Refinement for user interface designs

Formal approaches to software development require that we correctly describe (or specify) systems in order to prove properties about our proposed solution prior to building it. We must then follow a rigorous process to transform our specification into an implementation to ensure that the properties we have proved are retained. Different transformation, or refinement, methods exist for different formal methods, but they all seek to ensure that we can guide the transformation in a way which preserves the desired properties of the system. Refinement methods also allow us to subsequently compare two systems to see if a refinement relation exists between the two. When we design and build the user interfaces of our systems we are similarly keen to ensure that they have certain properties before we build them. For example, do they satisfy the requirements of the user? Are they designed with known good design principles and usability considerations in mind? Are they correct in terms of the overall system specification? However, when we come to implement our interface designs we do not have a defined process to follow which ensures that we maintain these properties as we transform the design into code. Instead, we rely on our judgement and belief that we are doing the right thing and subsequent user testing to ensure that our final solution remains useable and satisfactory. We suggest an alternative approach, which is to define a refinement process for user interfaces which will allow us to maintain the same rigorous standards we apply to the rest of the system when we implement our user interface designs.     

用UML和Object-Z描述交互式系统的接口规格说明

随着图形用户界面的普及，交互已成为目前软件系统的一个重要特征。与传统的基于字符界面的软件系统相比，基于图形用户界面的软件系统，从某种程序上可看作是一个交互式系统。形式化的规格说明具有精确性，无二义性和一致性等优点，用形式化说明语言来描述交互式系统用户接口的规格说明有很强的实用价值。由于形式化的规格说明的可读很差，因此可以采用标准的对象建模UML来帮助对形式化规格说明的理解。     

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.     

面向数据库的化工软件集成环境的设计

对于化工领域,用户若能够在一个软件集成环境上对现有的化工软件进行集成,则可以很大程度上节省用户软件二次开发或掌握集成技术所耗费的人力物力。本文试图研究开发一种化工软件集成的环境。利用Windows自身的特点,以及其管理应用程序的一般方法,设计了化工软件的集成环境。该集成环境由界面集成模块、代码集成模块、数据集成模块和数据库管理子系统4个模块组成,对于4个模块分别给出了界面集成策略、代码集成策略、数据集成策略、数据库和数据库管理子系统的建立策略。     

An Agent Model for the Resolution of Feature Conflicts in Telephony

Most telecommunication service providers resolve the feature interaction problem by providing specific instructions in their management software to handle scenarios where feature interaction may occur. This approach suffers from the complexity of the resulting code and the difficulty of adding new features to the system. Moreover, the system predefines the result of the resolution of the conflicting features and the end user has no means of choosing a different behavior, depending on the preferences of the user. In this paper we propose an agent-based architecture to detect and resolve feature interactions. Our system benefits from the flexibility and the semantic richness of policies and fuzzy logic to allow the end user to alter the behavior of the system, thus obtaining a more personalized service.     

A formal model for plastic human computer interfaces

The considerable and significant progress achieved in the design and development of new interaction devices between man and machine has enabled the emergence of various powerful and efficient input and/or output devices. Each of these new devices brings specific interaction modes.With the emergence of these devices, new interaction techniques and modes arise and new interaction capabilities are offered. New user interfaces need to be designed or former ones need to evolve. The design of so called plastic user interfaces contributes to handling such evolutions. The key requirement for the design of such a user interface is that the new obtained user interface shall be adapted to the application and have, at least, the same behavior as the previous (adapted) one. This paper proposes to address the problem of user interface evolution due to the introduction of new interaction devices and/or new interaction modes. More, precisely, we are interested by the study of the design process of a user interface resulting from the evolution of a former user interface due to the introduction of new devices and/or new interaction capabilities. We consider that interface behaviors are described by labelled transition systems and comparison between user interfaces is handled by an extended definition of the bi-simulation relationship to compare user interface behaviors when interaction modes are replaced by new ones.     

Implementing a user interface management system for existing applications using an object-oriented database tool

Numerous engineering application systems have been developed over the past twenty years, and many of these applications will continue to be used for many years to come. Examples of such applications include CAD Systems, finite-element analysis packages and inspection systems. Because many of these applications were developed before graphical workstations became available, they often have simple command-line user interfaces. Thus, there is a need for a graphical user interface management system (UIMS) that can be used to build point-and-click style interfaces for these existing engineering applications. In this paper we describe such a UIMS, and discuss its implementation using an object-oriented database tool. This UIMS allows users to create and modify user interfaces by editing graphical representations of the interfaces, thus eliminating the need to write code to build or modify an interface. The UIMS is implemented using an object-oriented database tool to take advantage of the data manipulation and storage management capabilities it provides. This approach reduces both the quantity and complexity of the code needed to implement the UIMS. It also allowed the UIMS to be implemented in a minimal amount of time.     

