Intelligent interaction design: the role of human-computer interaction research in the design of intelligent systems

As more intelligent systems are introduced into the marketplace, it is becoming increasingly urgent to consider usability for such systems. Historically, the two fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and human- computer interaction (HCI) have had little in common. In this paper, we consider how established HCI techniques can usefully be applied to the design and evaluation of intelligent systems, and where there is an urgent need for new approaches. Some techniques - notably those for requirements acquisition and empirical evaluation - can usefully be adopted, and indeed are, within many projects. However, many of the tools and techniques developed within HCI to support design and theory-based evaluation cannot be applied in their present forms to intelligent systems because they are based on inappropriate assumptions; there is consequently a need for new approaches. Conversely, there are approaches that have been developed within AI - e.g. in research on dialogue and on ontologies - that could usefully be adapted and encapsulated to respond to this need. These should form the core of a future research agenda for intelligent interaction design.     

The dimensionality and correlates of flow in human-computer interactions

Past research on playfulness in human—computer interactions has demonstrated that computers can encourage playfulness and that playfulness can have positive and negative work-related consequences. Thus, playfulness in human—computer interactions represents a potentially important topic for information systems research. This article first defines playfulness in human-computer interactions in terms of Csikszentmihalyi's (1975) flow theory and explores the dimensionality of the flow construct. Second, it reports the results of two studies conducted to investigate the factor structure and correlates of flow in human-computer interactions. Finally, implications are discussed.     

Specifying control and data in the design of educational software

When using the computer as a tool for learning, it is useful to distinguish between the contents and the realization aspects of an interactive session. We describe an approach which makes this distinction explicit to the author by viewing the programming process as one of giving independent specifications of: (a) data. i.e. what is to be learned, and (b) control, i.e. the particulars of the dialogue.A system. MEDICS, for training medical students in clinical decision making is presented as an illustration of the approach. We stress the importance of providing an interactive environment supporting powerful editing operations as the primary tool for the author. The paper specifically describes the MEDICS environment for construction of medical simulations and how control of execution is specified.     

Creating a design science of human-computer interaction

An increasingly important task of computer science is to support the analysis and design of computers as things to learn from, as tools to use in one's work, as media for interacting with other people. Human-computer interaction (HCI) is the speciality area that addresses this task. Through the past two decades, HCI has pursued a broad and ambitious scientific agenda, progressively integrating its research concerns with the contexts of system development and use. This has created an unprecedented opportunity to manage the emergence of new technology so as to support socially responsive objectives.     

On the design of human-computer interaction for administrative offices

Abstract

After pilot research in public sector administration offices of the FRG state Baden-Württemberg, the registration and update of personnel data was simulated in an experimental terminal station. The dialogue style was varied: (a) Transaction-oriented: In this mode the data of a complete mask are sent widespread to a host and checked there for input errors. The feedback is then sent back to the terminal, (b) Field-oriented: In this mode the data of every field or character is checked and feedback is sent back immediately. 25 administration officials participated in the trial sessions. They solved real tasks (full case, update) with the different program versions. The experimental data consisted of behaviour registration and interviews about learning, working style and system features. From the results certain design principles were formulated.     

Language, communication, social interaction and the design of human-computer interfaces

The importance of human sciences to the design of information technology is now generally recognized. As part of this recognition there is an interest in employing findings about language, communication and social interaction in design. In particular there has been a great deal of recent interest in the use of the methods and findings of conversation analysis, a sociological approach to the investigation of the structure of human conversation. The paper discusses the rationale for the use of such findings, outlines directions currently being pursued in this area, and provides a bibliography of recently-published and forthcoming research.     

Network and multidimensional representations of the declarative knowledge of human-computer interface design experts

A two-part experiment investigated human computer interface (HCI) experts' organization of declarative knowledge about the HCI. In Part 1, two groups of experts in HCI design—human factors experts and software development experts—and a control group of non-experts sorted 50 HCI concepts concerned with display, control, interaction, data manipulation and user knowledge into categories. In the second part of the experiment, the three groups judged the similarity of two sets of HCI concepts related to display and interaction, respectively. The data were transformed into measures of psychological distance and were analyzed using Pathfinder, which generates network representations of the data, and multidimensional scaling (MDS), which fits the concepts in a multidimensional space. The Pathfinder networks from the first part of the experiment differed in organization between the two expert groups, with human factors experts' networks consisting of highly interrelated subnetworks and software experts' networks consisting of central nodes and fewer, less interconnected sub-networks. The networks also differed across groups in concepts linked with such concepts as graphics, natural language, function keys and speech recognition. The networks of both expert groups showed much greater organization than did the non-experts' network. The network and MDS representations of the concepts for the two expert groups showed somewhat greater agreement in Part 2 than in Part 1. However, the MDS representations from Part 2 suggested that software experts organized their concepts on dimensions related to technology, implementation and user characteristics, whereas the human factors experts' organized their concepts more uniformly according to user characteristics. The discussion focuses on (1) the differences in cognitive models as a function of the amount and type of HCI design experience and (2) the role of cognitive models in HCI design and in communications within a multidisciplinary design team.     

