The Design and evaluation of the specification framework for user interface design

This thesis presentsthe design and evaluation of an interface specification meta-language(ISML) that has been developed to explicitly support metaphor abstractions in a model-based, user interface design framework. The application of metaphor to user interface design is widely accepted within the HCI community, yet despite this, there exists relatively little formal support for user interface design practitioners. With the increasing range and power of user interface technologies made widely available comes the opportunity for the designof sophisticated, new forms of interactive environments. The inter-disciplinary nature of HCI offers many approaches to user interface design that include views on tasks, presentationand dialogue architectures and various domain models. Notations and tools that support these views vary equally, ranging from craft-based approachesthrough to computational or tool- based support and formal methods. Work in these areas depicts gradual cohesion of a number of these design views, but do not currently explicitly specify the application of metaphorical concepts in graphical user interface design. Towards addressing this omission, ISML was developed based on (and extending) some existing model- based user interface design concepts. Abstractions of metaphor and other interface design views are captured in the ISML framework using the extensible mark-up language(XML). A six-month case study, developing the `Urban Shout Cast' application is used to evaluate ISML. Two groups of four software engineers developed a networked, multi-user, virtual radio-broadcasting environment. A qualitative analysis examines both how each group developed metaphor designs within the ISML framework and also their perceptions of its utility and practicality. Subsequent analysis on the specification data from both groups reveals aspects of the project's design that ISML captured and those that were missed. Finally, the extent to which ISML can currently abstract the metaphors used in the case study is assessed through the development of a unified `meta-object' model. The results of the case study show that ISML is capable of expressing many of the features of each group's metaphor design, as well as highlighting important design considerations during development. Furthermore, it has been shown, in principle, how an underlying metaphor abstraction can be mapped to two different implementations. Evaluation of the case study also includes important design lessons: ISML metaphor models can be both very large and difficult to separate from other design views, some of which are either weakly expressed or unsupported. This suggests that the appropriate mappings between design abstractions cannot always be easily anticipated, and that understanding the use of model-based specifications in user interface design projects remains a challenge to the HCI community

Using formal methods to support testing

Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. While traditionally these approaches have been seen as rivals, in recent years a new consensus has developed in which they are seen as complementary. This article reviews the state of the art regarding ways in which the presence of a formal specification can be used to assist testing

Dynamically generated multi-modal application interfaces

This work introduces a new UIMS (User Interface Management System), which aims to solve numerous problems in the field of user-interface development arising from hard-coded use of user interface toolkits. The presented solution is a concrete system architecture based on the abstract ARCH model consisting of an interface abstraction-layer, a dialog definition language called GIML (Generalized Interface Markup Language) and pluggable interface rendering modules. These components form an interface toolkit called GITK (Generalized Interface ToolKit). With the aid of GITK (Generalized Interface ToolKit) one can build an application, without explicitly creating a concrete end-user interface. At runtime GITK can create these interfaces as needed from the abstract specification and run them. Thereby GITK is equipping one application with many interfaces, even kinds of interfaces that did not exist when the application was written. It should be noted that this work will concentrate on providing the base infrastructure for adaptive/adaptable system, and does not aim to deliver a complete solution. This work shows that the proposed solution is a fundamental concept needed to create interfaces for everyone, which can be used everywhere and at any time. This text further discusses the impact of such technology for users and on the various aspects of software systems and their development. The targeted main audience of this work are software developers or people with strong interest in software development

The design and evaluation of the specification framework for user interface design

This thesis presentsthe design and evaluation of an interface specification meta-language(ISML) that has been developed to explicitly support metaphor abstractions in a model-based, user interface design framework. The application of metaphor to user interface design is widely accepted within the HCI community, yet despite this, there exists relatively little formal support for user interface design practitioners. With the increasing range and power of user interface technologies made widely available comes the opportunity for the designof sophisticated, new forms of interactive environments. The inter-disciplinary nature of HCI offers many approaches to user interface design that include views on tasks, presentationand dialogue architectures and various domain models. Notations and tools that support these views vary equally, ranging from craft-based approachesthrough to computational or tool- based support and formal methods. Work in these areas depicts gradual cohesion of a number of these design views, but do not currently explicitly specify the application of metaphorical concepts in graphical user interface design. Towards addressing this omission, ISML was developed based on (and extending) some existing model- based user interface design concepts. Abstractions of metaphor and other interface design views are captured in the ISML framework using the extensible mark-up language(XML). A six-month case study, developing the `Urban Shout Cast' application is used to evaluate ISML. Two groups of four software engineers developed a networked, multi-user, virtual radio-broadcasting environment. A qualitative analysis examines both how each group developed metaphor designs within the ISML framework and also their perceptions of its utility and practicality. Subsequent analysis on the specification data from both groups reveals aspects of the project's design that ISML captured and those that were missed. Finally, the extent to which ISML can currently abstract the metaphors used in the case study is assessed through the development of a unified `meta-object' model. The results of the case study show that ISML is capable of expressing many of the features of each group's metaphor design, as well as highlighting important design considerations during development. Furthermore, it has been shown, in principle, how an underlying metaphor abstraction can be mapped to two different implementations. Evaluation of the case study also includes important design lessons: ISML metaphor models can be both very large and difficult to separate from other design views, some of which are either weakly expressed or unsupported. This suggests that the appropriate mappings between design abstractions cannot always be easily anticipated, and that understanding the use of model-based specifications in user interface design projects remains a challenge to the HCI community.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