VB6.0下用户控件的设计与应用

介绍了基于COM的ActiveX控件技术,提出了在VB6.0下用户ActiveX控件设计、应用的具体方案,包括用户控件属性的创建,用户控件代码的测试、编译、注册等,解决了软件模块的移植和代码复用问题,为不同软件之间的接口和功能扩充提供了一种快捷有效的途径.     

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.     

Personalizing user–agent interaction

Interface agents are computer programs that provide personalized assistance to users with their computer-based tasks. The interface agents developed so far have focused their attention on learning a user's preferences in a given application domain and on assisting him according to them. However, in order to personalize the interaction with users, interface agents should also learn how to best interact with each user and how to provide them assistance of the right sort at the right time. To fulfil this goal, an interface agent has to discover when the user wants a suggestion to solve a problem or deal with a given situation, when he requires only a warning about it and when he does not need any assistance at all. In this work, we propose a learning algorithm, named WoS, to tackle this problem. Our algorithm is based on the observation of a user's actions and on a user's reactions to the agent's assistance actions. The WoS algorithm enables an interface agent to adapt its behavior and its interaction with a user to the user's assistance requirements in each particular context.     

Metis – An Object-Oriented Toolkit for Constructing Virtual Reality Applications

Virtual reality systems provide realistic look and feel by seamlessly integrating three-dimensional input and output devices. One software architecture approach to constructing such systems is to distribute the application between a computation-intensive simulator back-end and a graphics-intensive viewer front-end which implements user interaction. In this paper we discuss Metis, a toolkit we have been developing based on such a software architecture, which can be used for building interactive immersive virtual reality systems with computationally intensive components. The Metis toolkit defines an application programming interface on the simulator side, which communicates via a network with a standalone viewer program that handles all immersive display and interactivity. Network bandwidth and interaction latency are minimized, by use of a constraint network on the viewer side that declaratively defines much of dynamic and interactive behavior of the application.     

Real-time synthesis of a humanlike agent in response to the user's moving image

This paper describes a parallel computing system and a software algorithm for real-time interaction between a human user and a synthesized, humanlike, moving image. The realistic humanlike agent on a monitor can recognize the palm position and finger motion (finger sign) of the user. She/he then tracks and gazes at the hand position to change her/his facial expression in response to the finger sign in real time. This visual software agent (VSA) is expected to play an important role in building an advanced human interface. We regard this type of interactive agent as avisual software robot. To achieve real-time image recognition and image synthesis, we have developed a parallel visual computer system the transputer network with visual interface to transputers (TN-VIT). The imagesynthesis speed of the TN-VIT is about 24 frames/s, including finger-sign recognition. Some samples of synthesized images and experimental results are shown.     

Fourier Elimination for Compiling Constraint Hierarchies

Linear equality and inequality constraints arise naturally in specifying many aspects of user interfaces, such as requiring that one window be to the left of another, requiring that a pane occupy the leftmost 1/3 of a window, or preferring that an object be contained within a rectangle if possible. For interactive use, we need to solve similar constraint satisfaction problems repeatedly for each screen refresh, with each successive problem differing from the previous one only in the position of an input device and the previous state of the system. We present an algorithm for solving such systems of constraints using projection. The solution is compiled into very efficient, constraint-free code, which is parameterized by the new inputs. Producing straight-line, constraint-free code of this sort is important in a number of applications: for example, to provide predictable performance in real-time systems, to allow companies to ship products without including a runtime constraint solver, to compile Java applets that can be downloaded and run remotely (again without having to include a runtime solver), or for applications where runtime efficiency is particularly important. Even for less time-critical user interface applications, the smooth performance of the resulting code is more pleasing than that of code produced using other current techniques.     

