptability of notifications in the home showed that people generally want to be informed of urgent messages as soon as possible, whereas non-urgent messages should not be presented at all. A possible way to improve the acceptability of a notification might be to adjust the presentation mode and the timing of notifications to the message content and to the state of the user. For example, acceptability might be improved by considering user activities when selecting the best time to present the message. The relation between acceptability, presentation mode and timing has not been formally studied in a controlled home setting before. This paper presents the results of a user study, in which 10 participant couples were asked to engage in everyday home activities, and to subjectively rate factors that were expected to influence acceptability. The study was situated in a living-room laboratory in which the user activities and the timing of notifications were controlled. Questionnaire data was evaluated using cluster analysis in order to construct a semantic model that describes the relationship between user, system and environment. The key findings in the present study are: (1) acceptability could be improved by adjusting the level of intrusiveness of the presentation to message urgency: urgent messages should be presented intrusively, medium-urgent messages unobtrusively, and (2) non-urgent messages should be postponed until the message urgency has increased, or skipped if the message urgency never exceeds the predefined presentation threshold. Surprisingly, the user activities at the time of notification were not found to influence acceptability. These findings have resulted in a model of acceptability of notifications for the design of future home notification systems.     

fKenzo: A user interface for computations in Algebraic Topology

fKenzo (=friendly Kenzo) is a graphical user interface providing a user-friendly front-end for the Kenzo system, a Common Lisp program devoted to Algebraic Topology. The fKenzo system provides the user interface itself, an XML intermediary generator-translator and, finally the Kenzo kernel. We describe in this paper the main points of fKenzo, and we explain also the advantages and limitations of fKenzo with respect to Kenzo itself. The text is separated into two parts, trying to cover both the user and the developer perspectives.     

Pervasive community care platform: Ambient Intelligence leveraging sensor networks and mobile agents

Several powerful trends are contributing to an aging of much of the world's population, especially in economically developed countries. To mitigate the negative effects of rapidly ageing populations, societies must act early to plan for the welfare, medical care and residential arrangements of their senior citizens, and for the manpower and associated training needed to execute these plans. This paper describes the development of an Ambient Intelligent Community Care Platform (AICCP), which creates an environment of Ambient Intelligence through the use of sensor network and mobile agent (MA) technologies. The AICCP allows caregivers to quickly and accurately locate their charges; access, update and share critical treatment and wellness data; and automatically archive all records. The AICCP presented in this paper is expected to enable caregivers and communities to offer pervasive, accurate and context-aware care services.     

A bootstrap approach to visual user-interface design and development

An approach to the design of effective computer-based systems is discussed. This approach exploits the user's traditional diagrammatic notations in an effort to achieve usability for experts other than computer professionals. Notations are formalized as visual languages, thus allowing the design of visual editors, interpreters, and compilers. The users themselves exploit these tools to define a hierarchy of environments by a bootstrapping approach. By navigating within these environments, they can progressively design visual interfaces and computing tools that allow them not only to execute the required computational tasks, but also to gain insight into and control the computational process, and check the results.     

A factor combination approach to developing style guides for mobile phone user interface

This paper proposes a systematic approach to developing comprehensive guidelines for mobile phone user interface, and presents a case study to validate the approach. The approach applies a systematic combination of three critical factors: general usability principles, UI components and guideline properties to developing guidelines. In the case study, this factor combination approach was very effective in collecting experts’ ideas, creating guidelines and editing them. The resulting style guide can provide comprehensive and useful guidelines for designing mobile phone UI.

Relevance to Industry

UI designers can use the results of the study as a practical method to develop style guides for mobile phone UIs. The approach taken in the study will also be helpful in managing complex guideline information systematically.     

A laboratory study of user characteristics and decision-making performance in end-user computing

A laboratory study using a simulated business setting was conducted to examine relationships among user characteristics, DSS usage patterns, and decision-making performance. MBA-student subjects self-selected into one of two categories: (1) “end-user programmers” who chose to use the DSS modeling language to develop personalized decision models, or (2) “command level users” who used only “canned” models and query language retrievals. The results show that early development of personalized decision models was positively related to the end-user's previous computer experience. The findings also support the contention that end-user programming improves decision-making performance. End-user programmers consistently outperformed the command level users in terms of their firm's stock price, market share, and return on assets.