UTILIZING CONTEXT HISTORY TO PROVIDE DYNAMIC ADAPTATIONS

In order to provide “intimate” and “dynamic” adaptations under Weiser's vision for ubiquitous computing environments, we propose the utilization of context history together with user modeling and machine learning techniques. Our approach supports proactive adaptations by inducing patterns of user behavior. In addition, we support the requirement for enabling the user to receive an explicit and understandable explanation when a proactive adaptation occurs in order to encourage a trust relationship between the user and the context-aware system. In this article, we describe an experiment to examine the feasibility of our approach for supporting proactive adaptations in the domain of an intelligent office environment. The initial results of our experiment are promising and demonstrate how our system could gradually learn the user's preferences for controling his office environment by making inductions from the context history. Based on these initial findings, we believe that context history has a concrete role to play in supporting proactive adaptation in a ubiquitous computing environment.     

Task-specific information retrieval systems for software engineers

This paper discusses the development of task-specific information retrieval systems for software engineers. We discuss how software engineers interact with information and information retrieval systems and investigate to what extent a domain-specific search and recommendation system can be developed in order to support their work related activities. We have conducted a user study which is based on the “Cognitive Research Framework” to identify the relation between the information objects used during the code development (code snippets and search queries), the tasks users engage in and the associated use of search interfaces. Based on our user studies, a questionnaire and an automated observation of user interactions with the browser and software development environment, we identify that software engineers engage in a finite number of work related tasks and they also develop a finite number of “work practices”/“archetypes of behaviour”. Secondly we identify a group of domain specific behaviours that can successfully be used as a source of strong implicit relevance feedback. Based on our results, we design a snippet recommendation interface, and a code related recommendation interface which are embedded within the standard search engine.     

Adapting groupware systems to changes in the collaborator’s context of use

Owing to the dynamic nature of collaborative environments, the software intended to support collaborative work should adapt itself to the different situations that may occur. This requirement is related to the concept of “context of use”, which has been considered as an important aspect in the design of interactive systems. Nevertheless, two main problems about this concept have been identified by current research in context-aware computing: (1) most of the studies have mainly focused on the context of a single user, so the context of multiple users involved in a common endeavor remains little explored, and (2) adaptability in context-aware systems generally takes into account a reduced number of contextual variables (mainly the user’s location and platform). In this paper, we firstly re-conceptualize the notion of “context of use”, in order to consider the main characteristics of collaborative environments. Based on this new notion, we then design and implement a framework that allows application developers to specify the adaptability of groupware systems in terms of the state of activities, roles, collaborators’ location, available resources, and other typical variables of working groups. This framework has been generalized from scenarios that highlight dynamic situations presented in real collaborative settings. Finally, we validate our proposal by a set of applications that are able to adapt their user interface and functionality, when significant changes are produced in the environment, the working group, and/or the used devices.     

Software environment architectures and user interface facilities

The authors discuss the demands and constraints on a user interface management system for a software environment, and the relation between the architecture of the environment and the user interface management system. A model for designing user interface management systems for large extensible environments is presented. This model synthesizes several recent advances in user interfaces and specializes them to the domain of software environments. The model can be applied to a wide variety of environment contexts. A prototype implementation is described     

Crowd sculpting: A space‐time sculpting method for populating virtual environments

We introduce “Crowd Sculpting”: a method to interactively design populated environments by using intuitive deformation gestures to drive both the spatial coverage and the temporal sequencing of a crowd motion. Our approach assembles large environments from sets of spatial elements which contain inter‐connectible, periodic crowd animations. Such a “Crowd Patches” approach allows us to avoid expensive and difficult‐to‐control simulations. It also overcomes the limitations of motion editing, that would result into animations delimited in space and time. Our novel methods allows the user to control the crowd patches layout in ways inspired by elastic shape sculpting: the user creates and tunes the desired populated environment through stretching, bending, cutting and merging gestures, applied either in space or time. Our examples demonstrate that our method allows the space‐time editing of very large populations and results into endless animation, while offering real‐time, intuitive control and maintaining animation quality.     

Smart Spaces for Adaptive Information Integration in Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is reaping the benefits of advances in Semantic Web technology thanks to the growing number of available biomedical web resources and portals. Although positive in general, this abundance poses practical challenges to researchers who must be skilled in techniques for retrieving and integrating sparse and complex contents, and thereof calls for more “intelligent” and user friendly ways of interaction to easily get information. With the aim of making available the intelligent functionality of smart systems, this paper presents SSAIIB (Smart Spaces for Adaptive Information Integration in Bioinformatics), a reference framework for designing bioinformatics smart applications that support discovering, aggregating and delivering contents from web resources according to user’s goals, tasks and concerns. The “Smart Spaces” are software environments whose smartness lies in their ability to adaptively accomplish specific user’s activities such as the exploiting content from biomedical resources, integrating data captured from different sources, supporting data analytics, etc. SSAIIB is structured around two main technologies: service oriented architectures and software agents. In particular, it relies on mechanisms for dynamically assembling suitable services and the use of agents as a natural metaphor for both modelling user’s activities and accessing web resources. A case study is presented that shows the application of SSAIIB to the design and the implementation of a smart space for annotating biomedical texts.     