利用硬盘卷序列号实现对VB软件注册的解决方案

在VB应用软件中通过读取用户计算机的硬盘卷序列号作为机器码,加密后生成软件注册码。由于硬盘卷序列号是唯一的,提供的软件注册码也是唯一的,用户利用该软件注册码可实现对VB应用软件的注册。本文阐述了利用硬盘卷序列号实现对VB软件注册的详细实现过程。     

Plan recognition for interface agents

Interface agents are computer programs that provide personalized assistance to a user dealing with computer based applications. By understanding the tasks the user performs in a software application an interface agent could be aware of the context that represents the user’s focus of attention at each particular moment. With this purpose, plan recognition aims at identifying the plans or goals of a user from the tasks he (for simplicity, we use “he” to refer to the user, but we do not mean any distinctions about sexes) performs. A prerequisite for the recognition of plans is knowledge of a user’s possible tasks and the combination of these tasks in complex task sequences, which describes typical user behavior. Plan recognition will enable an interface agent to reason about what the user might do next so that it can determine how to assist him. In this work we present the state of the art in Plan Recognition, paying special attention to the features that make it useful to interface agents. These features include the ability to deal with uncertainty, multiple plans, multiple interleaved goals, overloaded tasks, noisy tasks, interruptions and the capability to adapt to a particular user.     

利用硬盘卷序列号实现对VB软件注册的解决方案

在VB应用软件中通过读取用户计算机的硬盘卷序列号作为机器码，加密后生成软件注册码。由于硬盘卷序列号是唯一的，提供的软件注册码也是唯一的，用户利用该软件注册码可实现对VB应用软件的注册。本文阐述了利用硬盘卷序列号实现对VB软件注册的详细实现过程。     

User Interface Reverse Engineering in Support of Interface Migration to the Web

Legacy systems constitute valuable assets to the organizations that own them, and today, there is an increased demand to make them accessible through the World Wide Web to support e-commerce activities. As a result, the problem of legacy-interface migration is becoming very important. In the context of the CELLEST project, we have developed a new process for migrating legacy user interfaces to web-accessible platforms. Instead of analyzing the application code to extract a model of its structure, the CELLEST process analyzes traces of the system-user interaction to model the behavior of the application's user interface. The produced state-transition model specifies the unique legacy-interface screens (as states) and the possible commands leading from one screen to another (as transitions between the states). The interface screens are identified as clusters of similar-in-appearance snapshots in the recorded trace. Next, the syntax of each transition command is extracted as the pattern shared by all the transition instances found in the trace. This user-interface model is used as the basis for constructing models of the tasks performed by the legacy-application users; these task models are subsequently used to develop new web-accessible interface front ends for executing these tasks. In this paper, we discuss the CELLEST method for reverse engineering a state-transition model of the legacy interface, we illustrate it with examples, we discuss the results of our experimentation with it, and we discuss how this model can be used to support the development of new interface front ends.     

Modeling the user state for context-aware spoken interaction in ambient assisted living

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems must provide adapted services easily accessible by a wide variety of users. This can only be possible if the communication between the user and the system is carried out through an interface that is simple, rapid, effective, and robust. Natural language interfaces such as dialog systems fulfill these requisites, as they are based on a spoken conversation that resembles human communication. In this paper, we enhance systems interacting in AAL domains by means of incorporating context-aware conversational agents that consider the external context of the interaction and predict the user’s state. The user’s state is built on the basis of their emotional state and intention, and it is recognized by means of a module conceived as an intermediate phase between natural language understanding and dialog management in the architecture of the conversational agent. This prediction, carried out for each user turn in the dialog, makes it possible to adapt the system dynamically to the user’s needs. We have evaluated our proposal developing a context-aware system adapted to patients suffering from chronic pulmonary diseases, and provide a detailed discussion of the positive influence of our proposal in the success of the interaction, the information and services provided, as well as the perceived quality.     

Querying through a user interface

In contrast to a traditional setting where users express queries against the database schema, we assert that the semantics of data can often be understood by viewing the data in the context of the user interface (UI) of the software tool used to enter the data. That is, we believe that users will understand the data in a database by seeing the labels, drop-down menus, tool tips, or other help text that are built into the user interface. Our goal is to allow domain experts with little technical skill to understand and query data. In this paper, we present our GUi As View (Guava) framework and describe how we use forms-based UIs to generate a conceptual model that represents the information in the user interface. We then describe how we generate a query interface from the conceptual model. We characterize the resulting query language using a subset of the relational algebra. Since most application developers want to craft a physical database to meet desired performance needs, we present here a transformation channel that can be configured by instantiating one or more of our transformation operators. The channel, once configured, automatically transforms queries from our query interface into queries that address the underlying physical database and delivers query results that conform to our query interface. In this paper, we define and formalize our database transformation operators. The contributions of this paper are that first, we demonstrate the feasibility of creating a query interface based directly on the user interface and second, we introduce a general purpose database transformation channel that will likely shorten the application development process and increase the quality of the software by automatically generating software artifacts that are often made manually and are prone to errors.