This paper describes a novel hand gesture recognition system that utilizes both multi-channel surface electromyogram (EMG) sensors and 3D accelerometer (ACC) to realize user-friendly interaction between human and computers. Signal... more
This paper describes a novel hand gesture recognition system that utilizes both multi-channel surface electromyogram (EMG) sensors and 3D accelerometer (ACC) to realize user-friendly interaction between human and computers. Signal segments of meaningful gestures are determined from the continuous EMG signal inputs. Multi-stream Hidden Markov Models consisting of EMG and ACC streams are utilized as decision fusion method to recognize hand gestures. This paper also presents a virtual Rubik's Cube game that is controlled by the hand gestures and is used for evaluating the performance of our hand gesture recognition system. For a set of 18 kinds of gestures, each trained with 10 repetitions, the average recognition accuracy was about 91.7% in real application. The proposed method facilitates intelligent and natural control based on gesture interaction.
Mashups are an increasingly popular way to integrate data from multiple web sites to fit a particular need, but it often requires substantial technical expertise to create them. To lower the barrier for creating mashups, we have extended... more
Mashups are an increasingly popular way to integrate data from multiple web sites to fit a particular need, but it often requires substantial technical expertise to create them. To lower the barrier for creating mashups, we have extended the CoScripter web automation tool with a spreadsheet-like environment called Vegemite. Our system uses directmanipulation and programming-by-demonstration techniques to automatically populate tables with information collected from various web sites. A particular strength of our approach is its ability to augment a data set with new values computed by a web site, such as determining the driving distance from a particular location to each of the addresses in a data set. An informal user study suggests that Vegemite may enable a wider class of users to address their information needs.
By our 1 demonstration we want to introduce our achievements in combining different purpose algorithms to build a chatbot which is able to keep a conversation on any topic. It uses snippets of Internet search results to stay within a... more
By our 1 demonstration we want to introduce our achievements in combining different purpose algorithms to build a chatbot which is able to keep a conversation on any topic. It uses snippets of Internet search results to stay within a context, Nakamura's Emotion Dictionary to detect an emotional load existence and categorization of a textual utterance and a causal consequences retrieval algorithm when emotive features are not found. It is also able to detect a possibility to make a pun by analyzing the input sentence and create one if timing is adequate.
An increasing number of today's consumer devices such as mobile phones or tablet computers are equipped with various sensors. The extraction of useful information such as gestures from sensor-generated data based on mainstream imperative... more
An increasing number of today's consumer devices such as mobile phones or tablet computers are equipped with various sensors. The extraction of useful information such as gestures from sensor-generated data based on mainstream imperative languages is a notoriously difficult task. Over the last few years, a number of domain-specific programming languages have been proposed to ease the development of gesture detection. Most of these languages have adopted a declarative approach allowing programmers to describe their gestures rather than having to manually maintain a history of event data and intermediate gesture results. While these declarative languages represent a clear advancement in gesture detection, a number of issues are still unresolved. In this paper we present relevant criteria for gesture detection and provide an initial classification of existing solutions based on these criteria in order to foster a discussion and identify opportunities for future gesture programming languages.
Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of researchers dealing with the integration of paper and digital information or services. While recent technological developments enable new forms of... more
Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of researchers dealing with the integration of paper and digital information or services. While recent technological developments enable new forms of paper-digital integration and interaction, some of the original research on interactive paper dates back almost twenty years. We give a brief overview of the most relevant past and current interactive paper developments. Then, based on our experience in developing a wide variety of interactive paper solutions over the last decade, as well as the results of other research groups, we outline future directions and challenges for the realisation of innovative interactive paper solutions. Further, we propose the definition of common data formats and interactive paper design patterns to ensure future cross-application and framework interoperability.
