Verification-guided modelling of salience and cognitive load

Well-designed interfaces use procedural and sensory cues to increase the cognitive salience of appropriate actions. However, empirical studies suggest that cognitive load can influence the strength of those cues. We formalise the relationship between salience and cognitive load revealed by empirical data. We add these rules to our abstract cognitive architecture, based on higher-order logic and developed for the formal verification of usability properties. The interface of a fire engine dispatch task from the empirical studies is then formally modelled and verified. The outcomes of this verification and their comparison with the empirical data provide a way of assessing our salience and load rules. They also guide further iterative refinements of these rules. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the outcomes of formal analysis and empirical studies suggests new experimental hypotheses, thus providing input to researchers in cognitive science

The Cognitive Atlas: Employing Interaction Design Processes to Facilitate Collaborative Ontology Creation

The Cognitive Atlas is a collaborative knowledge-building project that aims to develop an ontology that characterizes the current conceptual framework among researchers in cognitive science and neuroscience. The project objectives from the beginning focused on usability, simplicity, and utility for end users. Support for Semantic Web technologies was also a priority in order to support interoperability with other neuroscience projects and knowledge bases. Current off-the-shelf semantic web or semantic wiki technologies, however, do not often lend themselves to simple user interaction designs for non-technical researchers and practitioners; the abstract nature and complexity of these systems acts as point of friction for user interaction, inhibiting usability and utility. Instead, we take an alternate interaction design approach driven by user centered design processes rather than a base set of semantic technologies. This paper reviews the initial two rounds of design and development of the Cognitive Atlas system, including interactive design decisions and their implementation as guided by current industry practices for the development of complex interactive systems

Construction and Verification of Performance and Reliability Models

Over the last two decades formal methods have been extended towards performance and reliability evaluation. This paper tries to provide a rather intuitive explanation of the basic concepts and features in this area. Instead of striving for mathematical rigour, the intention is to give an illustrative introduction to the basics of stochastic models, to stochastic modelling using process algebra, and to model checking as a technique to analyse stochastic models

Systems, interactions and macrotheory

A significant proportion of early HCI research was guided by one very clear vision: that the existing theory base in psychology and cognitive science could be developed to yield engineering tools for use in the interdisciplinary context of HCI design. While interface technologies and heuristic methods for behavioral evaluation have rapidly advanced in both capability and breadth of application, progress toward deeper theory has been modest, and some now believe it to be unnecessary. A case is presented for developing new forms of theory, based around generic “systems of interactors.” An overlapping, layered structure of macro- and microtheories could then serve an explanatory role, and could also bind together contributions from the different disciplines. Novel routes to formalizing and applying such theories provide a host of interesting and tractable problems for future basic research in HCI

Theoretical models of the role of visualisation in learning formal reasoning

Although there is empirical evidence that visualisation tools can help students to learn formal subjects such as logic, and although particular strategies and conceptual difficulties have been identified, it has so far proved difficult to provide a general model of learning in this context that accounts for these findings in a systematic way. In this paper, four attempts at explaining the relative difficulty of formal concepts and the role of visualisation in this learning process are presented. These explanations draw on several existing theories, including Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, Green's Cognitive Dimensions, the Popper-Campbell model of conjectural learning, and cognitive complexity. The paper concludes with a comparison of the utility and applicability of the different models. It is also accompanied by a reflexive commentary[0] (linked to this paper as a hypertext) that examines the ways in which theory has been used within these arguments, and which attempts to relate these uses to the wider context of learning technology research

Obvious: a meta-toolkit to encapsulate information visualization toolkits. One toolkit to bind them all

This article describes “Obvious”: a meta-toolkit that abstracts and encapsulates information visualization toolkits implemented in the Java language. It intends to unify their use and postpone the choice of which concrete toolkit(s) to use later-on in the development of visual analytics applications. We also report on the lessons we have learned when wrapping popular toolkits with Obvious, namely Prefuse, the InfoVis Toolkit, partly Improvise, JUNG and other data management libraries. We show several examples on the uses of Obvious, how the different toolkits can be combined, for instance sharing their data models. We also show how Weka and RapidMiner, two popular machine-learning toolkits, have been wrapped with Obvious and can be used directly with all the other wrapped toolkits. We expect Obvious to start a co-evolution process: Obvious is meant to evolve when more components of Information Visualization systems will become consensual. It is also designed to help information visualization systems adhere to the best practices to provide a higher level of interoperability and leverage the domain of visual analytics