STS-73 Space Shuttle Mission Report

The STS-73 Space Shuttle Program Mission Report summarizes the Payload activities as well as the Orbiter, External Tank (ET), Solid Rocket Booster (SRB), Reusable Solid Rocket Motor (RSRM), and the Space Shuttle main engine (SSME) systems performance during the seventy-second flight of the Space Shuttle Program, the forty-seventh flight since the return-to-flight, and the eighteenth flight of the Orbiter Columbia (OV-102). STS-73 was also the first flight of OV-102 following the vehicle's return from the Orbiter Maintenance Down Period (OMDP). In addition to the Orbiter, the flight vehicle consisted of an ET that was designated ET-73; three SSME's that were designated as serial numbers 2037 (Block 1), 2031 (PH-1), and 2038 (Block 1) in positions 1, 2, and 3, respectively; and two SRB's that were designated BI-075. The RSRM's, designated RSRM-50, were installed in each SRB and the individual RSRM's were designated as 36OL050A for the left SRB, and 36OW050B for the right SRB. The primary objective of this flight was to successfully perform the planned operations of the United States Microgravity Laboratory (USML)-2 payload

The role of metaphor in user interface design

The thesis discusses the question of how unfamiliar computing systems, particularly those with graphical user interfaces, are learned and used. In particular, the approach of basing the design and behaviour of on-screen objects in the system's model world on a coherent theme and employing a metaphor is explored. The drawbacks, as well as the advantages, of this approach are reviewed and presented. The use of metaphors is also contrasted with other forms of users' mental models of interactive systems, and the need to provide a system image from which useful mental models can be developed is presented. Metaphors are placed in the context of users' understanding of interactive systems and novel application is made of the Qualitative Process Theory (QPT) qualitative reasoning model to reason about the behaviour of on-screen objects, the underlying system functionality, and the relationship between the two. This analysis supports reevaluation of the domains between which user interface metaphors are said to form mappings. A novel user interface design, entitled Medusa, that adopts guidelines for the design of metaphor-based systems, and for helping the user develop successful mental models, based on the QPT analysis and an empirical study of a popular metaphor-based system, is described. The first Medusa design is critiqued using well-founded usability inspection method. Employing the Lakoff/Johnson theory, a revised version of the Medusa user interface is described that derives its application semantics and dialogue structures from the entailments of the knowledge structures that ground understanding of the interface metaphor and that capture notions of embodiment in interaction with computing devices that QPT descriptions cannot. Design guidelines from influential existing work, and new methods of reasoning about metaphor-based designs, are presented with a number of novel graphical user interface designs intended to overcome the failings of existing systems and design approaches

IEEE/NASA Workshop on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification, and Validation

This volume contains the Preliminary Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE ISoLA Workshop on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification, and Validation, with a special track on the theme of Formal Methods in Human and Robotic Space Exploration. The workshop was held on 23-24 September 2005 at the Loyola College Graduate Center, Columbia, MD, USA. The idea behind the Workshop arose from the experience and feedback of ISoLA 2004, the 1st International Symposium on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods held in Paphos (Cyprus) last October-November. ISoLA 2004 served the need of providing a forum for developers, users, and researchers to discuss issues related to the adoption and use of rigorous tools and methods for the specification, analysis, verification, certification, construction, test, and maintenance of systems from the point of view of their different application domains

NASA space station automation: AI-based technology review

Research and Development projects in automation for the Space Station are discussed. Artificial Intelligence (AI) based automation technologies are planned to enhance crew safety through reduced need for EVA, increase crew productivity through the reduction of routine operations, increase space station autonomy, and augment space station capability through the use of teleoperation and robotics. AI technology will also be developed for the servicing of satellites at the Space Station, system monitoring and diagnosis, space manufacturing, and the assembly of large space structures

