Programmable applications: exploring the potential for language/interface symbiosis

Abstract

Programmable applications are software systems that seek to combine the learnability and accessibility of direct manipulation interfaces with the expressive power and range of programming languages. In this paper we explore techniques for creatively integrating language and interface constructs within programmable applications. Using SchemePaint—a programmable graphics application—as a source of examples, we demonstrate how an interface and language can combine symbolically and thereby provide powerful modes of expression within applications.     

A multi-layered architecture for sketch-based interaction within virtual environments

In this article, we describe a multi-layered architecture for sketch-based interaction within virtual environments. Our architecture consists of eight hierarchically arranged layers that are described by giving examples of how they are implemented and how they interact. Focusing on table-like projection systems (such as Virtual Tables or Responsive Workbenches) as human-centered output-devices, we show examples of how to integrate parts or all of the architecture into existing domain-specific applications — rather than realizing new general sketch applications — to make sketching an integral part of the next-generation human–computer interface.     

Integration of a 1-D river model with object-oriented methodology

This article first details the development of an integrated modelling system (Flow And Solute Transport in Estuaries and Rivers), which is capable of predicting water elevations, velocities and solute and sediment concentration distributions in well-mixed rivers or narrow estuaries. The model comprises hydrodynamic and solute transport solvers, a user-friendly graphical interface—including data management and storage tools—and graphic and tabular reporting facilities. The program, initially written in Fortran, is a numerical modelling program which deploys highly accurate numerical schemes to solve the hydrodynamic and solute transport equations. This model has recently been modified to include a graphical user interface based on an object-oriented methodology, and implemented using the Visual Basic programming language. Details are given herein of the procedures used to combine the Fortran program with a Windows-based programming language, namely Visual Basic. Particular emphasis has been focused on the construction of the interface for unsteady free-surface flow problems. An example application of the model is cited to illustrate the data management capabilities and accuracy of the model when applied to real hydroenvironmental projects.     

A knowledge based interface for message translation between shop floor devices

This paper addresses the use of a knowledge based interface to provide the communication service of message translation. The focus of this study is on the technical feasibility of using a knowledge based architecture to perform this service for programmable shop floor devices. Implementation of a software interface using a knowledge based architecture is unique compared with the procedural programming approach used for today's custom interfaces.Using the proposed design, a prototype interface was developed. This prototype was successfully applied in four different applications. Each of these applications involved the translation of messages between the Manufacturing Message Format Standard (MMFS) and one of four device specific languages used by different shop floor devices. Investigation of these languages revealed that each possesses a common core of structural characteristics that is necessary for development of a general parsing strategy. These characteristics are expressed in the form of language rules.     

Realization of STEP-NC enabled machining

A STEP-compliant CNC machine tool that demonstrated a G-code free machining scenario is presented. The aim of this research is to showcase the advantages of, and evaluate, STEP-NC—a new NC data model—by implementing it in a legacy CNC system. The work consists of two parts: retrofitting an existing CNC machine and the development of a STEP-compliant NC Converter called STEPcNC. The CompuCam's motion control system is used for retrofitting the machine, which is programmable using its own motion control language—6K Motion Control language and capable of interfacing with other CAPP/CAM programs through languages such as Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Delphi. STEPcNC can understand and process STEP-NC codes, and interface with the CNC controller through a Human Machine Interface. It makes use of STEP-NC information such as “Workplan”, “Workingstep”, machining strategy, machining features and cutting tools that is present in a STEP-NC file. Hence, the system is truly feature-based. The Application Interpreted Model of STEP-NC has been used.     

CEPROL: A cellular programming language

Realized cellular automata may be operated by universal computer systems as programmable special-purpose processors for parallelizable problems. Because of their architecture (local neighbourhood, small storage size per cell, they are well suited for processing systolic algorithms. A cellular programming language — named CEPROL — is presented which offers means for programming and controlling cellular automata processing such algorithms.     

Data communication between an expert system shell and a conventional algorithmic program with application to cam motion specification

Although more and more expert system shells have begun to provide communication interfaces to conventional procedural languages, the interfaces are basically shell- and language-dependent. This paper presents a simple, shell- and language-independent data communication technique between a shell and a procedural language via a concept analogous to the handshake data transmission used in microprocessors. A control file is used for the action of handshake. The communication interface is between two data files in two different language environments. A program written in a LISP-based expert system shell, OPS 5, and one written in a procedural language, FORTRAN, were tested to verify the presented technique.An expert system for cam motion specification, which needs the following three tasks—symbolic representation, numerical computation, and their communication—is described as one of the possible applications of the technique. These three tasks are essential to automated engineering design and analysis.     

