Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

Typing the Future: Designing Multimodal AR Keyboards

Recent demonstrations of AR showcase engaging spatial features while avoiding text input. However, this is not due to descending relevance but rather because no satisfactory solution to text input in a comprehensive AR system is available yet. Any novel technological device requires rethinking the way we interact with it, including text input. With its variety of sensors, AR devices offer numerous possibilities for uni- and multimodal interaction. However, it is essential to evaluate the actual problem space before suggesting solutions. In our design science research project, we aim to create design knowledge about the learnability and performance of AR keyboards. Based on transfer of learning theory and HCI literature on virtual keyboards, we propose meta requirements and initial design principles that serve as basis for developing a multimodal AR keyboard prototype

User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

199 p.The television (TV) set is present in most homes worldwide, and is the most used Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Despite its large implantation in the market, the interactive services consumption on TV set is limited. This thesis focuses on overcoming the following limiting factors: (i) limited Human Computer Interaction and (ii) lack of considering user’s real life context in the digital television (dTV) service integration strategy. Making interactive services accessible to TV set’s large user base, and especially to the most vulnerable ones, is understood as the path to integrate the mankind with the information society. This thesis explores the use of user interface abstraction technologies to reach the introduced goals. The main contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach to enable the universally accessible remote control of the TV set, (ii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible interactive services through TV sets, and (iii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible services in the TV user’s real life context. We have implemented the contributing approaches for different use cases, and we have evaluated them with real users, achieving good results

PHI : a logic-based tool for intelligent help systems

We introduce a system which improves the performance of intelligent help systems by supplying them with plan generation and plan recognition components. Both components work in close mutual cooperation. We demonstrate two modes of cross-talk between them, one where plan recognition is done on the basis of abstract plans provided by the planner and the other where optimal plans are generated based on recognition results. The examples which are presented are taken from an operating system domain, namely from the UNIX mail domain. Our system is completely logic-based. Relying on a common logical framework--the interval-based modal temporal logic LLP which we have developed--both components are implemented as special purpose inference procedures. Plan generation from first and second principles is provided and carried out deductively, whereas plan recognition follows a new abductive approach for modal logics. The plan recognizer is additionally supplied with a probabilistic reasoner as a means to adjust the help provided for user-specific characteristics