This paper addresses the problem of interaction design for service provision to customers in a multi-platform environment. It is based on a qualitative and quantitative study of a Portuguese multi-channel retail bank, and shows that, as... more
This paper addresses the problem of interaction design for service provision to customers in a multi-platform environment. It is based on a qualitative and quantitative study of a Portuguese multi-channel retail bank, and shows that, as most of the financial operations are functionally available across the different service platforms, experience requirements become increasingly influential in customers' usage of the different channels. Different financial services generate different interaction needs, and the fit between experience requirements and channel performance in satisfying those needs has a strong impact on customer channel choices. Based on these findings, essential use cases are applied and extended to capture experience requirements for the different financial operations in a technology independent way. With this approach, interaction designers can identify which platforms are best suited to provide the different services available, improving the multi-channel service as a whole. On the other hand, it also enables the identification of areas of interaction experience that need improvement in each platform, if services offered are likely to be effectively used.
Group recommender systems introduce a whole set of new challenges for recommender systems research. The notion of generating a set of recommendations that will satisfy a group of users, with potentially competing interests, is challenging... more
Group recommender systems introduce a whole set of new challenges for recommender systems research. The notion of generating a set of recommendations that will satisfy a group of users, with potentially competing interests, is challenging in itself. In addition to this we must consider how to record and combine the preferences of many different users as they engage in simultaneous recommendation dialogs. In this paper we introduce a group recommender system that is designed to provide assistance to a group of friends trying to plan a skiing vacation.
will act as a major forum for the presentation of innovative ideas, approaches, developments, and research projects in the area advanced Artificial Intelligence. It will also serve to facilitate the exchange of information between... more
will act as a major forum for the presentation of innovative ideas, approaches, developments, and research projects in the area advanced Artificial Intelligence. It will also serve to facilitate the exchange of information between researchers and industry professionals to discuss the latest issues and advancement in the research area. Core areas of AI and advanced multidisciplinary and its applications will be covered during the conferences.
A vision-based virtual mouse interface is described that utilizes a robotic head, visual tracking of the users head and hand positions and recognition of user hand signs to control an intelligent kiosk. The user interface supports, among... more
A vision-based virtual mouse interface is described that utilizes a robotic head, visual tracking of the users head and hand positions and recognition of user hand signs to control an intelligent kiosk. The user interface supports, among other things, smooth ...
Our main research aim is to improve the provision of explanation facilities in information systems generally, and to identify what is meant by "explanation". This paper reports research which identifies both the strengths and weaknesses... more
Our main research aim is to improve the provision of explanation facilities in information systems generally, and to identify what is meant by "explanation". This paper reports research which identifies both the strengths and weaknesses of current research and shows how to overcome those weaknesses. We are also concerned with both present and future uses of explanation in information systems and the role of explanation in a broad range of interactive applications.
In order to give people ubiquitous access to software applications, device controllers, and Internet services, it will be necessary to automatically adapt user interfaces to the computational devices at hand (e.g., cell phones, PDAs,... more
In order to give people ubiquitous access to software applications, device controllers, and Internet services, it will be necessary to automatically adapt user interfaces to the computational devices at hand (e.g., cell phones, PDAs, touch panels, etc.). While previous researchers have proposed solutions to this problem, each has limitations. This paper proposes a novel solution based on treating interface adaptation as an optimization problem. When asked to render an interface on a specific device, our Supple system searches for the rendition that meets the device's constraints and minimizes the estimated effort for the user's expected interface actions. We make several contributions: 1) precisely defining the interface rendition problem, 2) demonstrating how user traces can be used to customize interface rendering to particular user's usage pattern, 3) presenting an efficient interface rendering algorithm, 4) performing experiments that demonstrate the utility of our approach.