UBIDEV: a homogeneous service framework for pervasive computing environments

This dissertation studies the heterogeneity problem of pervasive computing system from the viewpoint of an infrastructure aiming to provide a service-oriented application model. From Distributed System passing through mobile computing, pervasive computing is presented as a step forward in ubiquitous availability of services and proliferation of interacting autonomous entities. To better understand the problems related to the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of pervasive computing environments, we need to analyze the structure of a pervasive computing system from its physical and service dimension. The physical dimension describes the physical environment together wit the technology infrastructure that characterizes the interactions and the relations within the environment; the service dimension represents the services (being them software or not) the environment is able to provide [Nor99]. To better separate the constrains and the functionalities of a pervasive computing system, this dissertation classifies it in terms of resources, context, classification, services, coordination and application. UBIDEV, as the key result of this dissertation, introduces a unified model helping the design and the implementation of applications for heterogeneous and dynamic environments. This model is composed of the following concepts: • Resource: all elements of the environment that are manipulated by the application, they are the atomic abstraction unit of the model. • Context: all information coming from the environment that is used by the application to adapts its behavior. Context contains resources and services and defines their role in the application. • Classification: the environment is classified according to the application ontology in order to ground the generic conceptual model of the application to the specific environment. It defines the basic semantic level of interoperability. • Service: the functionalities supported by the system; each service manipulates one or more resources. Applications are defined as a coordination and adaptation of services. • Coordination: all aspects related to service composition and execution as well as the use of the contextual information are captured by the coordination concept. • Application Ontology: represents the viewpoint of the application on the specific context; it defines the high level semantic of resources, services and context. Applying the design paradigm proposed by UBIDEV, allows to describe applications according to a Service Oriented Architecture[Bie02], and to focus on application functionalities rather than their relations with the physical devices. Keywords: pervasive computing, homogenous environment, service-oriented, heterogeneity problem, coordination model, context model, resource management, service management, application interfaces, ontology, semantic services, interaction logic, description logic.Questa dissertazione studia il problema della eterogeneit`a nei sistemi pervasivi proponendo una infrastruttura basata su un modello orientato ai servizi. I sistemi pervasivi sono presentati come un’evoluzione naturale dei sistemi distribuiti, passando attraverso mobile computing, grazie ad una disponibilit`a ubiqua di servizi (sempre, ovunque ed in qualunque modo) e ad loro e con l’ambiente stesso. Al fine di meglio comprendere i problemi legati allintrinseca eterogeneit`a dei sistemi pervasivi, dobbiamo prima descrivere la struttura fondamentale di questi sistemi classificandoli attraverso la loro dimensione fisica e quella dei loro servizi. La dimensione fisica descrive l’ambiente fisico e tutti i dispositivi che fanno parte del contesto della applicazione. La dimensione dei servizi descrive le funzionalit`a (siano esse software o no) che l’ambiente `e in grado di fornire [Nor99]. I sistemi pervasivi vengono cos`ı classificati attraverso una metrica pi `u formale del tipo risorse, contesto, servizi, coordinazione ed applicazione. UBIDEV, come risultato di questa dissertazione, introduce un modello uniforme per la descrizione e lo sviluppo di applicazioni in ambienti dinamici ed eterogenei. Il modello `e composto dai seguenti concetti di base: • Risorse: gli elementi dell’ambiente fisico che fanno parte del modello dellapplicazione. Questi rappresentano l’unit`a di astrazione atomica di tutto il modello UBIDEV. • Contesto: le informazioni sullo stato dell’ambiente che il sistema utilizza per adattare il comportamento dell’applicazione. Il contesto include informazioni legate alle risorse, ai servizi ed alle relazioni che li legano. • Classificazione: l’ambiente viene classificato sulla base di una ontologia che rappresenta il punto di accordo a cui tutti i moduli di sistema fanno riferimento. Questa classificazione rappresenta il modello concettuale dell’applicazione che si riflette sull’intero ambiente. Si definisce cos`ı la semantica di base per tutto il sistema. • Servizi: le funzionalit`a che il sistema `e in grado di fornire; ogni servizio `e descritto in termini di trasformazione di una o pi `u risorse. Le applicazioni sono cos`ı definite in termini di cooperazione tra servizi autonomi. • Coordinazione: tutti gli aspetti legati alla composizione ed alla esecuzione di servizi cos`ı come l’elaborazione dell’informazione contestuale. • Ontologia dell’Applicazione: rappresenta il punto di vista dell’applicazione; definisce la semantica delle risorse, dei servizi e dell’informazione contestuale. Applicando il paradigma proposto da UBIDEV, si possono descrivere applicazioni in accordo con un modello Service-oriented [Bie02] ed, al tempo stesso, ridurre l’applicazione stessa alle sue funzionalit`a di alto livello senza intervenire troppo su come queste funzionalit` a devono essere realizzate dalle singole componenti fisiche