| Intelligent Interface Agents | | BIBA | PDF | 3 | |
| Henry Lieberman | |||
| Attendees will come away with a real, no-nonsense understanding of "the
agent phenomenon"; why people are excited about agents, what the range of
applicability of interface agent systems is, what is good and bad about agents,
how to learn more about agents, and what is necessary to build them.
Features * What's an Agent? * Perspectives from Artificial Intelligence, and from Human-Computer Interaction * Controversies about Agents * Architectural Considerations for Agent Interfaces * Learning Techniques for Interface Agents * Examples of Agent Systems * Programming and User Interface Design for Agent Systems * Resources for learning about the Agents field | |||
| Designing and Evaluating Intelligent User Interfaces | | BIBAK | PDF | 5-6 | |
| Kristina Höök | |||
| Intelligent user interfaces have been proposed as a means to overcome some
of the problems that direct-manipulation interfaces cannot handle, such as:
information overflow problems; providing help on how to use complex systems; or
real-time cognitive overload problems. Intelligent user interfaces are also
being proposed as a means to make systems individualised or personalised,
thereby increasing the systems flexibility and appeal.
But in order for intelligent user interface to gain ground and be of real use to their users, more attention has to be given to usability issues. In this tutorial we shall discuss methods for design and evaluation of intelligent user interfaces from a usability perspective. Keywords: Intelligent user interfaces, Usability, Design methods, Evaluation | |||
| The Opportunity of a New Century | | BIB | 9 | |
| David Nagel | |||
| Coherent Gestures, Locomotion, and Speech in Life-Like Pedagogical Agents | | BIBAK | PDF | 13-20 | |
| Stuart G. Towns; Jennifer L. Voerman; Charles B. Callaway; James C. Lester | |||
| Life-like animated interface agents for knowledge-based learning
environments can provide timely, customized advice to support students' problem
solving. Because of their strong visual presence, they hold significant
promise for substantially increasing students' enjoyment of their learning
experiences. A key problem posed by life-like agents that inhabit artificial
worlds is deictic believability. In the same manner that humans refer to
objects in their environment through judicious combinations of speech,
locomotion, and gesture, animated agents should be able to move through their
environment, and point to and refer to objects appropriately as they provide
problem-solving advice. In this paper we describe a framework for achieving
deictic believability in animated agents. A deictic behavior planner exploits
a world model and the evolving explanation plan as it selects and coordinates
locomotive, gestural, and speech behaviors. The resulting behaviors and
utterances are believable, and the references are unambiguous. This approach
to spatial deixis has been implemented in a life-like animated agent, Cosmo,
who inhabits a learning environment for the domain of Internet packet routing.
The product of a large multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, 3D
modelers, graphic artists, and animators, Cosmo provides realtime advice to
students as they escort packets through a virtual world of interconnected
routers. Keywords: Animated agents, Life-like, Believability, Learning environments,
Educational applications | |||
| Guiding the User Through Dynamically Generated Hypermedia Presentations with a Life-Like Character | | BIBAK | PDF | 21-28 | |
| Elisabeth Andre; Thomas Rist; Jochen Muller | |||
| Rapid growth of competition on the electronic market place, will generate
the demand for new innovative communication styles with web users. In this
paper, we develop an operational approach for the automated generation of
hypermedia presentations. Unlike conventional hypermedia, we use a life-like
presentation agent which presents the generated material, and guides the user
through a dynamically expanding navigation space. The approach relies on a
model that combines behavior planning for life-like characters with concepts
from hypermedia authoring such as timeline structures and navigation graphs. Keywords: Automated presentation of information, Hypermedia generation, Life-like
characters | |||
| Tigrito: A Multi-Mode Interactive Improvisational Agent | | BIBAK | PDF | 29-32 | |
| Heidy Maldonado; Antoine Picard; Patrick Doyle; Barbara Hayes-Roth | |||
| This paper presents the implementation of Tigrito, an affective computer
character. We outline how Tigrito can be used to study children's sense of
engagement and relationship with virtual toys in different modes of
interaction. Keywords: Interactive, Avatar, Believability, Autonomous, Agent | |||
| Speech Research: Near and Not-So-Near Results and What They Might Mean for IUI | | BIBA | PDF | 35 | |
| Candy Sidner; Alex Acero; Janet Cahn; Julia Hirschberg; Robert Moore; Salim Roukos | |||
| The purpose of this panel is to provide members of the IUI community with a
look at where speech is heading in the near and not so near term. At present
speech research has made great strides in speech recognition (to the point that
large vocabulary, continuous dictation products are commercially available),
some strides in speech understanding for limited tasks, and progress on
synthesis (where products have long been available and continue to improve).
