Automated user interface engineering with a pattern reflecting programming language

The development of the user interface concerns all aspects of a software system that are targeted to the interactive delivery of its functionality and data. Today, user interface development accounts for a large proportion of the overall software implementation, while the programming process involves various recurring software patterns. Based on the identification of key commonly occurring user interface programming patterns, we have designed and implemented a user interface programming language with built-in constructs to directly support those software patterns, offering declarative programming features such as: precondition-based actions, unidirectional constraints and data-content monitors. Initially, we introduce the deployment syntax and semantics of the novel programming elements, relying upon subject interaction scenarios. Then we reveal the most demanding implementation aspects of the code generator and the respective run-time library.     

Parallel processing in an adaptable application oriented language processor

A framework for an application-oriented language processor is described which is based on a series of independent modules operating in parallel. All intermodule communication is handled by means of monitor procedures. The way in which this allows modules to be added or removed at will is discussed, and the implications of this approach for adaptable processors are described, with particular reference to the numerical control of machine tools.     

QUICK: a tool for graphical user-interface construction by non-programmers

The last decade has placed the superiority of graphical user interfaces over traditional text-based approaches beyond dispute. In almost all contexts, users have found graphical interfaces easier to learn, faster to use, and less error-prone. However, it has been shown that the creation of powerful graphical interfaces takes up to 80% of the time required to develop an application. In our work, we seek to extend the benefits of graphical interaction to the next layer of computer user—the interface designer. Our work in this area is distinguished from other efforts by two important differences. First, while other efforts focus primarily on the design of standard user interfaces, our approach emphasizes the creation of unique and innovative interfaces by supporting, among other things, arbitrary user-designed graphical representations, direct specification of animation, and digitized sound. Second, our goal is to cater to the nonprogrammer. Thus, we address a challenging trade-off: maximizing power and flexibility in an extremely simple environment. We explore the utility of the prototype object-oriented paradigm, a high-level userinterface language, and a direct-manipulation programming environment in this context.     

User interface—application communication in the Chimera user interface management system

Until quite recently, perhaps the least appreciated part of user interface management system (UIMS) architecture has been the interface to the application. A number of approaches to interface-application communication have been attempted, but these have suffered as a result of being non-programmable, unstructured and/or static. This paper presents the user-interface-application communication system developed for the Chimera UIMS, which attempts to address these problems. This system enables interprocess communication between user interface and application via an explicit, programmable UIMS component—an application linkage, which is structured, dynamic and reconfigurable at run-time. The internal structure of the linkage is described, along with the mechanism for communication with dialogue control and application. An extensive example is developed in order to illustrate the communication process to and from the user via dialogue control and linkage to the application.     

A parallel implementation of the SCAN language

SCAN is a special purpose context-free language which describes and generates a wide range of array accessing algorithms from a short set of simple ones. These algorithms may represent scan techniques for image processing, but at the same time they stand as generic data accessing strategies. In this paper we present two schemes (one sequential and one parallel) which implement the SCAN language and compare their memory requirements and execution time.     

A useful data-structuring technique

A data-structuring technique is described which enables data of widely varying types to be stored in a simple tree structure, and which requires only the name of a variable for both its type and value to be retrieved. The method uses well-established list-processing concepts in an unusual environment and illustrates the advantages to be gained by their use in application-oriented software. It has been used with some success in a modular processor for the storage of geometric and other data but is equally applicable to other fields.     

CIRL/PIWI: A GUI toolkit supporting retargetability

Writing applications that are easily moved to various computer platforms with different graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is a complex task. Yet this concept is important for the creator of commercial software, as it is not likely to be clear for many years whether one or two GUIs will survive and become industry ‘standards’ or whether the growth in GUIs will continue because of new developments in human-computer interfaces. Providing a user interface abstraction that maps into all toolkits seems to be an appropriate way to proceed, but is fraught with difficulty. For example, different GUIs present a different look-and-feel that often causes system-specific information to be embedded in an application. This paper surveys the problems inherent in designing a user interface abstraction, and describes the experiences gained from a specific implementation called CIRL/PIWI.

1 CIRL and PIWI are acronyms for Co-ordinate-Independent Resource Language and Presentation-Independent Windowed Interface.

The user interface abstraction contains a knowledge base that allows many components of the user interface to be defined independent of look-and-feel thereby increasing the portability of an application.     

Vu: visual user-interface design

Vu is an interactive visual programming environment, which enables interface designers to create highly interactive, graphical, direct-manipulation-style graphical user interfaces in a very natural manner. The general strategy of vu is to enable the designer to draw the screen display that the end user will see, and to test the interface by performing actions just as the end user would. This is achieved by providing exploratory programming in a highly visual and object-oriented environment. This paper describes the design principles and structure of vu.     