A NFC-based pervasive solution for city touristic surfing

Context-aware and pervasive computing applications have increased their number during the last decade, thanks to the development of new communication and mobile technologies. These applications cover a wide spectrum of problems, sectors, scenarios, and environments that aim to build smart environments supporting many kinds of human interactions. Tourism is an important economic sector for many cities and countries and therefore a research area where the development of ubiquitous applications is having a great interest. In this paper, we propose a solution oriented to help the user to find the location of interest points within the city and navigate through them. In this work, we propose the use of mobile phones with the near-field communication technology incorporated and Smart Posters disseminated along the city. Indoor and outdoor locations and navigation are allowed, “where is it?”, “what is it?”, “where am I?”, “what is there around me?” and the remaining hits of locations and navigation paradigms are supported by an easy, cheap, and context-awareness system without the need of hard tasks to the user related to system installation or tailoring.     

Supporting serendipitous integration in mobile computing environments

In the richly networked world of the near future, mobile computing users will be confronted with an ever-expanding array of devices and services accessible in their environments. In such a world, we cannot expect to have available to us specific applications that allow us to accomplish every conceivable combination of devices that we may wish. Instead, we believe that many of our interactions with the network will be characterized by the use of “general purpose” tools that allow us to discover, use, and integrate multiple devices around us. This paper lays out the case for why we believe that so-called “serendipitous integration” is a necessary fact that we will face in mobile computing, and explores a number of design experiments into supporting end user configuration and control of networked environments through general purpose tools. We present an iterative design approach to creating such tools and their user interfaces, discuss our observations about the challenges of designing for such a world, and then explore a number of tools that take differing design approaches to overcoming these challenges. We conclude with a set of reflections on the user experience issues that we believe are inherent in dealing with ad hoc mobile computing in richly networked environments.     

面向沉浸式流场可视化的多视图数据管理方法

由于沉浸式环境下的三维交互方式对二维界面操作不够友好,使得依赖于二维列表界面的流场数据管理任务变得复杂且低效。为了实现沉浸式虚拟环境下对流场数据高效的组织和管理,增强用户对流场空间信息的理解,提出一种基于多视图结合交互的沉浸式流场可视化数据块管理方法。该方法构建了一个三维小视图用于提供场景概览,并通过“主视图交互+小视图辅助“”小视图交互+主视图反馈”等多种多视图组合交互方式完成对多块流场数据的管理交互操作。最后构建了一个基于手势的沉浸式流场可视化系统,定义多项交互任务,从学习时长、完成时间和用户反馈几个方面对比了多视图方法和传统交互方法差异。实验结果表明,相比于传统交互方法,多视图方法可以显著提高数据管理任务的效率。     

Evaluation of user authentication methods in the gadget-free world

In an ideal gadget-free environment the user is interacting with the environment and the services through only “natural” means. This imposes restrictions on many aspects of the interaction. One key element in this is user authentication, because it assures the environment and related services of the legitimacy of user’s actions and empowers the user to carry out his tasks. We present five high-level categories of features of user authentication in the gadget-free world including security, privacy and usability aspects. These are adapted and extended from earlier research on web authentication methods. We survey existing authentication methods together with some emerging technologies and evaluate these according to the features in our categories. Our results show, that no single authentication method can realise all these requirements for authentication. In conclusion, we give future research directions and open problems that stem from our observations. Especially, finding combinations of authentication factors and methods that achieve all requirements is an interesting problem in the gadget-free scenario.     

An evaluation tool for research of user behavior in a realistic mobile environment

User behavior is significantly influenced by the surrounding environment. Especially complex and dynamically changing environments (like mobile environment) are represented by a wide variety of extraneous variables, which influence the user behavior in an unpredictable and mostly uncontrolled way. For researchers, it is challenging to measure and analyze the user behavior in such environments. We introduce a complex tool—the IVE tool—which provides a unique way of context visualization and synchronization of measured data of various kinds. Thanks to this tool it is possible to efficiently evaluate data acquired during complex usability tests in a mobile environment. The functionality of this tool is demonstrated on the use case “Navigation of visually impaired users in the building with support of a navigation system called NaviTerier.” During the experiment, we focused on collection and analysis of data that may show user stress and which may influence his/her ability to navigate. We analyzed objective data like Galvanic Skin Response parameter (GSR), Heart Rate Variability parameters (HRV) and audio video recordings and also subjective data like the user’s subjective stress feeling and observation of the user’s behavior.     

Utilizing vector space models for user modeling within e-learning environments

User modeling has been found to enhance the effectiveness and/or usability of software systems through the representation of certain properties of a particular user. This paper presents the research and the results of the development of a user modeling system for the implementation of student models within e-learning environments, utilizing vector space models. The central challenge has been to exploit the possibilities of IUI research on user models without compromising the performance of the overall system. The research described in this paper has aimed to augment the user interface of an existing e-learning environment with relevant aspects from the domain of intelligent user interfaces, through developing a student modeling component.     