Because of these changes, many kinds of speech capabilities will before long be
available to the IUI community as tools for intelligent user interfaces (and
even not so intelligent ones). Members of this panel are convening to make
some projections about the progress expected in research in the next three
years and also in the six year time horizon. They will address such questions
as:
* How is speech research on input going to move beyond continuous dictation in
the next few years? What are the significant challenges to, for example, using speech in a conversational fashion with computer programs over the next few years? How will this change over the longer term of 3-6 years, if at all? * What research directions are being undertaken to understand the challenges in using speech in standard (GUI) interfaces? What do the members of the panel believe are the appropriate ways to move beyond GUI interfaces? * What progress is being made on synthetic speech output to provide more natural voices and more natural speaking styles (articulation, prosodic function, emotion, timing, and the like)? What advances are likely in the near term? How will these change over the long term? What tools are likely to be available to other researchers? * For tools provided from speech research, how much sophistication about language and/or speech will non-speech researchers (and others) need to have to use the tools that will be available over the next few years? | |||
| Integrating User Interface Agents with Conventional Applications | | BIBAK | PDF | 39-46 | |
| Henry Lieberman | |||
| In most experiments with user interface agents to date, it has been
necessary either to implement both the agent and the application from scratch,
or to modify the code of an existing application to enable the necessary
communication. Instead, we would like to be able to "attach" an agent to an
existing application, while requiring only a minimum of advance planning on the
part of the application developer. Commercial applications are increasingly
supporting the use of "application programmers' interfaces" and scripting
languages as mean of achieving external control of applications. Are these
mechanisms sufficient for software agents to achieve communication with
applications?
This paper reports some preliminary experiments in developing agent software that works with existing, unmodified commercial applications and agents that work across multiple applications. We describe a programming by example agent, ScriptAgent, that uses a scripting language, Applescript, to record example procedures that are generalized by the agent. Another approach is examinability, where the application grants to the agent the right to examine internal data structures. We present another kind of learning agent, Tatlin, that compares successive application states to infer interface operations. Finally, we discuss broader systems issues such as parallelism, interface sharing between agent and application, and access to objects. Keywords: Agents, Scripting languages, Programming by example, Programming by example,
Programming by demonstration, Machine learning, User interface | |||
| Cyberdesk: A Framework for Providing Self-Integrating Context-Aware Services | | BIBAK | PDF | 47-54 | |
| Anind K. Dey; Gregory D. Abowd; Andrew Wood | |||
| Applications are often designed to take advantage of the potential for
integration with each other via shared information. Current approaches for
integration are limited, effecting both the programmer and end-user. In this
paper, we present CyberDesk, a framework for self-integrating software in which
integration is driven by user context. It relieves the burden on programmers
by removing the necessity to predict how software should be integrated. It
also relieves the burden from users by removing the need to understand how
different software components work together. Keywords: Context-aware computing, Automated software integration, Dynamic mediation,
Ubiquitous computing | |||
| MVIEWS: Multimodal Tools for the Video Analyst | | BIBAK | PDF | 55-62 | |
| Adam Cheyer; Luc Julia | |||
| Full-motion video has inherent advantages over still imagery for
characterizing events and movement. Military and intelligence analysts
currently view live video imagery from airborne and ground-based video
platforms, but few tools exist for efficient exploitation of the video and its
accompanying metadata. In pursuit of this goal, SRI has developed MVIEWS, a
system for annotating, indexing, extracting, and disseminating information from
video streams for surveillance and intelligence applications. MVIEWS is
implemented within the Open Agent Architecture, a distributed multiagent
framework that enables rapid integration of component technologies; for MVIEWS,
these technologies include pen and voice recognition and interpretation, image
processing and object tracking, geo-referenced interactive maps, multimedia
databases, and human collaborative tools. Keywords: Multimodal pen and voice user interfaces, Image processing and object
tracking, Video analysis and annotation, Agent architecture | |||
| Interface Design Based on Standardized Task Models | | BIBAK | PDF | 65-72 | |
| Larry Birnbaum; Ray Bareiss; Tom Hinrichs; Christopher Johnson | |||
| Producing high-quality, comprehensible user interfaces is a difficult,
labor-intensive process that requires experience and judgment. In this paper,
we describe an approach to assisting this process by using explicit models of
the user's task to drive the interface design process. The task model helps to
ensure that the resulting interface directly and transparently supports the
user in performing his task. By crafting a library of standardized, reusable
tasks and interface constructs, we believe it is possible to capture some of
the design expertise and to amortize much of the labor required for building
effective user interfaces. Keywords: Model-based interface design tools, Task analysis | |||
| EDEM: Intelligent Agents for Collecting Usage Data and Increasing User Involvement in Development | | BIBAK | PDF | 73-76 | |
| David M. Hilbert; Jason E. Robbins; David F. Redmiles | |||
| Expectation-Driven Event Monitoring (EDEM) provides developers with a
platform for creating software agents to collect usage data and increase user
involvement in the development of interactive systems. EDEM collects
information that is currently lost regarding actual usage of applications to
promote improved usability and a more empirically grounded design process. Keywords: Event monitoring, Intelligent agents, Expectation agents, Usability
engineering, Software engineering | |||
| U-TEL: A Tool for Eliciting User Task Models from Domain Experts | | BIBAK | PDF | 77-80 | |
| R. Chung-Man Tam; David Maulsby; Angel R. Puerta | |||
| Eliciting user-task models is a thorny problem in model-based user interface
design, and communicating domain-specific knowledge from an expert to a
knowledge engineer is a continuing problem in knowledge acquisition.