Gaze based navigation with digital screens offer a hands-free and touchless interaction, which is often useful in providing a hygienic interaction experience in a public kiosk scenario. The goodness of such a navigation system depends not... more
Gaze based navigation with digital screens offer a hands-free and touchless interaction, which is often useful in providing a hygienic interaction experience in a public kiosk scenario. The goodness of such a navigation system depends not only on the accuracy of detecting the eye gaze but also on the ability to determine whether a user is interested in clicking a button or is just looking at the button. The time for which a user needs to gaze at a particular button before it is considered as a click action is called the dwell time. In this paper, we explore intelligent adjustment of dwell times, where mouse click events on the buttons of a given application are emulated with user gaze. A constant dwell-time for all buttons and for all users may not provide an efficient and intuitive interface. We thereby propose a model to dynamically adjust dwell-time values used to emulate user mouse click events, exploiting the user's experience with different portions of a given application. The adjustment happens at a per-user, per-button granularity, as a function of the user's (a) prior usage experience of the given button within the application and (b) Midas touch characteristics for the given button. We propose OptiDwell, inspired by the action-value method based solutions to the Multi-Armed Bandits problem, for dwell click time adaptation. We experiment OptiDwell using an interactive TV channel browsing interface application , constituting of a mix of text and image buttons, over 10 computer-savvy users generating over 9000 click tasks. We observe significant improvement of user comfort level over the sessions, quantified by (a) improved (reduced) dwell times and (b) reduced number of Midas touches in spite of faster dwell-clicks, as high as 10-fold reduction in the best case. Our work is useful for creating an interface, with ac
It is believed that, with the help of suitable technology, learners and systems can cooperate in building a sufficiently accurate learner model they can use to promote learner reflection through discussion of their knowledge, preferences... more
It is believed that, with the help of suitable technology, learners and systems can cooperate in building a sufficiently accurate learner model they can use to promote learner reflection through discussion of their knowledge, preferences and motivational dispositions (among other learner characteristics). Open learner modelling is a technology that can help set up this discussion by giving the learners a representation of aspects of the learner as "believed" by the system. In this way/role, open learner modelling can perform a critical role in a new breed of intelligent learning environments driven by the aim to support the development of self-management, signification, participation and creativity in learners. In this chapter we provide an analysis of the migration of open learner modelling technology to common e-learning settings, the implications for modern e-learning systems in terms of adaptations to support the open learner modelling process, and the expected functionality of a new generation of intelligent learning environments.
Member-maintained communities ask their users to perform tasks the community needs. From Slashdot, to IMDb, to Wikipedia, groups with diverse interests create communitymaintained artifacts of lasting value (CALV) that support the group's... more
Member-maintained communities ask their users to perform tasks the community needs. From Slashdot, to IMDb, to Wikipedia, groups with diverse interests create communitymaintained artifacts of lasting value (CALV) that support the group's main purpose and provide value to others. Said communities don't help members find work to do, or do so without regard to individual preferences, such as Slashdot assigning meta-moderation randomly. Yet social science theory suggests that reducing the cost and increasing the personal value of contribution would motivate members to participate more.
This paper describes a discussion-bot that provides answers to students' discussion board questions in an unobtrusive and human-like way. Using information retrieval and natural language processing techniques, the discussion-bot... more
This paper describes a discussion-bot that provides answers to students' discussion board questions in an unobtrusive and human-like way. Using information retrieval and natural language processing techniques, the discussion-bot identifies the questioner's interest, mines suitable answers from an annotated corpus of 1236 archived threaded discussions and 279 course documents and chooses an appropriate response. A novel modeling approach was designed for the analysis of archived threaded discussions to ...
People interact with interfaces to accomplish goals, and knowledge about human goals can be useful for building intelligent user interfaces. We suggest that modeling high, human-level goals like "repair my credit score", is especially... more
People interact with interfaces to accomplish goals, and knowledge about human goals can be useful for building intelligent user interfaces. We suggest that modeling high, human-level goals like "repair my credit score", is especially useful for coordinating workflows between interfaces, automated planning, and building introspective applications.
In our research on Commonsense reasoning, we have found that an especially important kind of knowledge is knowledge about human goals. Especially when applying Commonsense reasoning to interface agents, we need to recognize goals from... more
In our research on Commonsense reasoning, we have found that an especially important kind of knowledge is knowledge about human goals. Especially when applying Commonsense reasoning to interface agents, we need to recognize goals from user actions (plan recognition), and generate sequences of actions that implement goals (planning). We also often need to answer more general questions about the situations in which goals occur, such as when and where a particular goal might be likely, or how long it is likely to take to achieve.