Integrating methods of human-computer interface design with structured systems development

Various methods for specification and design of the human-computer interface have been proposed but practice of such methods is not widespread. Possible reasons for this may be the lack of integration of human-computer interface design with software engineering and the specialized nature of HCI methods. A method of interface design is proposed which integrates the development of the human-computer interface with structured systems analysis and design. The method covers task and user analysis, interface specification and dialogue design. A case study of a library system is used to illustrate the method which is discussed in relation to different approaches that have been adopted for interface specification and design. It is argued that software design methods should cover all aspects of process design and the human-computer interface.     

A review of human factors guidelines and techniques for the design of graphical human-computer interfaces

This paper aims to alert human-computer interface designers to human factors guidelines and techniques relating to computer graphics. The paper is structured according to the following three areas: Production of Graphics, Display of Graphics and Manipulation of Graphics.     

Specifying timing constraints and composite events: an application in the design of electronic brokerages

Increasingly, business applications need to capture consumers' complex preferences interactively and monitor those preferences by translating them into event-condition-action (ECA) rules and syntactically correct processing specification. An expressive event model to specify primitive and composite events that may involve timing constraints among events is critical to such applications. Relying on the work done in active databases and real-time systems, this research proposes a new composite event model based on real-time logic (RTL). The proposed event model does not require fixed event consumption policies and allows the users to represent the exact correlation of event instances in defining composite events. It also supports a wide-range of domain-specific temporal events and constraints, such as future events, time-constrained events, and relative events. This event model is validated within an electronic brokerage architecture that unbundles the required functionalities into three separable components - business rule manager, ECA rule manager, and event monitor - with well-defined interfaces. A proof-of-concept prototype was implemented in the Java programming language to demonstrate the expressiveness of the event model and the feasibility of the architecture. The performance of the composite event monitor was evaluated by varying the number of rules, event arrival rates, and type of composite events.     

基于微博交互关系算法的敏感舆情研究

传统的敏感舆情模型中,不论是基于文本或是数据挖掘的分析方法都是直接处理网络舆情,未结合网络传播特性分析.针对上述问题,研究并采用基于微博交互关系算法:通过量化微博的敏感程度,分析用户的交互关系来构建微博敏感舆论传播模型.实验基于新浪微博,搜索到一定数量的敏感用户,对用户的交互行为进行分析,得到未来有发表敏感舆论倾向的用户并进行监控.实验结果证明,与传统的舆情模型相比,该方法可行且有效,开拓了舆情分析思路,适用于当前网络舆情研究.     

As~(3+)与DNA4种碱基相互作用的理论研究

砷在进入生物体后,可通过对基因损伤和基因表达等多方面的影响而发挥其毒性。本文运用量子化学计算,研究了As3+与DNA4种碱基的配位作用。从理论上确立了As3+与4种碱基的配合特征和各种配合物的相对稳定性以及As3+对4种碱基配合的选择性。当As3+与碱基结合时,最多能与3个碱基配体形成稳定构型,我们共得到17个稳定的三配体配合物。其中,As3+与O和N所形成配位键As-O和As-N的键长范围分别为(1.76~1.85)?和(1.88~2.01)?。As3+与4种不同碱基作用时,倾向与鸟嘌呤发生配位反应,且易于结合位点羰基O处发生反应。     

Visual scan patterns reflect to human-computer interactions on processing different types of messages in the flight deck

The flight deck of commercial aircraft is sophisticated and searching for the necessary information at the right time is sometimes challenging. This research investigates pilot's visual parameters while interacted with two different designs of crew alerting system by eye tracking technology. There are 24 aviation professionals that participated in this experiment including commercial pilots, private pilots and avionic engineers. Compared with traditional design, the new integrated design applied proximity compatibility principles to assist pilots in searching necessary information to deal with urgent situations. The results demonstrated that the integrated design is superior to traditional design in providing accurate instructions as determined by visual behaviors. However, the integrated design increases pilot's situation awareness by redirecting attention from current task to the most critical task with the cost of a longer total fixation duration time. Pilot's visual parameters demonstrated significant differences while interacting with PFD mainly numeric, ND mostly by symbols and EICAS with presented text messages. Therefore, flight deck design has to adopt a holistic approach as pilot's visual attentions is shifting among all types of different displays to gain situation awareness rather than focus on only one display. The design of integrated EICAS can provide detailed instructions to deal with urgent situations which induced higher cognitive loads as pilot's pupil dilation is significant bigger than interacted with traditional design. By eye tracking technology, it is applicable to design human-centred flight decks to improve safety and human performance in aviation.     

