Mapping Tasks to Interactions for Graph Exploration and Graph Editing on Interactive Surfaces

Graph exploration and editing are still mostly considered independently and systems to work with are not designed for todays interactive surfaces like smartphones, tablets or tabletops. When developing a system for those modern devices that supports both graph exploration and graph editing, it is necessary to 1) identify what basic tasks need to be supported, 2) what interactions can be used, and 3) how to map these tasks and interactions. This technical report provides a list of basic interaction tasks for graph exploration and editing as a result of an extensive system review. Moreover, different interaction modalities of interactive surfaces are reviewed according to their interaction vocabulary and further degrees of freedom that can be used to make interactions distinguishable are discussed. Beyond the scope of graph exploration and editing, we provide an approach for finding and evaluating a mapping from tasks to interactions, that is generally applicable. Thus, this work acts as a guideline for developing a system for graph exploration and editing that is specifically designed for interactive surfaces.Comment: 21 pages, minor corrections (typos etc.

Comparing Horizontal and Vertical Surfaces for a Collaborative Design Task

We investigate the use of different surface orientations for collaborative design tasks. Specifically, we compare horizontal and vertical surface orientations used by dyads performing a collaborative design task while standing. We investigate how the display orientation influences group participation including face-to-face contact, total discussion, and equality of physical and verbal participation among participants. Our results suggest that vertical displays better support face-to-face contact whereas side-by-side arrangements encourage more discussion. However, display orientation has little impact on equality of verbal and physical participation, and users do not consistently prefer one orientation over the other. Based on our findings, we suggest that further investigation into the differences between horizontal and vertical orientations is warranted

An E-whiteboard application to support early design-stage sketching of UML diagrams

We describe a Unified Modelling Language (UML) diagramming tool that uses an E-whiteboard, pen-based sketching interface to support collaborative design. Our tool allows designers to sketch UML visual modelling language constructs, mixing different UML diagram components, free-hand annotations and hand-written text. A key novelty of our approach is the preservation of handdrawn diagrams and support for manipulation of the diagrams using pen-based actions. UML sketches can be “formalized ” to computer-recognised and drawn diagrams, and exported to a 3 rd party CASE tool. 1

Sketch recognition of digital ink diagrams : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Figures are either re-used with permission, or abstracted with permission from the source article.Sketch recognition of digital ink diagrams is the process of automatically identifying hand-drawn elements in a diagram. This research focuses on the simultaneous grouping and recognition of shapes in digital ink diagrams. In order to recognise a shape, we need to group strokes belonging to a shape, however, strokes cannot be grouped until the shape is identified. Therefore, we treat grouping and recognition as a simultaneous task. Our grouping technique uses spatial proximity to hypothesise shape candidates. Many of the hypothesised shape candidates are invalid, therefore we need a way to reject them. We present a novel rejection technique based on novelty detection. The rejection method uses proximity measures to validate a shape candidate. In addition, we investigate on improving the accuracy of the current shape recogniser by adding extra features. We also present a novel connector recognition system that localises connector heads around recognised shapes. We perform a full comparative study on two datasets. The results show that our approach is significantly more accurate in finding shapes and faster on process diagram compared to Stahovich et al. (2014), which the results show the superiority of our approach in terms of computation time and accuracy. Furthermore, we evaluate our system on two public datasets and compare our results with other approaches reported in the literature that have used these dataset. The results show that our approach is more accurate in finding and recognising the shapes in the FC dataset (by finding and recognising 91.7% of the shapes) compared to the reported results in the literature

The influence of communication modality and shared visual information on collaboration in virtual teams

The rise of the internet coupled with advancements in computing technology has contributed to the increasing popularity of virtual team working. Virtual teams rely heavily upon the use of mediated communication as face-to-face interaction is limited. Many off-the-shelf collaborative technologies with multiple features are widely accessible in the market to support virtual collaboration. These technologies are being adopted to support uni- and multi-modal interaction in various workplace settings. However the influence of these technologies is often domain specific and is dependent on the type of tasks and teams, thus selecting the most appropriate tool to support a specific collaborative task is difficult. This thesis investigated the use and influence of communication modality when used to accompany shared workspaces in virtual collaboration, particularly in the design and engineering domain. Empirical studies were conducted in laboratory and field settings to evaluate the effects of modality and shared workspaces on collaboration. Novel and off-the-shelf technologies were examined at different development stages (i.e. from user requirements elicitation, to prototype evaluation, to workplace implementation and evaluation of off-the-shelf technologies). The focus of these studies was to compare audio, audio-visual, text-only and text with additional audio communication within the context of shared workspaces. The purpose was to identify whether these modalities have different effects when used in synergy with shared workspaces for collaboration on spatial and non-spatial tasks. The first series of studies investigated how these modalities were adopted in the workplace individually and/or to supplement other tools in collaborative work. Findings from these studies contributed to the understanding of how modalities are selected to support different aspects of various collaborative tasks. A field study was conducted to evaluate the implementation of an ‘always-on’ audio-visual feed to provide shared visual information in the workplace suggested that providing shared visual information for remote users could help maintain team awareness. The results suggested that a careful consideration is required to ensure that the context of use, technical constraints and the quality of the audio-visual feed satisfied the end user needs. Finally, to further extend this understanding, laboratory studies were conducted to compare these modalities. The findings suggested that audio-only compared to audio-visual had no influence on collaboration, while text-only communication required no additional audio to support a virtual design task, given that a shared workspace or screen sharing is provided in both settings. Shared workspaces reduce the necessity for virtual team members to verbalise lexically complex information, thus allowing users to concentrate on the core activities of collaborative tasks