Supporting air traffic control collaboration with a tabletop system

International audienceCollaboration is key to safety and efficiency in Air Traffic Control. Legacy paper-based systems enable seamless and non-verbal collaboration, but trends in new software and hardware for ATC tend to separate controllers more and more, which hinders collaboration. This paper presents a new interactive system designed to support collaboration in ATC. We ran a series of interviews and workshops to identify collaborative situations in ATC. From this analysis, we derived a set of requirements to support collaboration: support mutual awareness, communication and coordination, dynamic task allocation and simultaneous use with more than two people. We designed a set of new interactive tools to fulfill the requirements, by using a multi-user tabletop surface, appropriate feedthrough, and reified and partially-accomplishable actions. Preliminary evaluation shows that feedthrough is important, users benefit from a number of tools to communicate and coordinate their actions, and the tabletop is actually usable by three people both in tightly coupled tasks and parallel, individual activities. At a higher level, we also found that co-location is not enough to generate mutual awareness if users are not engaged in meaningful collaboration

Exigences d’utilisabilité pour les outils d’ingénierie des exigences

International audienceRequirement engineering (RE) tools are necessary for several reasons: they allow engineers to manage an increasing amount of information, to maintain traceability between requirements, solution and tests, and to evaluate requirement change impact on the solution and test.\This article proposes an analysis of system engineering practices in the aeronautical industry, with a focus on requirement engineering. From contextual interviews, we have identified scenarios reflecting system engineers's activity related to the editing and management of requirements. The analysis of these scenarios has allowed us to elicit usability requirements for RE tools, more precise than "user-friendly". These usability requirements will feed our future work on RE tool design.Les outils d’ingénierie des exigences sont nécessaires pour plusieurs raisons : ils permettent de gérer un nombre croissant d’informations, de maintenir la traçabilité entre exigences, solution et tests, d’évaluer l’impact d’un changement d’exigences sur la solution et les tests. Cet article propose une analyse des pratiques en ingénierie système dans l’industrie aéronautique, centrée sur l’ingénierie des exigences. A partir de la réalisation d’enquêtes contextuelles, nous avons identifié des scénarios représentatifs de l’activité des ingénieurs système sur la rédaction et la gestion des exigences. L’analyse de ces scénarios nous a permis d’identifier des exigences en termes d’utilisabilité des outils, plus précises que « user - friendliness », qui alimenteront la conception de nouveaux outils d’ingénierie des exigences

Learn-ciam: a model-driven approach for the development of collaborative learning tools

This paper introduces Learn-CIAM, a new model-based methodological approach for the design of flows and for the semi-automatic generation of tools in order to support collaborative learning tasks. The main objective of this work is to help professors by establishing a series of steps for the specification of their learning courses and the obtaining of collaborative tools to support certain learning activities (in particular, for in-group editing, searching and modeling). This paper presents a complete methodological framework, how it is supported conceptually and technologically, and an application example. So to guarantee the validity of the proposal, we also present some validation processes with potential designers and users from different profiles such as Education and Computer Science. The results seem to demonstrate a positive reception and acceptance, concluding that its application would facilitate the design of learning courses and the generation of collaborative learning tools for professionals of both profiles

Contributions to the science of controlled transformation

writing completed in april 2013My research activities pertain to "Informatics" and in particular "Interactive Graphics" i.e. dynamic graphics on a 2D screen that a user can interact with by means of input devices such as a mouse or a multitouch surface. I have conducted research on Interactive Graphics along three themes: interactive graphics development (how should developers design the architecture of the code corresponding to graphical interactions?), interactive graphic design (what graphical interactions should User Experience (UX) specialists use in their system?) and interactive graphics design process (how should UX specialists design? Which method should they apply?) I invented the MDPC architecture that relies on Picking views and Inverse transforms. This improves the modularity of programs and improves the usability of the specification and the implementation of interactive graphics thanks to the simplification of description. In order to improve the performance of rich-graphic software using this architecture, I explored the concepts of graphical compilers and led a PhD thesis on the topic. The thesis explored the approach and contributed both in terms of description simplification and of software engineering facilitation. Finally, I have applied the simplification of description principles to the problem of shape covering avoidance by relying on new efficient hardware support for parallelized and memory-based algorithms. Together with my colleagues, we have explored the design and assessment of expanding targets, animation and sound, interaction with numerous tangled trajectories, multi-user interaction and tangible interaction. I have identified and defined Structural Interaction, a new interaction paradigm that follows the steps of the direct and instrumental interaction paradigms. I directed a PhD thesis on this topic and together with my student we designed and assessed interaction techniques for structural interaction. I was involved in the design of the "Technology Probes" concept i.e. runnable prototypes to feed the design process. Together with colleagues, I designed VideoProbe, one such Technology Probe. I became interested in more conceptual tools targeted at graphical representation. I led two PhD theses on the topic and explored the characterization of visualization, how to design representations with visual variables or ecological perception and how to design visual interfaces to improve visual scanning. I discovered that those conceptual tools could be applied to programming languages and showed how the representation of code, be it textual or "visual" undergoes visual perception phenomena. This has led me to consider our discipline as the "Science of Controlled Transformations". The fifth chapter is an attempt at providing this new account of "Informatics" based on what users, programmers and researchers actually do with interactive systems. I also describe how my work can be considered as contributing to the science of controlled transformations