Specifying comfortable driving postures for ergonomic design and evaluation of the driver workspace using digital human models

Specifying comfortable driving postures is essential for ergonomic design and evaluation of a driver workspace. The present study sought to enhance and expand upon several existing recommendations for such postures. Participants (n = 38) were involved in six driving sessions that differed by vehicle class (sedan and SUV), driving venue (laboratory-based and field) or seat (from vehicles ranked high and low by vehicle comfort). Sixteen joint angles were measured in preferred postures to more completely describe driving postures, as were corresponding perceptual responses. Driving postures were found to be bilaterally asymmetric and distinct between vehicle classes, venues, age groups and gender. A subset of preferred postural ranges was identified using a filtering mechanism that ensured desired levels of perceptual responses. Accurate ranges of joint angles for comfortable driving postures, and careful consideration of vehicle and driver factors, will facilitate ergonomic design and evaluation of a driver workspace, particularly when embedded in digital human models.     

Designing emotionally evocative homepages: an empirical study of the quantitative relations between design factors and emotional dimensions

Emotional aspects of homepages are becoming more important as people spend more time in cyberspace. This research aims to identify quantitative relationships between key design factors and generic dimensions of secondary emotions so that we may develop homepages which target emotions more effectively. In order to achieve this goal, we conducted three related studies. In the first study, we identified 13 generic dimensions of secondary emotions that people usually feel when viewing diverse homepages. In the second study, we identified key design factors that professional designers frequently use in their attempts to develop emotionally evocative homepages. Finally, in the third study, we identified quantitative relationships between the key design factors and the 13 emotional dimensions. This paper describes these three studies and concludes with the implications and limitations of the study results.     

The social and the cognitive in human-computer interaction

Of late, designers of interactive systems and other exponents of HCI have expressed an increased interest in the contribution which Social Science might make to design. Using recent discussions of "distributed cognition" as our stalking horse, we show that a strategy of simple annexation or incorporation is unlikely to realize the value which the Social Sciences might contribute. Such value will not be derived by a "filling out" of design requirements through the addition of social dimensions to cognitive ones. Rather, it will take the form of a re-appraisal of deep-seated distinctions such as that between the social and the cognitive. In the context of some on-going work at EuroPARC, we examine the possibilities which this re-appraisal might offer. We conclude with a review of the implications of this kind of re-appraisal for the design of interactive systems.     

Specifying the dynamic behavior of management systems

Decision making in any complex system is a very difficult task. In Man, decisions are reached as a result of trying to satisfy both conscious and unconscious goals. To emulate this in a computer system we need to find a way of representing goals and modeling the decision making process. This paper describes a model for decision making in the context of the management of distributed computer systems, and discusses the implications for the representation of goals and other information used during the decision making process. The work described in this paper was performed in the ESPRIT II project DOMAINS. This project is concerned with developing an architecture for the integrated management of all resources in a networked system. The emphasis of this paper lies in modeling rather than implementation.     

Specifying and verifying requirements of real-time systems

An approach to specification of requirements and verification of design for real-time systems is presented. A system is defined by a conventional mathematical model for a dynamic system where application specific states denote functions of real time. Specifications are formulas in duration calculus, a real-time interval logic, where predicates define durations of states. Requirements define safety and functionality constraints on the system or a component. A top-level design is given by a control law: a predicate that defines an automation controlling the transition between phases of operation. Each phase maintains certain relations among the system states; this is analogous to the control functions known from conventional control theory. The top-level design is decomposed into an architecture for a distributed system with specifications for sensor, actuator, and program components. Programs control the distributed computation through synchronous events. Sensors and actuators relate events with system states. Verification is a deduction showing that a design implies requirements     

Humans in the loop: human-computer interaction and security

The security field suffers from an endemic problem: despite our best efforts, the current infrastructure is continually full of security vulnerabilities. The systems that comprise this infrastructure also are full of boundaries and interfaces where humans and systems must interact: most secure systems exist to serve human users and carry out human-oriented processes, and are designed and built by humans. From the perspective of the human-computer interaction (HCO community), many of these interfaces do not reflect good thinking on how to make them easy to use in a manner that results in security. From the perspective of the security community, many widespread security problems arguably might stem from bad interaction between humans and systems. I recently attended a workshop (ACM/CHI 2003 Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Security Systems) that tried to bring together these communities to trigger further inquiry into this area. In this article, I want to discuss the workshop and how the thinking there applies to the secure systems topic this department addresses.