Towards a cultural user interface generation principles

As ubiquitous computing, and pervasive computing technology are being applied rapidly to the service industry, in the field of HCI, more complex and in-depth research are required at the moment. The efforts to make user experience more valuable using useful multimedia technologies around us, are being made in various parts of the world. In addition to this, generation studies for developing easier and faster UI are being conducted in the field of UI. Until now, the studies have been focused on generation studies using UI pattern models, but smart UI generation development, considering the cultural environment of users, is required. The purpose of this study is to suggest 3-D integrated design principles of modeling, design, and system for the design of cultural user interface generation reflecting the users’ potential culture models. For this, a CTT model was designed based on MB-UID; and a cultural UI generation system architecture was designed by using cultural dimension models and cultural markers. To analyze the cultural factors, CISC (Cultural Index Score for Country) was derived in the process of culture profiling. Then, to verify the design model, culture UI was implemented, targeting the category UI of smartphone app stores.     

Towards standardisation of user models for simulation and adaptation purposes

The use of user models can be very valuable when trying to develop accessible and ergonomic products and services taking into account users’ specific needs and preferences. Simulation of user–product interaction using user models may reveal accessibility issues at the early stages of design and development, and this results to a significant reduction in costs and development time. Moreover, user models can be used in adaptive interfaces enabling the personalised customisation of user interfaces that enhances the accessibility and usability of products and services. This paper presents the efforts of the Virtual User Modelling and Simulation Standardisation ‘VUMS’ cluster of projects towards the development of an interoperable user model, able to describe both able-bodied and people with various kinds of disabilities. The VUMS cluster is consisted by the VERITAS, MyUI, GUIDE, and VICON FP7 European projects, all involved in user modelling from different perspectives. The main goal of the VUMS cluster was the development of a unified user model that could be used by all the participant projects and that could be the basis of a new user model standard. Currently, within the VUMS cluster, a common user model has been defined and converters that enable the transformation from each project’s specific user model to the VUMS user model and vice versa have been developed enabling, thus, the exchange of user models between the projects.     

UIML: an appliance-independent XML user interface language

Today's Internet appliances feature user interface technologies almost unknown a few years ago: touch screens, styli, handwriting and voice recognition, speech synthesis, tiny screens, and more. This richness creates problems. First, different appliances use different languages: WML for cell phones; SpeechML, JSML, and VoxML for voice enabled devices such as phones; HTML and XUL for desktop computers, and so on. Thus, developers must maintain multiple source code families to deploy interfaces to one information system on multiple appliances. Second, user interfaces differ dramatically in complexity (e.g, PC versus cell phone interfaces). Thus, developers must also manage interface content. Third, developers risk writing appliance-specific interfaces for an appliance that might not be on the market tomorrow. A solution is to build interfaces with a single, universal language free of assumptions about appliances and interface technology. This paper introduces such a language, the User Interface Markup Language (UIML), an XML-compliant language. UIML insulates the interface designer from the peculiarities of different appliances through style sheets. A measure of the power of UIML is that it can replace hand-coding of Java AWT or Swing user interfaces.     

Model-based intelligent user interface adaptation: challenges and future directions

Software and Systems Modeling - Adapting the user interface of a software system to the requirements of the context of use continues to be a major challenge, particularly when users become more...     

Towards mobile language evolution exploitation

Knowing about the evolution of a term can significantly help when searching for relevant information, especially in case of sudden evolutions (e.g. as of dramatical changes in political situations). Here, some terms get a completely new meaning or are used in new or different ways. In mobile situations it is important to be able to effectively retrieve information, since this is usually done in a hurry and interaction possibilities with mobile devices are limited. In this paper we describe a methodology using word sense discrimination to discover term evolution. We present two mobile interfaces for easy access and exploration of this evolution, as well as a user-study to show its usefulness. We conclude the paper with an outlook of further research possibilities in this new topic.     

Fooling the user of a programming language

Fooling the user' of a programming language by ‘natural’ constructions can cause completely unpredictable reliability defects in software systems. Numerous examples show the extent of the problem. Two methods of overcoming it are presented: simple languages devoid of user-fooling powers, and explication languages to accompany the more powerful languages.     