Modular architecture for custom-built systems oriented to real-time computer vision: Application to color recognition

This paper presents a modular architecture called DIPSA, which is intended to be used for building custom-made real-time Computer-Vision systems. It consists of four module types and each of them represents a family of circuits that perform specific visual tasks. Our architectural model proposes an algorithm-dependent methodology and makes good results possible using problem oriented solutions. The desired performance is achieved choosing the appropriate modules and connecting them by means of heterogeneous pipeline and concurrence. Additionally, two DIPSA-based hardware systems for real-time Color Recognition are described here.     

An empirical study of users as application developers

A study was conducted in ten organizations of 272 non-DP professionals (“users”) who develop their own administrative computer-based applications. The data are used to create taxonomies of such users and of the applications they develop. Findings concerning the distribution of work time, application development time, relative advantages and disadvantages of user developed applications, and other factors are summarized. Evaluations of user developed applications activity by both users and DP managers are reported, and users' perceptions of importance and satisfaction with 18 different factors related to this activity are analyzed.     

Communication via eye blinks and eyebrow raises: video-based human-computer interfaces

Two video-based human-computer interaction tools are introduced that can activate a binary switch and issue a selection command. BlinkLink, as the first tool is called, automatically detects a users eye blinks and accurately measures their durations. The system is intended to provide an alternate input modality to allow people with severe disabilities to access a computer. Voluntary long blinks trigger mouse clicks, while involuntary short blinks are ignored. The system enables communication using blink patterns: sequences of long and short blinks which are interpreted as semiotic messages. The second tool, EyebrowClicker, automatically detects when a user raises his or her eyebrows and then triggers a mouse click. Both systems can initialize themselves, track the eyes at frame rate, and recover in the event of errors. No special lighting is required. The systems have been tested with interactive games and a spelling program. Results demonstrate overall detection accuracy of 95.6% for BlinkLink and 89.0% for EyebrowClicker.     

The design and implementation of a distributed image understanding system

Computer vision is concerned with extracting information about a scene by analyzing images of that scene. Performing any computer vision task requires an enormous amount of computation. Exploiting parallelism appears to be a promising way to improve the performance of computer vision systems. Past work in this area has focused on applying parallel processing techniques to image-operator level parallelism. In this article, we discuss the parallelism of computer vision in the control level and present a distributed image understanding system (DIUS).In DIUS, control-level parallelism is exploited by a dynamic scheduler. Furthermore, two levels of rules are used in the control mechanism. Meta-rules are concerned mainly with which strategy should be driven and the execution sequence of the system; control rules determine which task needs to be done next. A prototype system has been implemented within a parallel programming environment, Strand, which provides various virtual architectures mapping to either a shared-memory machine, Sequent, or to the Sun network.     

Distributed multi-camera visual mapping using topological maps of planar regions

This paper presents a multi-agent solution for cooperative visual mapping using planar regions. Each agent is assumed to be equipped with a conventional camera and has limited communication capabilities. Our approach starts building topological maps from independent image sequences where natural landmarks extracted from conventional images are grouped to create a graph of planes. With this approach the features observed in several images belonging to the same planar region are stored only once, reducing the size of the individual maps. In a distributed scenario this is very important because smaller maps can be transmitted faster, which makes our approach better suited for cooperative mapping. The later fusion of the individual maps is obtained via distributed consensus without any initial information about the relations between the different maps. Experiments with real images in complex scenarios show the good performance of our proposal.     

How map designers can represent their ideas in thematic maps

Problem analysis in designing thematic maps and user interfaces which assist map designers in incorporating their ideas into maps are presented. Problems in designing choropleth maps are analyzed from the map designers point of view. A graphical user interface, called “Histogram Interface”, is implemented as countermeasure for problems in designing choropleth maps. The user interface can assist map designers in representing their ideas and achieving the desired maps through the designing process. The user interface operations, which correspond to the map designer's ideas, are explained. The user interface effectiveness is confirmed by resulting map examples and the corresponding graphical patterns on the interface. A concept is proposed concerning the importance in any computer graphics field, which the designers should consider in determining how to incorporate their ideas into pictures.     

Design patterns for user interface for mobile applications

The topic of this paper is a collection of user interface (UI) design patterns for mobile applications. In the paper we present the structure of the patterns collection – the patterns are suggested solutions to problems that are grouped into a set of problem areas that are further grouped into three main problem areas – a structure which is valuable both as an index to identifying patterns to use, and it gives a fairly comprehensive overview of issues when designing user interfaces for mobile applications. To show the breadth of the patterns collection we present six individual problems with connected design patterns in some detail – each coming from different problem areas. They represent important and relevant problems, and are on different levels of abstraction, thus showing how patterns may be used to present problems and solutions on different levels of detail. To show the relevance and usefulness of the patterns collection for usability professionals with a mixed background, we present some relevant findings from a validation of the patterns collection. In addition to verifying the relevance and usefulness of the patterns collection, it also shows both expected and surprising correlations between background and perceived relevance and usefulness. One important finding from the validation is an indication that the patterns collection is best suited for experienced UI developers wanting to start developing mobile UIs. Using a patterns collection for documenting design knowledge and experience has been a mixed experience, so we discuss pros and cons of this. Finally, we present related work and future research.