This paper presents an online system for recognizing isolated, hand-sketched Urdu characters drawn on a Tablet PC. Attributes of Urdu characters are analyzed to define a set of features which are then trained and classified using a... more
This paper presents an online system for recognizing isolated, hand-sketched Urdu characters drawn on a Tablet PC. Attributes of Urdu characters are analyzed to define a set of features which are then trained and classified using a weighted, linear classifier. As a proof of concept, we have integrated our recognition algorithm into an application used to help people learn the Urdu language. Preliminary results obtained from our studies showed an accuracy of 92.8% for native Urdu writers.
Despite increased presence of gestural and multimodal user interfaces in research as well as daily life, development of such systems still mostly relies on programming concepts which have emerged from classic WIMP user interfaces. This... more
Despite increased presence of gestural and multimodal user interfaces in research as well as daily life, development of such systems still mostly relies on programming concepts which have emerged from classic WIMP user interfaces. This workshop proposes to explore the gap between attempts to formalize and structure development for multimodal interfaces in the research community on the one hand and the lack of adoption of these formal languages and frameworks by practitioners and other researchers on the other hand.
The intertwining of everyday life and computation, along with a new generation of inexpensive digital recording devices and storage facilities, is revolutionizing our ability to collect and analyze human activity data. Such ubiquitous... more
The intertwining of everyday life and computation, along with a new generation of inexpensive digital recording devices and storage facilities, is revolutionizing our ability to collect and analyze human activity data. Such ubiquitous data collection has an exciting potential to augment human cognition and radically improve information-intensive work. In this paper we introduce a system to aid the process of data collection and analysis during observational research by providing non-intrusive automatic capture of paper-based annotations. The system exploits current note-taking practices and incorporates digital pen technology. We describe the development, deployment and use of the system for interactive visualization and annotation of multiple stream of video and other types of time-based data.
Most computer users find organizing large amounts of personal information problematic. Often, hierarchies are the sole means to do it. However, users can remember a broader range of autobiographic contextual data about their personal... more
Most computer users find organizing large amounts of personal information problematic. Often, hierarchies are the sole means to do it. However, users can remember a broader range of autobiographic contextual data about their personal items. Unfortunately, it can seldom be used to manage and retrieve them. Even when this is possible, it is often done by asking users to fill in values for arbitrary properties in dialog boxes or wizards.
Automated software customization is drawing increasing attention as a means to help users deal with the scope, complexity, potential intrusiveness, and ever-changing nature of modern software. The ability to automatically customize... more
Automated software customization is drawing increasing attention as a means to help users deal with the scope, complexity, potential intrusiveness, and ever-changing nature of modern software. The ability to automatically customize functionality, interfaces, and advice to specific users is made more difficult by the uncertainty about the needs of specific individuals and their preferences for interaction. Following recent probabilistic techniques in user modeling, we model our user with a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) and propose to explicitly infer the "user's type"-a composite of personality and affect variables-in real time. We design the system to reason about the impact of its actions given the user's current attitudes. To illustrate the benefits of this approach, we describe a DBN model for a text-editing help task. We show, through simulations, that user types can be inferred quickly, and that a myopic policy offers considerable benefit by adapting to both different types and changing attitudes. We then develop a more realistic user model, using behavioral data from 45 users to learn model parameters and the topology of our proposed user types. With the new model, we conduct a usability experiment with 4 users and 4 different policies. These experiments, while preliminary, show encouraging results for our adaptive policy.
Intelligent user interfaces are characterised by their capability to adapt at run-time and make several communication decisions concerning 'what', 'when', 'why' and 'how' to communicate, through a certain adaptation strategy. In this... more
Intelligent user interfaces are characterised by their capability to adapt at run-time and make several communication decisions concerning 'what', 'when', 'why' and 'how' to communicate, through a certain adaptation strategy. In this paper, we present a methodological approach to assist this decision making process, which is based on a clear separation of the important attributes that characterise the adaptation strategy, namely the adaptation determinants, constituents, goals and rules. Based on this separation, we also present a methodological approach for the formulation of adaptation rules, which utilises techniques from the domain of multiple criteria decision making. It is argued that, following the proposed approach, the adaptation strategy can be easily customised to the requirements of different application domains and user groups, and can be re-used with minor modifications in different applications. As a result, developers of intelligent user interfaces can be significantly assisted, and users can be empowered to exploit the benefits of intelligent interfaces.