一个轻量级多设备用户界面描述语言MDUIDL

为适应多设备环境下用户界面开发的需求,解决当前UIDL存在的一些问题,设计并实现了一个轻量级多设备用户界面描述语言MDUIDL。该语言分为抽象界面描述语言、具体界面描述语言、事件描述语言和设备描述语言,分别从不同侧面对多设备应用系统的用户界面进行描述。通过实例研究,表明该语言具有良好的界面表达能力和对多设备环境的支持,且简单易学,易于使用。     

Automating visual language generation

A system to generate and interpret customized visual languages in given application areas is presented. The generation is highly automated. The user presents a set of sample visual sentences to the generator. The generator uses inference grammar techniques to produce a grammar that generalizes the initial set of sample sentences, and exploits general semantic information about the application area to determine the meaning of the visual sentences in the inferred language. The interpreter is modeled on an attribute grammar. A knowledge base, constructed during the generation of the system, is then consulted to construct the meaning of the visual sentence. The architecture of the system and its use in the application environment of visual text editing (inspired by the Heidelberg icon set) enhanced with file management features are reported     

Knowledge-intensive natural language generation

The development of natural language interfaces to artificial intelligence systems is dependent on the representation of knowledge. A major impediment to building such systems has been the difficulty in adding sufficient linguistic and conceptual knowledge to extend and adapt their capabilities. This difficulty has been apparent in systems that perform the task of language production, i.e., the generation of natural language output to satisfy the communicative requirements of a system.A uniform, parsimonious representation of knowledge about language can increase extensibility and efficiency as well as simplify the generation process. The Ace framework applies knowledge representation fundamentals to the task of encoding knowledge about language. Within this framework, linguistic and conceptual knowledge are organized into hierarchies, and structured associations are used to join knowledge structures that are metaphorically related or otherwise used in linguistic expression. These structured associations permit specialized linguistic knowledge to derive partially from more abstract knowledge, facilitating the use of abstractions in generating specialized phrases. A simple generator called KING (Knowledge INtensive Generator) uses an Ace knowledge base to produce utterances from their conceptual representation.     

Shaping user input: a strategy for natural language dialogue design

Traditional approaches to natural language dialogue interface design have adopted ordinary human-human conversation as the model for online human-computer interaction. The attempt to deal with all the subtleties of natural dialogues, such as topic focus, coherence, ellipsis, pronominal reference, etc. has resulted in prototype systems that are enormously complex and computationally expensive.

In a series of experiments^†, we explored ways of minimizing the processing burden of a dialogue system by channeling user input towards a more tractable, though still natural, form of Englishlanguage questions. Through linking a pair of terminals, we presented subjects with two different dialogue styles as a framework for online help in the domain of word-processing. The first dialogue style involved ordinary conversational format. The second style involved a simulation of an automated dialogue system, including apparent processing restrictions and ‘system process messages’ to inform the subject of the steps taken by the system during query analysis. In both cases human tutors played the role of the help system. After each dialogue session, subjects were interviewed to determine their assessments of the naturalness and usability of the dialogue interface.

We found that user input became more tractable to parsing and query analysis as the dialogue style became more formalized, yet the subjective assessment of naturalness and usability remained fairly constant. This suggests that techniques for channeling user input in a dialogue system may be effectively employed to reduce processing demands without compromising the benefits of a natural language interface. Theoretically, this data lends support to the hypothesis that unrestricted human-human conversation is not the most appropriate model for the design of human-computer dialogue interfaces.     

Lexicalization in natural language generation: A survey

In natural language generation, a meaning representation of some kind is successively transformed into a sentence or a text. Naturally, a central subtask of this problem is the choice of words, orlexicalization. In this paper, we propose four major issues that determine how a generator tackles lexicalization, and survey the contributions that researchers have made to them. Open problems are identified, and a possible direction for future research is sketched.     

Towards a language for concurrent processes

In this paper we shall discuss concurrency in programming languages, with a view towards designing a process-oriented language which, by its inherent parallelism, is well suited to exploit the forthcoming generation of distributed processor networks. We shall start by discussing the traditional approach towards managing concurrency, with ‘monitors’ co-ordinating the interactions of ‘processes’, and shall demonstrate that this approach actually degrades concurrency by imposing sequentiality during interactions because it is based on the premise of co-ordinating secure access to shared resources. As a tool for interprocess communication it is felt that the ‘monitor’ is too far removed from the abstract nature of the problem, and so, as a purely engineering solution, it imposes too broad and too prolonged an exclusion to be acceptable in general. Instead we turn to a simpler, and ultimately more powerful notion of ‘message passing’ between parallel processes. We shall show how, if the message system is polymorphic, any data value, however large it is, can pass freely between any pair of processes. By making the processes themselves values in the language we shall discover that message networks can come into being dynamically, and tailor themselves to their applications as and when necessary by ‘short-circuiting’ extensive communications paths. We shall also see how, if the message system is inherently asynchronous, the degree of the parallelism in a system can be enhanced, not degraded, as more and elaborate communications paths develop, the only sequentiality in the system as a whole being imposed by synchronizing processes, not the message passing system itself. After discussing the various built-in system facilities that permit processes to dynamically find out about and study one another, thus permitting processes to set up and thereafter supervise whole subsystems, we shall round off by discussing the advantages of introducing the machines themselves into the language, making it possible for processes to become aware of, and then ‘migrate’ within, the topological structure of a multi-processor distributed network, moving closer to their application, or just to a less-loaded processor, as the need arises. To conclude we shall contrast this new-style process-oriented language with various existing programming languages which have experimented with concurrency, either implicitly or explicitly, in order to see if, and if so how, this new style is any simpler and more powerful than its precursors.     