We devised a task elicitation method that capitalizes on a domain expert's ability to describe a task in plain English, and on a knowledge engineer's skills to formalize it. The method bridges the gap between the two by helping the expert refine the description and by giving the engineer clues to its structure. We implemented and evaluated an interactive tool called the User-Task Elicitation Tool (U-TEL) to elicit user-task models from domain experts based on our methodology. Via direct manipulation, U-TEL provides capabilities for word processing, keyword classification, and outline refinement. By using U-TEL, domain experts can refine a textual specification of a user task into a basic user-task model suitable for use in model-based interface development environments. Our evaluation shows that U-TEL can be used effectively by domain experts with or without a background in programming or interface modeling, and that the tool can be a key element in promoting user-centered interface design in model-based systems. Keywords: User-centered design, Model-based user interface design, Task models,
Knowledge elicitation | |||
| Task-Sensitive Cinematography Interfaces for Interactive 3d Learning Environments | | BIBAK | PDF | 81-88 | |
| William H. Bares; Luke S. Zettlemoyer; Dennis W. Rodriguez; James C. Lester | |||
| Interactive 3D learning environments can provide rich problem-solving
experiences with unparalleled visual impact. In these environments, students
interactively solve problems by directing their avatars to navigate through
complex worlds, transport entities from one location to another, and manipulate
devices. However, realtime camera control is critical to their successful
deployment. To create effective learning experiences, a virtual camera must in
realtime "film" their activities in a manner that most clearly depicts the
salient aspects of the tasks students are performing. To address this problem,
we have developed the cinematic task modeling framework for automated realtime
task-sensitive camera control in 3D environments. Cinematic task models
dynamically map the intentional structure of users' activities to visual
structures that continuously depict the most relevant actions and objects in
the environment. By exploiting cinematic task models, a cinematography
interface to 3D learning environments can dynamically plan camera positions,
view directions, and camera movements that help users perform their tasks. To
investigate the effect of the cinematic task modeling framework on
student-environment interactions, we have constructed a full-scale
cinematography interface and a 3D learning environment testbed. Focus group
studies suggest that task-sensitive camera planning significantly improves
students' interactions with complex 3D learning environments. Keywords: 3D environments, Task models, Camera-planning, Learning environments,
Educational applications | |||
| Affect and Emotion in the User Interface | | BIBA | PDF | 91-94 | |
| Barbara Hayes-Roth; Gene Ball; Christine Lisetti; Rosalind W. Picard; Andrew Stern | |||
| Intelligence. So much of our technology revolves around intelligence: technology in support of intellectual activities; the goal of engineering artificial intelligence; the need for intelligence in the user interface. And yet, so much of everyday life is really about affect and emotion: differences in performance under conditions that are supportive, threatening, or punishing; the challenges of conflict resolution and cooperation among heterogeneous groups of people; the implicit messages of body language and conversational style; the spirit-sustaining texture of our affective relationships with family and friends. | |||
| Interacting in Chaos | | BIB | PDF | 97 | |
| Dan R., Jr. Olsen | |||
| Demonstrational Automation of Text Editing Tasks Involving Multiple Focus Points and Conversions | | BIBAK | PDF | 101-108 | |
| Yuzo Fujishima | |||
| We present a programming by demonstration (PBD) system for text editing
tasks and describe over an experimental evaluation of it. Unlike other PBD
systems our system can automate tasks that involve multiple focus points and
conversions. In the system, a document is regarded as a sequence of objects
and a task is modeled as repetitions of turns, in which the user focuses on
sub-sequences of the document and modifies them. We ran a user study to
evaluate the system and found that even non-programmers could automate tasks
and wanted to use the system for their own tasks. Keywords: Programming by demonstration, PBD, Programming by example, PBE, Text editing | |||
| Building Applications Using Only Demonstration | | BIBAK | PDF | 109-116 | |
| Richard G. McDaniel; Brad A. Myers | |||
| By combining the strengths of multiple interaction techniques and
inferencing algorithms, Gamut can infer behaviors from examples that previously
required a developer to annotate or otherwise modify code by hand. Gamut is a
programming-by-demonstration (PBD) tool for building whole applications. It
revises code automatically when new examples are demonstrated using a recursive
procedure that efficiently scans for the differences between a new example and
the original behavior. Differences that cannot be resolved by generating a
suitable description are handled by another AI algorithm, decision tree
learning, providing a significantly greater ability to infer complex
relationships. Gamut's interaction techniques facilitate demonstrating many
examples quickly and allow the user to give the system hints that show
relationships that would be too time consuming to discover by search alone.
