Tuning an HCI Curriculum for Master Students to Address Interactive Critical Systems Aspects

International audienceThis paper presents the need for specific curricula in order to address the training of specialists in the area of Interactive Critical Systems. Indeed, while curricula are usually built in order to produce specialists in one discipline (e.g. computer science) dealing with systems or products requires training in multiple disciplines. The area of Interactive Critical Systems requires deep knowledge in computer science, dependability, Human-Computer Interaction and safety engineering. We report in this paper how these various disciplines have been integrated in a master program at Université Toulouse III, France and highlight the carrier paths followed by the graduated students and how these carriers are oriented towards aeronautics and space application domains

A sketch based system for infra-structure presentation

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

Integration of sketch-based ideation and 3D modeling with CAD systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis is concerned with the study of how sketch-based systems can be improved to enhance idea generation process in conceptual design stage. It is also concerned with achieving a kind of integration between sketch-based systems and CAD systems to complete the digitization of the design process as sketching phase is still not integrated with other phases due to the different nature of it and the incomplete digitization of sketching phase itself. Previous studies identified three main related issues: sketching process, sketch-based modeling, and the integration between the digitized design phases. Here, the thesis is motivated from the desire to improve sketch-based modeling to support idea generation process but unlike previous studies that only focused on the technical or drawing part of sketching, this thesis attempts to concentrate more on the mental part of the sketching process which play a key role in developing ideas in design. Another motivation of this thesis is to produce a kind of integration between sketch-based systems and CAD systems to enable 3D models produced by sketching to be edited in detailed design stage. As such, there are two main contributions have been addressed in this thesis. The first contribution is the presenting of a new approach in designing sketch-based systems that enable more support for idea generation by separating thinking and developing ideas from the 3D modeling process. This kind of separation allows designers to think freely and concentrate more on their ideas rather than 3D modeling. the second contribution is achieving a kind of integration between gesture-based systems and CAD systems by using an IGES file in exchanging data between systems and a new method to organize data within the file in an order that make it more understood by feature recognition embedded in commercial CAD systems.This study is funded by the Ministry of Higher Education of Egypt

Remote vision based multi gesture interaction in natural indoor environments

Der Einsatz von Computersehen als Sensor für die Interaktion mit technischen Systemen hat in den letzten Jahren starkes Interesse gefunden. In vielen der bekannt gewordenen Fallstudien und Anwendungen werden Posen oder Bewegungen einer interagierenden Person durch einen Rechner, der mit Kameras ausgestattet ist, beobachtet, und die Reaktionen des Rechners dem Benutzer angezeigt, der sein Verhalten dann so ändert, dass ein gewünschtes Interaktionsziel erreicht wird. Diese Arbeit greift zwei wesentliche Schwierigkeiten der computersehensbasierten oder perzeptuellen Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion auf: das Unterscheiden von Gesten von willkürlichen Körperhaltungen oder Bewegungen sowie der Umgang mit natürlichen Umgebungen. Ferner wird die Frage der Abtrennung der computersehensbasierten Schnittstelle von der Anwendung angegangen, analog zu heutigen anwendungsunabhängigen graphischen Benutzungsschnittstellen. Wesentliche Beiträge sind - eine so genannte "Interaktionsraumarchitektur", die die computersehensbasierte Schnittstelle von der Anwendung durch eine Folge von Interaktionsräumen entkoppelt, die aufeinander abgebildet werden, - eine so genannte "Interaktionsraumarchitektur", die die computersehensbasierte Schnittstelle von der Anwendung durch eine Folge von Interaktionsräumen entkoppelt, die aufeinander abgebildet werden, - ein Konzept der "Mehrtyp-Gesteninteraktion", die verschiedene Gesten mit örtlichen und zeitlichen Randbedingungen kombiniert, um so die Zuverlässigkeit der Gestenerkennung zu erhöhen, - zwei Konzepte zur optischen Kalibrierung des Interaktionsraumes, die den Aufwand der Integration von Kameras in die Interaktionsumgebung reduzieren, - eine Lösung des Problems der Kombination von Zeigegesten mit statischen Handgesten durch die Verwendung von statischen Kameras für globale Ansichten und rechnergesteuerten aktiven Kameras für lokal angepasste Ansichten, - eine Kombination von mehreren Methoden, um das Problem von unzuverlässigen Ergebnissen der Bildsegmentierung zu mindern, die durch wechselnde Beleuchtung, die für natürliche Umgebungen typisch ist, hervorgerufen werden: Fehlererkennung und Konturkorrektur auf Grundlage von Bildfolgen und mehreren Ansichten, situationsabhängige Signalverarbeitung sowie automatische Parameteranpassung. Die Tragfähigkeit der Konzepte wird anhand eines Systems zur computersehensbasierten Interaktion mit einer Rückprojektionswand nachgewiesen, das implementiert und evaluiert wurde.Computer vision as a sensor of interaction with technical systems has found increasing interest in the past few years. In many of the proposed case studies and applications, the user's current pose or motion is observed by cameras attached to a computer, and the computer's reaction is displayed to the user who changes the pose accordingly in order to reach a desired goal of interaction. The focus of this thesis is on two major difficulties of computer vision-based, or perceptual, human-computer interaction: distinguishing gestures from arbitrary postures or motions, and coping with troubles caused by natural environments. Furthermore, we address the question of decoupling the computer vision-based interface from the application in order to achieve independency between both, analogously to today's application-independent graphical user interfaces. The main contributions are - a so-called “interaction space architecture” which decouples the computer vision interface from the application by using a sequence of interaction spaces mapped on each other, - a concept of “multi-type gesture interaction” which combines several gestures with spatial and temporal constraints in order to increase the reliability of gesture recognition, two concepts of optical calibration of the interaction space which reduce the efforts of integrating the cameras as sensors in the environment of interaction, a solution to the problem of combining pointing gestures with static hand gestures, by using static cameras for global views and computer-controlled active cameras for locally adapted views, a combination of several methods for coping with unreliable results of image segmentation caused by varying illumination typical for natural environments: error detection and contour correction from image sequences and multiple views, situation-dependent signal processing, and automatic parameter control. The concepts are proved based on a system for computer vision-based interaction with a backprojection wall, which has been implemented and evaluated

Interaction design for situated media production teams

PhD ThesisMedia production teams are the backbone of many media industries including television, sport gatherings and live music events. These domains are characterised by a key set of situational factors which significantly impact on the collaborative production workflow, such as temporality, professional concerns and mission criticality. The availability of new interaction technologies presents an opportunity to design systems to support these teams in these complex environments, leveraging the affordances of interaction technologies in response to the situated factors that impact specifically on these types of domains. StoryCrate and ProductionCrate, two large-scale real-world prototype systems for supporting situated media production teams were designed and deployed to explore the interaction design considerations that could support these teams in specific scenarios. Through an extensive analysis of these deployments, key design considerations, interaction techniques and modalities are presented that can be developed in response to the situational factors found in collaborative media production environments

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