Increasingly heritage institutions are making digital artifacts available to the general public and research groups to promote the active exploration of heritage and encourage visits to heritage sites. Stories, such as folklore and first... more
Increasingly heritage institutions are making digital artifacts available to the general public and research groups to promote the active exploration of heritage and encourage visits to heritage sites. Stories, such as folklore and first person accounts form a useful and engaging heritage resource for this purpose. Story Fountain provides intelligent support for the exploration of digital stories. The suite of functions provided in Story Fountain together support the investigation of questions and topics that require the accumulation, association or induction of information across the story archive. Story Fountain provides specific support toward this end such as for comparing and contrasting story concepts, the presentation of story paths between concepts, and mapping stories and events according to properties such as who met whom and who lived where.
In this paper an ongoing research into dynamic intelligent handler of frequently asked questions (FAQs) is described. Although, the use of FAQs is widely used, there is no evidence that most FAQs contain frequently asked questions. This... more
In this paper an ongoing research into dynamic intelligent handler of frequently asked questions (FAQs) is described. Although, the use of FAQs is widely used, there is no evidence that most FAQs contain frequently asked questions. This doubt arises due to the lack of a count of the number of times particular questions are asked; lack of indicators of the most recently asked question and a profile of users who asked these questions, and when these questions were last asked. These inadequacies render FAQs less useful for gauging user information needs and for devising appropriate interventions for different categories of users. Thus, a consulting environment in which an "intelligent handler" gets questions, dynamically creates FAQs with views based on user profiles, allows users to respond to questions and choose best response to questions is being developed.
Authoring dynamic web pages is an inherently difficult task. We present DESK, an interactive authoring tool that allows the customization of dynamic page generation procedures with no apriori tool-specific skill requirements from authors.... more
Authoring dynamic web pages is an inherently difficult task. We present DESK, an interactive authoring tool that allows the customization of dynamic page generation procedures with no apriori tool-specific skill requirements from authors. Our approach consists of combining Programming By Example (PBE) techniques with an ontology-based representation of knowledge displayed in web pages. DESK acts as a client-side complement of a dynamic web page generation system, PEGASUS, which generates HTML pages from a formally structured domain model and an abstract presentation model. Authorized users can modify the internal presentation model by editing the generated HTML pages with DESK in a WYSIWYG environment. DESK keeps track of all user's actions and exploits the explicitly represented domain semantics to enhance the power of PBE techniques.
Web site personalization could be immensely improved if the user's current intentions could be recognized by the surf- ing behavior. The latter can be captured in the form of events occurring in the browser, like mouse moves or... more
Web site personalization could be immensely improved if the user's current intentions could be recognized by the surf- ing behavior. The latter can be captured in the form of events occurring in the browser, like mouse moves or opening Web pages. But which aspects of the user's behavior best con- tribute to the recognition of the task a user is
Over the past few years, multi-touch user interfaces emerged from research prototypes into mass market products. This evolution has been mainly driven by innovative devices such as Apple's iPhone or Microsoft's Surface tabletop computer.... more
Over the past few years, multi-touch user interfaces emerged from research prototypes into mass market products. This evolution has been mainly driven by innovative devices such as Apple's iPhone or Microsoft's Surface tabletop computer. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of software engineering abstractions in existing multi-touch development frameworks. Many multi-touch applications are based on hard-coded procedural low level event processing. This leads to proprietary solutions with a lack of gesture extensibility and cross-application reusability. We present Midas, a declarative model for the definition and detection of multi-touch gestures where gestures are expressed via logical rules over a set of input facts. We highlight how our rule-based language approach leads to improvements in gesture extensibility and reusability. Last but not least, we introduce JMidas, an instantiation of Midas for the Java programming language and describe how JMidas has been applied to implement a number of innovative multi-touch gestures.