Altogether, the concepts combined in Gamut will allow nonprogrammers to build
software they never could before. Keywords: End-user programming, User interface software, Application builders,
Programming-by-demonstration, Programming-by-example, Inductive learning, Gamut | |||
| Context-Sensitive Filtering for Browsing in Hypertext | | BIBAK | PDF | 119-126 | |
| Tsukasa Hirashima; Noriyuki Matsuda; Toyohiro Nomoto; Jun'ichi Toyoda | |||
| Modeling of the user's interests is one of the most important issues to
support a user to gather information. Although there are several promising
methods to infer the interests from the user's browsing behavior, they assume
that the interests are consistent during the information gathering. However,
in browsing which is one of the most popular ways to gather information, the
user's interests are often strongly dependent on the local context of the
browsing. This paper describes a method to model the user's shifting interests
from the browsing history. An information filtering method using the model of
the interests has been implemented. We call it "context-sensitive filtering."
The results of an experimental evaluation, by real users' browsing for an
encyclopedia in CD-ROM format, are also reported. Keywords: Information filtering, Context-sensitive, Hypertext, Browsing | |||
| Deja Vu: A Knowledge-Rich Interface for Retrieval in Digital Libraries | | BIBAK | PDF | 127-134 | |
| Andrew S. Gordon; Eric A. Domeshek | |||
| Providing access to digital libraries will require interfaces that
effectively mediate between the retrieval needs of library users and the
materials that the library has to offer. This paper describes Deja Vu, a new
interface for retrieval in digital libraries. Rather than relying on
traditional query-based techniques, Deja Vu allows users to browse through the
subject terms used to catalog library materials to find ones that meet their
particular retrieval needs. The browsing process is facilitated by a new
knowledge structure introduced in this paper called Expectation Packages.
Expectation Packages group together subject terms based on the commonsense
knowledge of library users to provide a richly interconnected browsing space.
An example application of Deja Vu is described, which incorporates the Library
of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials to provide access to online image
collections. Keywords: Retrieval interfaces, Digital libraries, Thesaurus browsing | |||
| Visualization of Construction Planning Information | | BIBAK | PDF | 135-138 | |
| Kathleen McKinney; Martin Fischer; John Kunz | |||
| Visualizing a construction schedule helps planners to identify potential
construction problems prior to actual building construction. Planners must
envision the sequence of construction, the workspace logistics, and utilization
of resources and equipment in space and over time. This paper discusses
methods of generating, visualizing, and evaluating construction planning
information with CAD based tools. We use a construction example to illustrate
how feature extraction of 3D CAD models can help identify construction problems
and evaluate the quality of a construction plan through 4D analysis and 4D
annotation. Keywords: 4D CAD, Annotation, Construction, Feature extraction, Information
visualization | |||
| Software Architecture Critics in Argo | | BIBAK | PDF | 141-144 | |
| Jason E. Robbins; David M. Hilbert; David F. Redmiles | |||
| Software architectures are high-level design representations of software
systems that focus on composition of software components and how those
components interact. Software architectures abstract the details of
implementation and allow the designer to focus on essential design decisions.
