How do interactive tabletop systems influence collaboration?

This paper examines some aspects of the usefulness of interactive tabletop systems, if and how these impact collaboration. We chose creative problem solving such as brainstorming as an application framework to test several collaborative media: the use of pen-and-paper tools, the ‘‘around-the-table’’ form factor, the digital tabletop interface, the attractiveness of interaction styles. Eighty subjects in total (20 groups of four members) participated in the experiments. The evaluation criteria were task performance, collaboration patterns (especially equity of contributions), and users’ subjective experience. The ‘‘aroundthe-table’’ form factor, which is hypothesized to promote social comparison, increased performance and improved collaboration through an increase of equity. Moreover, the attractiveness of the tabletop device improved subjective experience and increased motivation to engage in the task. However, designing attractiveness seems a highly challenging issue, since overly attractive interfaces may distract users from the task

Product information management for complex modular security systems

Um sistema PIM gere toda a informação que possibilita a comercialização dos produtos através de diferentes canais. A sua importância durante o ciclo de vida de um produto aumentou devido à sofisticação técnica dos produtos, a gerir internamente e a publicar externamente. Sistemas, tais como o ERP e o CCMS, deverão integrar-se com um sistema PIM, o qual deve funcionar como a “espinha dorsal” da informação de produto. O presente projeto tem como objetivo principal a criação de uma solução para gerir a informação de produto para sistemas modulares complexos. A proposta de solução inclui a criação de uma ontologia para parte dos inúmeros sistemas disponíveis no catálogo de produtos de uma das maiores organizações multinacionais do setor de engenharia e tecnologia a nível mundial. O processo de criação da solução proposta baseou-se na metodologia de investigação pesquisa-ação e foi dividido em cinco fases. Na fase de diagnóstico descreveu-se e analisou-se a atual situação dos sistemas ERP e CCMS que gerem o catálogo online dos sistemas de produtos comercializados. Levantaram-se ainda as taxonomias de produto atuais e elaborou-se a proposta. Na fase de planeamento da ação descreveram-se a equipa de trabalho, a abordagem inspirada na metodologia Agile usada para desenvolver a solução, as reuniões de planeamento, os parceiros de trabalho, as ferramentas a usar e a sua justificação. Na fase de tomada de ação foi descrito o processo de criação da solução ontológica e o resultado final, incluindo a construção das novas taxonomias e a sua validação pelos especialistas. Propuseram-se exemplos e representações gráficas usando a ferramenta Protégé. Na fase de avaliação, a solução ontológica foi testada, tendo-se validado que os requisitos necessários foram satisfeitos pela estrutura. Na fase de especificação de aprendizagem propuseram-se os próximos passos para a implementação e gestão futura do modelo ontológico. Com esta solução, a organização poderá gerir mais eficientemente a informação de produto e a estrutura de dados. Ela possui versatilidade para gerir produtos individuais ou sistemas modulares complexos e melhorar a sua comunicação com o cliente. Além disso, a ontologia tem ainda um enorme potencial se combinada com técnicas de IA. Algumas limitações do projeto e propostas de trabalhos futuros foram ainda apresentadas

Do You Know What I Know?:Situational Awareness of Co-located Teams in Multidisplay Environments

Modern collaborative environments often provide an overwhelming amount of visual information on multiple displays. In complex project settings, the amount of visual information on multiple displays, and the multitude of personal and shared interaction devices in these environments can reduce the awareness of team members on ongoing activities, the understanding of shared visualisations, and the awareness of who is in control of shared artifacts. Research reported in this thesis addresses the situational awareness (SA) support of co-located teams working on team projects in multidisplay environments. Situational awareness becomes even more critical when the content of multiple displays changes rapidly, and when these provide large amounts of information. This work aims at getting insights into design and evaluation of shared display visualisations that afford situational awareness and group decision making. This thesis reports the results of three empirical user studies in three different domains: life science experimentation, decision making in brainstorming teams, and agile software development. The first and the second user studies evaluate the impact of the Highlighting-on-Demand and the Chain-of-Thoughts SA on the group decision-making and awareness. The third user study presents the design and evaluation of a shared awareness display for software teams. Providing supportive visualisations on a shared large display, we aimed at reducing the distraction from the primary task, enhancing the group decision-making process and the perceived task performance

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

A Value-Driven Framework for Software Architecture

Software that is not aligned with the business values of the organization for which it was developed does not entirely fulfill its raison d’etre. Business values represent what is important in a company, or organization, and should influence the overall software system behavior, contributing to the overall success of the organization. However, approaches to derive a software architecture considering the business values exchanged between an organization and its market players are lacking. Our quest is to address this problem and investigate how to derive value-centered architectural models systematically. We used the Technology Research method to address this PhD research question. This methodological approach proposes three steps: problem analysis, innovation, and validation. The problem analysis was performed using systematic studies of the literature to obtain full coverage on the main themes of this work, particularly, business value modeling, software architecture methods, and software architecture derivation methods. Next, the innovation step was accomplished by creating a framework for the derivation of a software reference architecture model considering an organization’s business values. The resulting framework is composed of three core modules: Business Value Modeling, Agile Reference Architecture Modeling, and Goal-Driven SOA Architecture Modeling. While the Business value modeling module focuses on building a stakeholder-centric business specification, the Agile Reference Architecture Modeling and the Goal-Driven SOA Architecture Modeling modules concentrate on generating a software reference architecture aligned with the business value specification. Finally, the validation part of our framework is achieved through proof-of-concept prototypes for three new domain specific languages, case studies, and quasi-experiments, including a family of controlled experiments. The findings from our research show that the complexity and lack of rigor in the existing approaches to represent business values can be addressed by an early requirements specification method that represents the value exchanges of a business. Also, by using sophisticated model-driven engineering techniques (e.g., metamodels, model transformations, and model transformation languages), it was possible to obtain source generators to derive a software architecture model based on early requirements value models, while assuring traceability throughout the architectural derivation process. In conclusion, despite using sophisticated techniques, the derivation process of a software reference architecture is helped by simple to use methods supported by black box transformations and guidelines that facilitate the activities for the less experienced software architects. The experimental validation process used confirmed that our framework is feasible and perceived as easy to use and useful, also indicating that the participants of the experiments intend to use it in the future

