The Design with Intent Method: A design tool for influencing user behaviour

Using product and system design to influence user behaviour offers potential for improving performance and reducing user error, yet little guidance is available at the concept generation stage for design teams briefed with influencing user behaviour. This article presents the Design with Intent Method, an innovation tool for designers working in this area, illustrated via application to an everyday human-technology interaction problem: reducing the likelihood of a customer leaving his or her card in an automatic teller machine. The example application results in a range of feasible design concepts which are comparable to existing developments in ATM design, demonstrating that the method has potential for development and application as part of a user-centred design process.     

Schema mapping and query translation in heterogeneous P2P XML databases

Peers in a peer-to-peer data management system often have heterogeneous schemas and no mediated global schema. To translate queries across peers, we assume each peer provides correspondences between its schema and a small number of other peer schemas. We focus on query reformulation in the presence of heterogeneous XML schemas, including data–metadata conflicts. We develop an algorithm for inferring precise mapping rules from informal schema correspondences. We define the semantics of query answering in this setting and develop query translation algorithm. Our translation handles an expressive fragment of XQuery and works both along and against the direction of mapping rules. We describe the HePToX heterogeneous P2P XML data management system which incorporates our results. We report the results of extensive experiments on HePToX on both synthetic and real datasets. We demonstrate our system utility and scalability on different P2P distributions.     

Discriminating between disturbance and process model mismatch in model predictive control

A novel method for discriminating faults in model predictive control is presented. The proposed method monitors the Kalman filter innovations to detect the presence of autocorrelation, which is an indication of suboptimal state estimation. The cause of the suboptimal state estimation is diagnosed by the observability of this innovations process. This task involves determining the order of the autocorrelation present in the innovations. The proposed MPC fault discrimination method is demonstrated on a SISO process and a MIMO process.     

Floating Point Verification in HOL Light: The Exponential Function

Since they often embody compact but mathematically sophisticated algorithms, operations for computing the common transcendental functions in floating point arithmetic seem good targets for formal verification using a mechanical theorem prover. We discuss some of the general issues that arise in verifications of this class, and then present a machine-checked verification of an algorithm for computing the exponential function in IEEE-754 standard binary floating point arithmetic. We confirm (indeed strengthen) the main result of a previousl published error analysis, though we uncover a minor error in the hand proof and are forced to confront several subtle issues that might easily be overlooked informally.The development described here includes, apart from the proof itself, a formalization of IEEE arithmetic, a mathematical semantics for the programming language in which the algorithm is expressed, and the body of pure mathematics needed. All this is developed logically from first principles using the HOL Light prover, which guarantees strict adherence to simple rules of inference while allowing the user to perform proofs using higher-level derived rules.     

Conformance Tests for Real-Time Systems with Timed Automata Specifications

A method is introduced for testing the conformance of implemented real-time systems to timed automata specifications. Uppaal timed automata are transformed into testable timed transition systems (TTTSs) using a test view. Fault hypotheses and a test generation algorithm for TTTSs are defined. Results of applying the method are presented. Received October 1999 / Accepted in revised form November 2000     

Representational Reasoning and Verification

Formal approaches to the design of interactive systems rely on reasoning about properties of the system at a very high level of abstraction. Specifications to support such an approach typically provide little scope for reasoning about presentations and the representation of information in the presentation. In contrast, psychological theories such as distributed cognition place a strong emphasis on the role of representations, and their perception by the user, in the cognitive process. However, the post-hoc techniques for the observation and analysis of existing systems which have developed out of the theory do not help us in addressing such issues at the design stage. Mn this paper we show how a formalisation can be used to investigate the representational aspects of an interface. Our goal is to provide a framework to help identify and resolve potential problems with the representation of information, and to support understanding of representational issues in design. We present a model for linking properties at the abstract and perceptual levels, and illustrate its use in a case study of a ight deck instrument. There is a widespread consensus that proper tool support is a prerequisite for the adoption of formal techniques, but the use of such tools can have a profound effect on the process itself. In order to explore this issue, we apply a higher-order logic theorem prover to the analysis. Received May 1999 / Accepted in revised form July 2000     

Is team training in briefings for surgical teams feasible in simulation?

We developed a module for surgical team training using briefings in simulated crisis scenarios and here we report preliminary findings. Nine surgical teams (34 trainees) participated in a pre-training simulation, followed by an interactive workshop on briefing and checklists, and then a post-training simulation. Both technical and non-technical skills were assessed via observation during simulations by expert trainers who provided feedback on performances at the end of simulation. Trainees also reported their attitudes to briefings and evaluated the training. Pre-training attitudes to briefing were positive, some of which improved post-training and trainees’ evaluation of the training was positive. Surgeons’ technical skill improved significantly post-training, but their decision-making skill was rated lower than other non-technical skills, compared to other trainees. The training did not appear to greatly improve non-technical skill performance. Training surgical teams in simulation is feasible but much more work is needed on measurement development and training strategy to confirm its efficacy and utility.     

Design and evaluation of systems to support interaction capture and retrieval

Although many recent systems have been built to support Information Capture and Retrieval (ICR), these have not generally been successful. This paper presents studies that evaluate two different hypotheses for this failure, firstly that systems fail to address user needs and secondly that they provide only rudimentary support for ICR. Having first presented a taxonomy of different systems built to support ICR, we then describe a study that attempts to identify user needs for ICR. On the basis of that study we carried out two user-oriented evaluations. In the first, we carried out a task-based evaluation of a state-of-the-art ICR system, finding that it failed to provide users with abstract ways to view meetings data, and did not present users with information categories that they considered to be important. In a second study, we introduce a new method for comparative evaluation of different techniques for accessing meetings data. The second study showed that simple interface techniques that extracted key information from meetings were effective in allowing users to extract gist from meetings data. We conclude with a discussion of outstanding issues and future directions for ICR research.     

Building language resources for a Multi-Engine English-Filipino machine translation system

In this paper, we present the building of various language resources for a multi-engine bi-directional English-Filipino Machine Translation (MT) system. Since linguistics information on Philippine languages are available, but as of yet, the focus has been on theoretical linguistics and little is done on the computational aspects of these languages, attempts are reported here on the manual construction of these language resources such as the grammar, lexicon, morphological information, and the corpora which were literally built from almost non-existent digital forms. Due to the inherent difficulties of manual construction, we also discuss our experiments on various technologies for automatic extraction of these resources to handle the intricacies of the Filipino language, designed with the intention of using them for the MT system. To implement the different MT engines and to ensure the improvement of translation quality, other language tools (such as the morphological analyzer and generator, and the part of speech tagger) were developed.