Regardless of notation, designers are faced with the task of making good design
decisions, which demands a wide range of knowledge of the problem and solution
domains. Argo is a software architecture design environment that supports
designers by addressing several cognitive challenges of design. In this paper
we describe how Argo supports decision making by automatically supplying
knowledge that is timely and relevant to decisions at hand. Keywords: Domain-oriented design environments, Software architecture, Human cognitive
needs, Design critics | |||
| Authorable Critiquing for Intelligent Educational Systems | | BIBAK | PDF | 145-152 | |
| Christopher K. Riesbeck; Wolff Dobson | |||
| An important issue in intelligent interfaces is making them as authorable as
non-intelligent interfaces. In this paper, we describe Indie, an authoring
tool for intelligent interactive education and training environments, with
particular emphasis on how authors create knowledge bases for critiquing
student arguments. A central problem was providing authors with tools that
supported the entire development process from mock-up to final product. Two
key ideas are: (1) MVC-based event-action triggers to support a gradual
migration from interface-based to model-driven interactions (2) rule-based
evidence assessment events. Keywords: Intelligent learning environments, Educational systems, Authoring tools,
Goal-based scenarios | |||
| Adaptive Forms: An Interaction Paradigm for Entering Structured Data | | BIBAK | PDF | 153-160 | |
| Martin R. Frank; Pedro Szekely | |||
| Many software applications solicit input from the user via a "forms"
paradigm that emulates their paper equivalent. It exploits the users'
familiarity with these and is well suited for the input of simple
attribute-value data (name, phone number, ...). The paper-forms paradigm
starts breaking down when there is user input that may or may not be applicable
depending on previous user input. In paper-based forms, this manifests itself
by sections marked "fill out only if you entered yes in question 8a above", and
simple electronic forms suffer from the same problem -- much space is taken up
for input fields that are not applicable.
One possible approach to making only relevant sections appear is to hand-write program fragments to hide and show them. As an alternative, we have developed a form specification language based on a context-free grammar that encodes data dependencies of the input, together with an accompanying run-time interpreter that uses novel layout techniques for collapsing already-entered input fields, for "blending" input fields possibly yet to come, and for showing only the applicable sections of the form. Keywords: Data entry, Layout, Parsing, User interfaces, Human-computer interaction | |||
| Agents in their Midst: Evaluating User Adaptation to Agent-Assisted Interfaces | | BIBAK | PDF | 163-170 | |
| Tara Gustafson; J. Ben Schafer; Joseph Konstan | |||
| This paper presents the results of introducing an agent into a real-world
work situation -- production of the online edition of a daily newspaper.
Quantitative results show that agents helped users accomplish the task more
rapidly without increasing user error and that users consistently
underestimated the quality of their own performance. Qualitative results show
that users accepted agents rapidly and that they unknowingly altered their
working styles to adapt to the agent. Keywords: Agent-assisted interface, User studies, User-centered interface design,
Learning agents, Online newspaper production, Electronic publication | |||
| An Experiment with Navigation and Intelligent Assistance | | BIBAK | PDF | 171-178 | |
| Robert St. Amant; Martin S. Dulberg | |||
| Modern user interfaces make extensive use of navigation, a metaphor based on
wayfinding in a physical space. Navigation can be an effective solution for
many problems in understanding and manipulating a complex information space.
Our work is in the area of intelligent assistance for decision support
environments, where assistance may take the form of automatically exploring
decision alternatives, recording justifications for actions, testing global
consistency of local results, and generating audit trails, among other
activities. This paper describes an experimental evaluation of assisted search
in an artificial environment using navigation as a communication medium, under
conditions that vary the quality of assistance. Keywords: Navigation, Wayfinding, Intelligent assistance | |||
| From HAL to Office Applicances: Human-Machine Interfaces in Science Fiction and Reality | | BIBA | PDF | 181 | |
| David G. Stork | |||
| In the mid-1960s, the creators of the epic film 2001: A Space Odyssey sought
to portray the future of computers as realistically as possible. This was
before computer science and HCI were broadly acknowledged disciplines, and
their vision was unconstrained by the many lessons (and failures) yet to come.
Now, on the occasion of the HAL 9000 computer's first "birthday" (almost to the
day), it makes sense to analyze their view of the "future" of human interfaces,
to see where it stands up, where it was seriously flawed, what was overlooked,
and why.
For instance, the film's creators felt that computers would get bigger and bigger -- HAL is omnipresent while there are no desktop or laptop computers, PDAs or digital watches in sight. In reality the opposite occurred. They felt that speech would be the primary I/O medium (there are no mouses, keyboards, touchscreens or data gloves in the film), whereas in reality effortless speech for HCI remains a distant dream. Conversely, their portrayal of computer graphics has been far outpaced by today's graphics and visualization techniques -- from dynamic simulations of thunderstorms to realistic special effects in TV advertisements to films such as Toy Story. Nowadays innumerable "visionaries" confidently predict the future of computers and technology. They might be more humble were they to look back and understand why informed and careful predictions so often fail. I shall illustrate several such lessons gleaned from "looking back at the future," with special focus on HCI, the web, and active documents that bear both content for human consumption and information for controlling networked office appliances. | |||