Creating natural language interfaces to VR systems

Two research projects are described that explore the use of spoken natural language interfaces to virtual reality (VR) systems. Both projects combine off-the-shelf speech recognition and synthesis technology with in-house command interpreters that interface to the VR applications. Details about the interpreters and other technical aspects of the projects are provided, together with a discussion of some of the design decisions involved in the creation of speech interfaces. Questions and issues raised by the projects are presented as inspiration for future work. These issues include: requirements for object and information representation in VR models to support natural language interfaces; use of the visual context to establish the interaction context; difficulties with referencing events in the virtual world; and problems related to the usability of speech and natural language interfaces in general.     

Attributed Variables in XSB

The attributed variable data type plays an important role in many extensions to the basic Logic Programming language. It provides a flexible mechanism to implement constraint solvers over different domains in a standard logic programming system. To combine the technique of constraint solving with tabling and build a tabled constraint logic programming system, special work has to be done to handle attributed variables when they are copied into and out of tables. In this paper, we describe the implementation of attributed variables in XSB — a tabled logic programming system.We first introduce the internal representation of attributed variables and the interface between the internal representation and the user defined high level unification handler. Then, as the primary focus of the paper, we describe how the tabling mechanism in XSB can be extended to efficiently handle attributed variables. To save attributed variables in tables, the structure of subgoal table and answer table is modified, and the tabling engine itself requires extension as well.     

基于FPGA的视频图像高速处理技术——在钢轨动态检测中的应用

高速图像处理可用软件和硬件两种方案实现。软件方案成本低,灵活,但速度慢;硬件方案速度高,不够灵活且成本高。现场可编程门阵列(FPGA)正好能解决这一矛盾。介绍了一种基于FPGA的视频图像高速处理技术,它被成功地用于钢轨断面图像的实时动态监测系统中。该系统采用了投票表决算法,用VHDL语言(超高速集成电路硬件描述语言)编程,采用多语言协同仿真技术(FLI)。结果表明,该系统充分发挥了FPGA器件的并行特性,显著提高了图像处理速度,达到了动态监测的实时性要求。     

可编程保护测控功能通用性设计与实现

介绍了保护测控装置中可编程保护测控功能的概念、应用场景及实现要求,提出适用于不同软硬件平台的可编程功能通用化设计方案.在分析可编程功能与保护测控装置标准或通用功能之间的数据接口及其描述方法的基础上阐述了编程语言的设计以及用户程序转换为中间代码和目标代码的实现方法,讨论了装置虚拟机通过构造逻辑堆栈高效地执行用户程序的过程,并提出了配套图形化编程工具软件的实现思路.该方案为保护测控装置提供了灵活的通用化二次可编程接口.     

Combining Statistical Language Models via the Latent Maximum Entropy Principle

We present a unified probabilistic framework for statistical language modeling which can simultaneously incorporate various aspects of natural language, such as local word interaction, syntactic structure and semantic document information. Our approach is based on a recent statistical inference principle we have proposed—the latent maximum entropy principle—which allows relationships over hidden features to be effectively captured in a unified model. Our work extends previous research on maximum entropy methods for language modeling, which only allow observed features to be modeled. The ability to conveniently incorporate hidden variables allows us to extend the expressiveness of language models while alleviating the necessity of pre-processing the data to obtain explicitly observed features. We describe efficient algorithms for marginalization, inference and normalization in our extended models. We then use these techniques to combine two standard forms of language models: local lexical models (Markov N-gram models) and global document-level semantic models (probabilistic latent semantic analysis). Our experimental results on the Wall Street Journal corpus show that we obtain a 18.5% reduction in perplexity compared to the baseline tri-gram model with Good-Turing smoothing.Editors: Dan Roth and Pascale Fung     

嵌入式遥控摄影和监视平台的设计与实现

在这篇文章里,笔者使用高可靠性、低成本的S3C2410X开发板构建一个可编程的嵌入式系统平台来传输高分辨率的数码相机信号。这个平台使用Linux操作系统和集中式网络服务。为了遥控数码相机,设计了基于PTP协议的数码相机接口。在这个系统中,还设计了一个解释型的语言解释器系统管理插件,让用户可以借由简单定义的描述语言,来自主开发符合需求的应用系统,从而提高系统可用性和可测量性。     