This paper describes COMET, a collaborative intelligent tutoring system for medical problem-based learning. The system uses Bayesian networks to model individual student knowledge and activity, as well as that of the group. It... more
This paper describes COMET, a collaborative intelligent tutoring system for medical problem-based learning. The system uses Bayesian networks to model individual student knowledge and activity, as well as that of the group. It incorporates a multi-modal interface that integrates text and graphics so as to provide a rich communication channel between the students and the system, as well as among students in the group. Students can sketch directly on medical images, search for medical concepts, and sketch hypotheses on a shared workspace. The prototype system incorporates substantial domain knowledge in the area of head injury diagnosis. A major challenge in building COMET has been to develop algorithms for generating tutoring hints. Tutoring in PBL is particularly challenging since the tutor should provide as little guidance as possible while at the same time not allowing the students to get lost. From studies of PBL sessions at a local medical school, we have identified and implemented eight commonly used hinting strategies. We compared the tutoring hints generated by COMET with those of experienced human tutors. Our results show that COMET's hints agree with the hints of the majority of the human tutors with a high degree of statistical agreement (McNemar test, p = 0.652, Kappa = 0.773).
This paper presents an online system for recognizing isolated, hand-sketched Urdu characters drawn on a Tablet PC. Attributes of Urdu characters are analyzed to define a set of features which are then trained and classified using a... more
This paper presents an online system for recognizing isolated, hand-sketched Urdu characters drawn on a Tablet PC. Attributes of Urdu characters are analyzed to define a set of features which are then trained and classified using a weighted, linear classifier. As a proof of concept, we have integrated our recognition algorithm into an application used to help people learn the Urdu language. Preliminary results obtained from our studies showed an accuracy of 92.8% for native Urdu writers.
The need for Natural Language Interfaces to databases (NLIs) has become increasingly acute as more and more people access information through their web browsers, PDAs, and cell phones. Yet NLIs are only usable if they map natural language... more
The need for Natural Language Interfaces to databases (NLIs) has become increasingly acute as more and more people access information through their web browsers, PDAs, and cell phones. Yet NLIs are only usable if they map natural language questions to SQL queries correctly. As Schneiderman and Norman have argued, people are unwilling to trade reliable and predictable user interfaces for intelligent but unreliable ones. In this paper, we introduce a theoretical framework for reliable NLIs, which is the foundation for the fully implemented Precise NLI. We prove that, for a broad class of semantically tractable natural language questions, Precise is guaranteed to map each question to the corresponding SQL query. We report on experiments testing Precise on several hundred questions drawn from user studies over three benchmark databases. We find that over 80% of the questions are semantically tractable questions, which Precise answers correctly. Precise automatically recognizes the 20% of questions that it cannot handle, and requests a paraphrase. Finally, we show that Precise compares favorably with Mooney's learning NLI and with Microsoft's English Query product.
We describe a method for notifying users through auditory cues embedded in an ambient soundscape in the environment. It uses pieces of music which are composed in such a way, that particular instruments or motifs can be added or omitted... more
We describe a method for notifying users through auditory cues embedded in an ambient soundscape in the environment. It uses pieces of music which are composed in such a way, that particular instruments or motifs can be added or omitted without losing the aesthetic quality of the overall composition. This allows for very subtle modifications in the soundscape which are only noticed by those users who have chosen this particular instrument or motif as "their" notification instrument before. As a side effect, the soundscape itself can be used to subtly influence the mood of users. The method has been implemented in a prototype, which we briefly discuss. The prototype is implemented using a spatial audio framework and can hence notify users from particular directions.
Controlling the movements of mobile robots, including driving the robot through the world and panning the robot's cameras, typically requires many physical joysticks, buttons, and switches. Operators will often employ a technique called... more
Controlling the movements of mobile robots, including driving the robot through the world and panning the robot's cameras, typically requires many physical joysticks, buttons, and switches. Operators will often employ a technique called "chording" to cope with this situation. Much like a piano player, the operator will simultaneously actuate multiple joysticks and switches with his or her hands to create a combination of complimentary movements. However, these controls are in fixed locations and unable to be reprogrammed easily. Using a Microsoft Surface multi-touch table, we have designed an interface that allows chording and simultaneous multi-handed interaction anywhere that the user wishes to place his or her hands. Taking inspiration from the biomechanics of the human hand, we have created a dynamically resizing, ergonomic, and multi-touch controller (the DREAM Controller). This paper presents the design and testing of this controller with an iRobot ATRV-JR robot.