Designing for augmented attention: Towards a framework for attentive user interfaces

Attentive user interfaces are user interfaces that aim to support the user’s attentional capacities. By sensing the users’ attention for objects and people in their everyday environment, and by treating user attention as a limited resource, these interfaces avoid today’s ubiquitous patterns of interruption. Focusing upon attention as a central interaction channel allows development of more sociable methods of communication and repair with ubiquitous devices. Our methods are analogous to human turn taking in group communication. Turn taking improves the user’s ability to conduct foreground processing of conversations. Attentive user interfaces bridge the gap between the foreground and periphery of user activity in a similar fashion, allowing users to move smoothly in between.We present a framework for augmenting user attention through attentive user interfaces. We propose five key properties of attentive systems: (i) to sense attention; (ii) to reason about attention; (iii) to regulate interactions; (iv) to communicate attention and (v) to augment attention.     

Opening the black box of system usage: user adaptation to disruptive IT

According to Benbasat and Barki (2007), systems usage has remained a black box in spite of the fact that the construct lies at the heart of a host of studies in the field. We know very little about how exactly users cope with information technology (IT), especially disruptive IT. To answer such questions, we grounded our current work in Beaudry and Pinsonneault's Coping Model of User Adaptation (2005; CMUA), a model that explains user strategies appraising an IT event. These strategies are a response to threats and opportunities embedded in the IT event and are impacted by the level of control users have over the situation. In the current study, following CMUA, we develop and test measures for a deeper understanding of systems usage and user adaptation to IT through a 2 × 2 laboratory experiment. Overall, we found strong support for the CMUA model.     

EEUPL: Towards effective and efficient user profile linkage across multiple social platforms

Linking user profiles belonging to the same people across multiple social networks underlines a wide range of applications, such as cross-platform prediction, cross-platform recommendation, and advertisement. Most of existing approaches focus on pairwise user profile linkage between two platforms, which can not effectively piece up information from three or more social platforms. Different from the previous work, we investigate scalable user profile linkage across multiple social platforms by proposing an effective and efficient model called EEUPL, which can detect duplicate profiles within one platform that belong to same person and is implemented with Apache Spark for distributed execution. The model contains two key components: 1) To link cross-platform user profiles effectively, we propose an average-link strategy based clustering method. 2) To extend the model EEUPL to large-scale datasets, an Apache Spark based approach is developed. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate the superiority of the model EEUPL compared with the state-of-art methods.

     

Human-centred design methods: Developing scenarios for robot assisted play informed by user panels and field trials

This article describes the user-centred development of play scenarios for robot assisted play, as part of the multidisciplinary IROMEC¹ project that develops a novel robotic toy for children with special needs. The project investigates how robotic toys can become social mediators, encouraging children with special needs to discover a range of play styles, from solitary to collaborative play (with peers, carers/teachers, parents, etc.). This article explains the developmental process of constructing relevant play scenarios for children with different special needs. Results are presented from consultation with panel of experts (therapists, teachers, parents) who advised on the play needs for the various target user groups and who helped investigate how robotic toys could be used as a play tool to assist in the children’s development. Examples from experimental investigations are provided which have informed the development of scenarios throughout the design process. We conclude by pointing out the potential benefit of this work to a variety of research projects and applications involving human–robot interactions.     

Stochastic approximation and user adaptation in a competitiveresource sharing system

This paper is motivated by the work of Altman and Shimkin (1998). Customers arrive at a service center and must choose between two types of service: a channel that is shared by all currently in it and a dedicated line. The mean service cost (or time) for any customer entering the shared resource depends on the decisions of all future arrivals up to the time of departure of that customer, and so has a competitive aspect. The decision rule of each arriving customer is based on its own immediate self-interest, given the available data on the past performance. If the current estimate of the cost for the shared resource equals that of the dedicated line, any decision is possible. The procedure is a type of learning algorithm. The convergence problem is one in asynchronous stochastic approximation, where the ODE may be a differential inclusion. It is shown that, asymptotically, the performance of the learning system is that for the symmetric Nash strategy, despite the allowed arbitrariness and lack of coordination