Coordinating multiagent applications on the WWW: a referencearchitecture

The original Web did not support multiuser, interactive applications. This shortcoming is being studied, and several approaches have been proposed to use the Web as a platform for programming Internet applications. However, most existing approaches are oriented to centralized applications at servers, or local programs within clients. To overcome this deficit, we introduce PageSpace, that is a reference architecture for designing interactive multiagent applications. We describe how we control agents in PageSpace, using variants of the coordination language Linda to guide their interactions. Coordination technology is integrated with the standard Web technology and the programming language Java. Several kinds of agents live in the PageSpace: user interface agents, personal homeagents, agents that implement applications, and agents which interoperate with legacy systems. Within our architecture, it is possible to support fault-tolerance and mobile agents as well     

Coordinating Mobile Agents by the XML-Based Tuple Space

This paper presents Xspace,a programmable coordination paradigm for Internet applications based on mobile agents.The Xspace system fully exploits the advantages of the XML language and Linda-like coordination.It supports XML documents as tuple fields and multiple matching routines implementing different relations among XML documents,including those given by XML query languages,The Xspace uses Java as the implementation language;it is based on object-oriented XMLized tuple spaces to implement a portable and programmable coordination paradigm for mobile agents.The dsign and implementation procedures of Xspace are described in this paper,Experiment and performance evaluation are also made.Finally,some conclusinos and remarks are given.     

Grafcet revisited with a synchronous data-flow language

The Grafcet (or sequential function charts) language is a graphic language often offered in programmable logic control systems (PLC) used for industrial control-command applications. Modeling of Grafcet by the synchronous data-flow language Signal gives both explicit semantics, and the corresponding simulator. The translation into a graph of tasks makes it possible to execute the Grafcet program on any hardware architecture. Moreover, the use of Signal's proof tools allows verification of Grafcet properties, opening the field of critical applications to this very expressive language     

基于XML的多粒度访问控制系统

如何为大量以Web服务形式存在的Web关键资源和应用中涉及到的XML文档资源提供安全访问控制并把二者很好地结合起来是当前电子商务安全服务研究中的一个重要课题。为此,该文提出一种基于XML的粗细粒度结合的多粒度访问控制系统。该系统采用基于角色的访问控制模型(RBAC),在扩展XACML规范的基础上,提出一种相对统一的策略描述语言;引入临时授权的概念,用于表示和实现更为丰富的访问控制策略;并提供灵活的安全映射接口,使其易于和其他安全系统相结合,为企业及企业间的应用提供访问控制服务。     

Case study: Using its style tools to implement IBM's CUA-2 user interface style

In an empirical case study of software tools, two participants used the ITS style designer's language to implement a general purpose, executable, rule-based user interface style. This language allows style designers to select, combine and modify rule prototypes in order to construct a rule-based user interface style. The participants implemented the entire IBM CUA-2 user interface style, plus nine additional human-computer interaction techniques, in 5–7 person-weeks. This is impressive productivity. Typically the time to complete a single CUA-2 application is measured in person-years, not person-weeks. The style implemented here is reusable by any ITS-implemented application. The achievement reported here shows that about half the work of all ITS-implemented CUA-2 applications has been completed in a few person-weeks. This result demonstrates the power and productivity of the ITS approach and tools. The results of this case study showed that key ‘ready-mades’ (e.g. named attribute groups) provided in the style designer's toolkit could be used intact, which is important for importing or exporting interaction techniques from one style to another style. The results generalize to other computer-literate designers who may want to use these tools to create other user interface styles.     

A theoretical framework and empirical examination of the effects of foreign and translated interface language

Given the increased globalization and popularization of computer applications, translating a system's human interface into the local language has become a major consideration for software vendors and distributors. In this paper, we suggest a theoretical framework for the study of user interface translation. The framework includes recognizing vendors' and users' costs of, and benefits from, software translation. An experiment was conducted, based on this framework, to test user performance and preferences regarding interface translations. The experiment manipulated the translation of two interface components: documentation language and manipulation language. The results indicate that users are sensitive to different combinations of interface translation in a way that is commensurate with the instruction-following process (Terwilliger and Polson 1997). Users performed best when a fully translated interface was used and worst when only the manipulation language was translated. Users' preferences were in line with their performance, indicating that a cost benefit approach can serve as a promising starting point to the study of interface translation.