This paper explores the prototype design of an auditory interface enhancement called the Sonic Grid that helps visually impaired users navigate GUI-based environments. The Sonic Grid provides an auditory representation of GUI elements... more
This paper explores the prototype design of an auditory interface enhancement called the Sonic Grid that helps visually impaired users navigate GUI-based environments. The Sonic Grid provides an auditory representation of GUI elements embedded in a twodimensional interface, giving a 'global' spatial context for use of auditory icons, ear-cons and speech feedback. This paper introduces the Sonic Grid, discusses insights gained through participatory design with members of the visually impaired community, and suggests various applications of the technique, including its use to ease the learning curve for using computers by the visually impaired.
One difficulty in creating synthetic characters for interactive stories is that these characters must convey their role in the story in a believable way. However, the relation between believability, on one side, and the role a character... more
One difficulty in creating synthetic characters for interactive stories is that these characters must convey their role in the story in a believable way. However, the relation between believability, on one side, and the role a character plays in a drama, on the other, has not yet been fully addressed. In this paper we will present a view on how to develop believable synthetic characters whose behaviour is based on a set of predefined functions (Propp's functions) associated with the role they play in the story. To illustrate the approach, we will present a collaborative virtual environment, Teatrix, designed for children to build their own stories-fairy tales. In Teatrix, virtual actors play roles (such as villain, hero, magician, etc), which are functional for the development of the story. Such roles have pre-defined goals and plans, allowing the story to flow and climax situations to arise. Teatrix is already in use by children ages between 7 and 9, in the context of a Computer-Integrated Classroom scenario.
Prior research into embodied interface agents has found that users like them and find them engaging. In this paper, we argue that embodiment can serve an even stronger function if system designers use actual human conversational protocols... more
Prior research into embodied interface agents has found that users like them and find them engaging. In this paper, we argue that embodiment can serve an even stronger function if system designers use actual human conversational protocols in the design of the interface. Communicative behaviors such as salutations and farewells, conversational turn-taking with interruptions, and referring to objects using pointing gestures are examples of protocols that all native speakers of a language already know how to perform and that can thus be leveraged in an intelligent interface. We discuss how these protocols are integrated into Rea, an embodied, multi-modal conversational interface agent who acts as a real-estate salesperson, and we show why embodiment is required for their successful implementation.
We present data-driven methods for supporting musical creativity by capturing the statistics of a musical database. Specifically, we introduce a system that supports users in exploring the high-dimensional space of musical chord sequences... more
We present data-driven methods for supporting musical creativity by capturing the statistics of a musical database. Specifically, we introduce a system that supports users in exploring the high-dimensional space of musical chord sequences by parameterizing the variation among chord sequences in popular music. We provide a novel user interface that exposes these learned parameters as control axes, and we propose two automatic approaches for defining these axes. One approach is based on a novel clustering procedure, the other on principal components analysis. A user study compares our approaches for defining control axes both to each other and to an approach based on manually-assigned genre labels. Results show that our automatic methods for defining control axes provide a subjectively better user experience than axes based on manual genre labeling. Figure 1: Example instantiations of our polygon slider based on different parameterizations of the chord sequence space. Manipulating any of the "handles" adjusts the weight of the corresponding control axis. Applications include the generation of chord sequences based on the statistics of (a) genres or (b) artists. Axes need not be driven by underlying labels: abstract axes, such as those computed by our PCA-and randomly-seeded-clustering approaches, are also described and evaluated.