End-user strategy programming

Rule-based programming systems can be fragile because they force the user to account for all logical alternatives. If an unconsidered case does arise during execution, program behavior falls through the cracks into unspecified behavior. We investigate rule-based, end-user strategy programming by introducing our Interactive Football Playbook—a domain specific, end-user programming environment to allow American football coaches to create animated football scenarios by associating strategy information with virtual football players. We address the problem of rule explosion through “rule bending” to support a minimalist, scaffolding-driven programming environment. Additionally, we introduce visual language representations for logical and sequential “and” to mitigate end-user confusion with the semantic meaning of these “and” constructs.     

Sharing VLNET worlds on the Web

Virtual environments define a new interface for networked multimedia applications. The sense of “presence” in the virtual environment is an important requirement for collaborative activities involving multiple remote users working with social interactions. Using virtual actors within the shared environment is a supporting tool for presence. In this paper, we present a shared virtual life network with virtual humans that provides a natural interface for collaborative working and we describe the bridge we realized between this 3D shared world and the Web through a system of 3D snapshots.     

A concept for decentralization: Production management — Workstations and their tools

The necessity of more flexibility and shorter response times requires new information tools for running decentralized PM-systems. With the help of personal computers, specifically designed PM-workstations can support this decentralization. In contrast to rather inflexible and sometimes overloaded centralized software such PM-workstations are providing an object-oriented user interface and are specifically designed to the respective functions of the user. Offering the user graphics and window-techniques, these workstations are supporting the user's acting instead of the common passive reacting. A PM-workstation is implemented by layers of tools. It can be used within the PM-information system autonomically, as an intelligent terminal as well as an “agent” in a distributed information system. A special realization of an assembly management workstation is demonstrated.     

In situ evaluation of recommender systems: Framework and instrumentation

This paper deals with the evaluation of the recommendation functionality inside a connected consumer electronics product in prototype stage. This evaluation is supported by a framework to access and analyze data about product usage and user experience. The strengths of this framework lie in the collection of both objective data (i.e., “What is the user doing with the product?”) and subjective data (i.e., “How is the user experiencing the product?”), which are linked together and analyzed in a combined way. The analysis of objective data provides insights into how the system is actually used in the field. Combined with the subjective data, personal opinions and evaluative judgments on the product quality can be then related to actual user behavior. In order to collect these data in a most natural context, remote data collection allows for extensive user testing within habitual environments. We have applied our framework to the case of an interactive TV recommender system application to illustrate that the user experience of recommender systems can be evaluated in real-life usage scenarios.     

Resource collaboration system based on dynamic user preference and context

In a ubiquitous computing environment, service composition and collaboration among heterogeneous resources are required, thus, an infrastructure that supports these requirements is an essential factor in seamless service delivery. In this environment, users hope to get a variety of customized services by using only an individual mobile device. But the resource of the mobile device has limitations such as tiny display screens, limited input, less powerful processors, and limited storage. Moreover each user situation is different and user preferences are also various. Therefore it is one of new issues to provide a customized service for a user through resource collaboration based on various user preference and situation. To solve this issue, this paper proposes a resource collaboration system which infers customized resources for composing a user required service and collaborative with selected resources. For our collaboration system, this paper proposes the method to infer resources based on the context and user preferences including dynamic change of the preference. This paper also shows a reasonable execution environment for the proposed system through the performance evaluation in server-client and peer-to-peer environments.     

The implications of window type environments for developers of educational software

Schools in the U.K. are beginning to acquire computers which support a Window-Icon-Menu-Pointer (WIMP) user interface. One factor in the rate of uptake will be the availability, or otherwise, of suitable educational software. This paper reports on the technical aspects of software development for a WIMP environment (Microsoft Windows) and is based on experience gained in an educational software development project called “Dancing Windows”.     

e-R&D – Effectively Managing Process Diversity

Managing process diversity becomes increasingly relevant in software development. Software organizations typically do not work on the greenfield and thus need to integrate external workflows with R&;D internal workflow management and heterogeneous development and maintenance processes. To stay competitive with its software development, Alcatel has put in place an orchestrated improvement program of its processes and the underlying engineering tools environment. Why do we call this “e-R&;D”? For two reasons. These improvement activities necessarily fit into the wider context of Alcatel's business process improvement and corporate e-business initiatives. The “e-R&;D” also means enabling of interactive R&;D processes and increasing collaborative work across the globe. At Alcatel we realized, during a substantial reengineering of our development and industrialization processes, that the approach to acquire an off-the-shelf process and tailor it to our needs was not applicable. Different processes need to be seamlessly integrated to avoid inconsistencies and inefficiency caused by replicated work. Specific focus is given within this article on how we manage process diversity in a product line where various components are embedded in individual architectures, asking for different but defined development and maintenance processes depending on pre-selected criteria.