Discovering knowledge structures in mind maps of mental health risks

This thesis addressed the problem of risk analysis in mental healthcare, with respect to the GRiST project at Aston University. That project provides a risk-screening tool based on the knowledge of 46 experts, captured as mind maps that describe relationships between risks and patterns of behavioural cues. Mind mapping, though, fails to impose control over content, and is not considered to formally represent knowledge. In contrast, this thesis treated GRiSTs mind maps as a rich knowledge base in need of refinement; that process drew on existing techniques for designing databases and knowledge bases. Identifying well-defined mind map concepts, though, was hindered by spelling mistakes, and by ambiguity and lack of coverage in the tools used for researching words. A novel use of the Edit Distance overcame those problems, by assessing similarities between mind map texts, and between spelling mistakes and suggested corrections. That algorithm further identified stems, the shortest text string found in related word-forms. As opposed to existing approaches’ reliance on built-in linguistic knowledge, this thesis devised a novel, more flexible text-based technique. An additional tool, Correspondence Analysis, found patterns in word usage that allowed machines to determine likely intended meanings for ambiguous words. Correspondence Analysis further produced clusters of related concepts, which in turn drove the automatic generation of novel mind maps. Such maps underpinned adjuncts to the mind mapping software used by GRiST; one such new facility generated novel mind maps, to reflect the collected expert knowledge on any specified concept. Mind maps from GRiST are stored as XML, which suggested storing them in an XML database. In fact, the entire approach here is ”XML-centric”, in that all stages rely on XML as far as possible. A XML-based query language allows user to retrieve information from the mind map knowledge base. The approach, it was concluded, will prove valuable to mind mapping in general, and to detecting patterns in any type of digital information

Enhancing the study reading skills of distance education students : strategies for designing course material

D. Ed. (Didactics

Gentleman : a lightweight web-based projectional editor

Lors de la conception et la manipulation de logiciel par modélisation, il est avantageux de bénéficier d’un grand degré de liberté au niveau de la présentation afin de comprendre l’information et prendre une action en exerçant peu d’effort cognitif et physique. Cette caractéristique doit aussi s’étendre aux outils que nous employons afin que ceux-ci augmentent nos capacités, plutôt que les restreindre. En génie logiciel, nous travaillons présentement à rehausser encore le niveau d’abstraction afin de réduire le rôle central du code décrit avec un langage de programmation à usage général. Ceci permettrait d’inclure les experts non techniques dans les activités de développement de logiciel. Cette approche, centralisée sur le domaine et l’expert, s’inscrit dans l’ingénierie dirigée par les modèles (IDM), où un modèle est produit et manipulé par divers experts et utilisateurs. Le modèle est alors décrit avec un langage créé spécifiquement pour un domaine d’application ou une tache, appelé langage dédié (DSL). Une technique utilisée pour créer ces modèles et leurs DSL est le projectional editing, qui permet d’utiliser des notations diverses interchangeables et d’étendre et composer facilement un langage. Toutefois, les solutions actuelles sont lourdes, spécifiques à une plateforme, et manquent considérablement d’utilisabilité, limitant ainsi l’usage et l’exploitation de cette approche. Pour mieux refléter les avantages du paradigme IDM avec le style projectionnel, nous introduisons dans cette thèse Gentleman, un éditeur projectionnel léger sur le web. Avec Gentleman, le développeur crée un modèle en combinant des concepts utilisés pour définir la structure du modèle et des projections pour les manipuler dans l’éditeur. Nous avons évalué Gentleman à travers une étude basée sur un groupe d’utilisateur. L’étude a confirmé sa capacité à créer et manipuler des modèles efficacement. Les participants ont noté qu’il est facile de prendre en main Gentleman et que l’interface est très intuitive comparativement aux éditeurs existants. Nous avons aussi intégré Gentleman avec succès à une plateforme web, démontrant ainsi ses capacités d’interopérabilité et l’avantage d’une solution web.In software activities and, more specifically, when modeling, the modeler should benefit from as much freedom as possible to understand the presented information and take action with minimal cognitive and mechanical effort. This characteristic should also apply to the tools used in the process so that they extend our capabilities rather than limit them. In the field of software engineering, current work aims to push the level of abstraction past general-purpose programming language into domain-specific modeling. This enables domain experts with various backgrounds to participate in software development activities. This vision is central to model-driven engineering (MDE) where, instead of code, various experts and users produce and manipulate domain-specific language (DSL). In recent years, projectional editing has proven to be a valid approach to creating and manipulating DSLs, as it supports various easily interchangeable notations and enables language extension and composition. However, current solutions are heavyweight, platform-specific, and suffer from poor usability. To better support this paradigm and minimize the risk of accidental complexity in terms of expressiveness, in this thesis, we introduce Gentleman, a lightweight web-based projectional editor. With Gentleman, a developer creates a model by combining concepts used to define its structure and projections to interact and manipulate them in the editor. We have evaluated Gentleman through a user study. The evaluation confirmed its capacity to create and manipulate models effectively. Most participants noted that the editor is very user-friendly and intuitive compared to existing editors. We have also successfully integrated Gentleman into a web application, demonstrating its interoperability and the benefit of a web solution