This paper addresses the problem of interaction design for service provision to customers in a multi-platform environment. It is based on a qualitative and quantitative study of a Portuguese multi-channel retail bank, and shows that, as... more
This paper addresses the problem of interaction design for service provision to customers in a multi-platform environment. It is based on a qualitative and quantitative study of a Portuguese multi-channel retail bank, and shows that, as most of the financial operations are functionally available across the different service platforms, experience requirements become increasingly influential in customers' usage of the different channels. Different financial services generate different interaction needs, and the fit between experience requirements and channel performance in satisfying those needs has a strong impact on customer channel choices. Based on these findings, essential use cases are applied and extended to capture experience requirements for the different financial operations in a technology independent way. With this approach, interaction designers can identify which platforms are best suited to provide the different services available, improving the multi-channel service as a whole. On the other hand, it also enables the identification of areas of interaction experience that need improvement in each platform, if services offered are likely to be effectively used.
As computer applications become larger with every new version, there is a growing need to provide some way for users to manage the interface complexity. There are three different potential solutions to this problem: 1) an adaptable... more
As computer applications become larger with every new version, there is a growing need to provide some way for users to manage the interface complexity. There are three different potential solutions to this problem: 1) an adaptable interface that allows users to customize the application to suit their needs; 2) an adaptive interface that performs the adaptation for the users; or 3) a combination of the adaptive and adaptable solutions, an approach that would be suitable in situations where users are not customizing effectively on their own. In this paper we examine what it means for users to engage in effective customization of a menu-based graphical user interface. We examine one aspect of effective customization, which is how characteristics of the users' tasks and customization behaviour affect their performance on those tasks. We do so by using a process model simulation based on cognitive modelling that generates quantitative predictions of user performance. Our results show that users can engage in customization behaviours that vary in efficiency. We use these results to suggest how adaptive support could be added to an adaptable interface to improve the effectiveness of the users' customization.
Visitors often tend to visit museums in groups, mainly with family or friends, yet most of the today mobile museum guides focus on supporting the individual visitor. The technology described in this paper allows supporting groups of... more
Visitors often tend to visit museums in groups, mainly with family or friends, yet most of the today mobile museum guides focus on supporting the individual visitor. The technology described in this paper allows supporting groups of visitors in addition to individuals by providing contextaware services aimed at supporting the whole group. These include context-aware communication and alerting services that are provided by the museum visitor's guide system developed in the framework of the PIL (PEACH-Israel) project, as an example case of a larger variety of possible context-aware services.
Proactive contextual information systems help people locate information by automatically suggesting potentially relevant resources based on their current tasks or interests. Such systems are becoming increasingly popular, but designing... more
Proactive contextual information systems help people locate information by automatically suggesting potentially relevant resources based on their current tasks or interests. Such systems are becoming increasingly popular, but designing user interfaces that effectively communicate recommended information is a challenge: the interface must be unobtrusive, yet communicate enough information at the right time to provide value to the user. In this paper we describe our experience with the FXPAL Bar, a proactive information system designed to provide contextual access to corporate and personal resources. In particular, we present three features designed to communicate proactive recommendations more effectively: translucent recommendation windows increase the user's awareness of particularly highlyranked recommendations, query term highlighting communicates the relationship between a recommended document and the user's current context, and a novel recommendation digest function allows users to return to the most relevant previously recommended resources.
With the increasing number of computers per user, it has become common for most users to deal with growing numbers of electronic documents. Those documents are usually stored in hierarchic file systems, requiring them to be classified... more
With the increasing number of computers per user, it has become common for most users to deal with growing numbers of electronic documents. Those documents are usually stored in hierarchic file systems, requiring them to be classified into the hierarchy, a difficult task. Such organization schemes do not provide adequate support for the efficient and effortless retrieval of documents at a later time, since their position in the hierarchy is one of the only clues to a document's whereabouts. However, humans are natural-born storytellers, and stories help relate and remember important pieces of information. Hence, the usage of narratives where a user "tells a story" about the document will be a valuable tool towards simplifying the retrieval task.
... Wolfgang Wahlster Abstract The design of mobile navigation systems adapting to lim-ited resources will be an important future challenge. ... INTRODUCTION Personal navigation systems that extend beyond... more
... Wolfgang Wahlster Abstract The design of mobile navigation systems adapting to lim-ited resources will be an important future challenge. ... INTRODUCTION Personal navigation systems that extend beyond today's use in cars will play a major role in the future. ...
