Crowdsourcing user interface adaptations for minimizing the bloat in enterprise applications

Bloated software systems encompass a large number of features resulting in an increase in visual complexity. Enterprise applications are a common example of such types of systems. Since many users only use a distinct subset of the available features, providing a mechanism to tailor user interfaces according to each user’s needs helps in decreasing the bloat thereby reducing the visual complexity. Crowdsourcing can be a means for speeding up the adaptation process by engaging and leveraging the enterprise application communities. This paper presents a tool supported model-driven mechanism for crowdsourcing user interface adaptations. We evaluate our proposed mechanism and tool through a basic preliminary user study

Adaptive model-driven user interface development systems

Adaptive user interfaces (UIs) were introduced to address some of the usability problems that plague many software applications. Model-driven engineering formed the basis for most of the systems targeting the development of such UIs. An overview of these systems is presented and a set of criteria is established to evaluate the strengths and shortcomings of the state-of-the-art, which is categorized under architectures, techniques, and tools. A summary of the evaluation is presented in tables that visually illustrate the fulfillment of each criterion by each system. The evaluation identified several gaps in the existing art and highlighted the areas of promising improvement

An interactive interface for nursing robots.

Physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) is inevitable for a human user while working with assistive robots. There are various aspects of pHRI, such as choosing the interface, type of control schemes implemented and the modes of interaction. The research work presented in this thesis concentrates on a health-care assistive robot called Adaptive Robot Nursing Assistant (ARNA). An assistive robot in a health-care environment has to be able to perform routine tasks and be aware of the surrounding environment at the same time. In order to operate the robot, a teleoperation based interaction would be tedious for some patients as it would require a high level of concentration and can cause cognitive fatigue. It would also require a learning curve for the user in order to teleoperate the robot efficiently. The research work involves the development of a proposed Human-Machine Interface (HMI) framework which integrates the decision-making module, interaction module, and a tablet interface module. The HMI framework integrates a traded control based interaction which allows the robot to take decisions on planning and executing a task while the user only has to specify the task through a tablet interface. According to the preliminary experiments conducted as a part of this thesis, the traded control based approach allows a novice user to operate the robot with the same efficiency as an expert user. Past researchers have shown that during a conversation with a speech interface, a user would feel disengaged if the answers received from the interface are not in the context of the conversation. The research work in this thesis explores the different possibilities of implementing a speech interface that would be able to reply to any conversational queries from the user. A speech interface was developed by creating a semantic space out of Wikipedia database using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). This allowed the speech interface to have a wide knowledge-base and be able to maintain a conversation in the same context as intended by the user. This interface was developed as a web-service and was deployed on two different robots to exhibit its portability and the ease of implementation with any other robot. In the work presented, a tablet application was developed which integrates speech interface and an onscreen button interface to execute tasks through ARNA robot. This tablet interface application can access video feed and sensor data from robots, assist the user with decision making during pick and place operations, monitor the user health over time, and provide conversational dialogue during sitting sessions. In this thesis, we present the software and hardware framework that enable a patient sitter HMI, and together with experimental results with a small number of users that demonstrate that the concept is sound and scalable

Designing privacy for scalable electronic healthcare linkage

A unified electronic health record (EHR) has potentially immeasurable benefits to society, and the current healthcare industry drive to create a single EHR reflects this. However, adoption is slow due to two major factors: the disparate nature of data and storage facilities of current healthcare systems and the security ramifications of accessing and using that data and concerns about potential misuse of that data. To attempt to address these issues this paper presents the VANGUARD (Virtual ANonymisation Grid for Unified Access of Remote Data) system which supports adaptive security-oriented linkage of disparate clinical data-sets to support a variety of virtual EHRs avoiding the need for a single schematic standard and natural concerns of data owners and other stakeholders on data access and usage. VANGUARD has been designed explicit with security in mind and supports clear delineation of roles for data linkage and usage

Engineering Adaptive Model-Driven User Interfaces for Enterprise Applications

Enterprise applications such as enterprise resource planning systems have numerous complex user interfaces (UIs). Usability problems plague these UIs because they are offered as a generic off-the-shelf solution to end-users with diverse needs in terms of their required features and layout preferences. Adaptive UIs can help in improving usability by tailoring the features and layout based on the context-of-use. The model-driven UI development approach offers the possibility of applying different types of adaptations on the various UI levels of abstraction. This approach forms the basis for many works researching the development of adaptive UIs. Yet, several gaps were identified in the state-of-the-art adaptive model-driven UI development systems. To fill these gaps, this thesis presents an approach that offers the following novel contributions: - The Cedar Architecture serves as a reference for developing adaptive model-driven enterprise application user interfaces. - Role-Based User Interface Simplification (RBUIS) is a mechanism for improving usability through adaptive behavior, by providing end-users with a minimal feature-set and an optimal layout based on the context-of-use. - Cedar Studio is an integrated development environment, which provides tool support for building adaptive model-driven enterprise application UIs using RBUIS based on the Cedar Architecture. The contributions were evaluated from the technical and human perspectives. Several metrics were established and applied to measure the technical characteristics of the proposed approach after integrating it into an open-source enterprise application. Additional insights about the approach were obtained through the opinions of industry experts and data from real-life projects. Usability studies showed the approach’s ability to significantly improve usability in terms of end-user efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction