Freeform User Interfaces for Graphical Computing

報告番号: 甲15222 ; 学位授与年月日: 2000-03-29 ; 学位の種別: 課程博士 ; 学位の種類: 博士(工学) ; 学位記番号: 博工第4717号 ; 研究科・専攻: 工学系研究科情報工学専

The Effect of 2D and 3D Menus on Memory Retention in User Interface Design

The increasing use of 3D user interface elements, particularly 3D menus, demonstrates the need to expand research in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) as it pertains to 3D user interfaces. The results of this thesis contribute to the understanding of the cognitive impacts of using 3D menus. Multiple application areas for 3D menus have been identified where memory retention is a critical success factor, but little research has been done in the area of memory retention for 3D menus. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate if the use of 3D carousel menus increases retention of information over 2D menus and if is there a gender effect with these results. A three factor split-plot (one-between subject factor and two-within subject factors) experiment was designed to test if menu dimension, content type, and gender are significant factors in memory retention and to determine if there are any interactions between these factors. The results of the experiment revealed that dimension and gender are not significant factors in the retention of information and none of the interactions of dimension (2D vs. 3D), gender, and content were significant. Several subjects’ questionnaire responses demonstrated that the menu dimension they perceived to better aid retention was 3D; however these results were not statistically significant. While these results showed that within the boundaries chosen the use of a 3D menu neither promotes nor degrades memory retention, there are still a number of questions that need to be answered regarding the use of 3D menus and their effect on other cognitive processes

Democratizing Web Automation: Programming for Social Scientists and Other Domain Experts

We have promised social scientists a data revolution, but it has not arrived. What stands between practitioners and the data-driven insights they want? Acquiring the data. In particular, acquiring the social media, online forum, and other web data that was supposed to help them produce big, rich, ecologically valid datasets. Web automation programming is resistant to high-level abstractions, so end-user programmers end up stymied by the need to reverse engineer website internals—DOM, JavaScript, AJAX. Programming by Demonstration (PBD) offered one promising avenue towards democratizing web automation. Unfortunately, as the web matured, the programs became too complex for PBD tools to synthesize, and web PBD progress stalled.This dissertation describes how I reformulated traditional web PBD around the insight that demonstrations are not always the easiest way for non-programmers to communicate their intent. By shifting from a purely Programming-By-Demonstration view to a Programming-By-X view that accepts a variety of user-friendly inputs, we can dramatically broaden the class of programs that come in reach for end-user programmers. Our Helena ecosystem combines (i) usable PBD-based program drafting tools, (ii) learnable programming languages, and (iii) novel programming environment interactions. The end result: non-coders write Helena programs in 10 minutes that can handle the complexity of modern webpages, while coders attempt the same task and time out in an hour. I conclude with a discussion of the abstraction-resistant domains that will fall next and how hybrid PL-HCI breakthroughs will vastly expand access to programming

Development of microcomputer-based mental acuity tests for repeated-measures studies

The purpose of this report is to detail the development of the Automated Performance Test System (APTS), a computer battery of mental acuity tests that can be used to assess human performance in the presence of toxic elements and environmental stressors. There were four objectives in the development of APTS. First, the technical requirements for developing APTS followed the tenets of the classical theory of mental tests which requires that tests meet set criteria like stability and reliability (the lack of which constitutes insensitivity). To be employed in the study of the exotic conditions of protracted space flight, a battery with multiple parallel forms is required. The second criteria was for the battery to have factorial multidimensionality and the third was for the battery to be sensitive to factors known to compromise performance. A fourth objective was for the tests to converge on the abilities entailed in mission specialist tasks. A series of studies is reported in which candidate APTS tests were subjected to an examination of their psychometric properties for repeated-measures testing. From this work, tests were selected that possessed the requisite metric properties of stability, reliability, and factor richness. In addition, studies are reported which demonstrate the predictive validity of the tests to holistic measures of intelligence

Equational and Rule-Based Programming: Visualization, Reliability, and Knowledge Base Generation

This document describes developing an environment for effective use of functional/equational programs and rule-based expert systems. There are significant advantages in using these paradigms for reliability, parallelism, and accumulation of expertise in knowledge bases. The environment will make it easier to understand and use these paradigms, construct more reliable systems, and automatically enrich rule-based knowledge bases with the expertise. It will consist of the following components: (1) Visualization: for composing systems using a graphical interface and for understanding of algorithms. (2) Consistency Checking: for an equational and a rule-based language in accordance with the semantics of the languages. (3) Knowledge Base Generation and Testing: a translator that extracts expertise from existing programs and accumulates it as rules in knowledge bases; the rules are tested to enhance reliability. (4) Verification: interactive heterogeneous reasoning that consists of equational reasoning based on visual and textual information. These tools will be integrated in the proposed environment. The environment will greatly reduce the costs and increase the reliability of functional/equational and rule-based systems

Augmenting the scope of interactions with implicit and explicit graphical structures

International audienceWhen using interactive graphical tools, users often have to manage a structure, i.e. the arrangement of and relations between the parts or elements of the content. However, the interaction with structures may be complex, and not well integrated with the interaction with the content. Based on contextual inquiries and past works, we have identified a number of concepts and requirements about the interaction with structure. We have explored two interactive tools: a new kind of property sheet that relies on the implicit struc-ture of graphics; and a property delegation graph to enable users to provide an explicit graphical structure. The interac-tions with the tools augment the scope of interactions to multiple objects