Collaborative explicit plasticity framework: a conceptual scheme for the generation of plastic and group-aware user interfaces

The advent of new advances in mobile computing has changed the manner we do our daily work, even enabling us to perform collaborative activities. However, current groupware approaches do not offer an integrating and efficient solution that jointly tackles the flexibility and heterogeneity inherent to mobility as well as the awareness aspects intrinsic to collaborative environments. Issues related to the diversity of contexts of use are collected under the term plasticity. A great amount of tools have emerged offering a solution to some of these issues, although always focused on individual scenarios. We are working on reusing and specializing some already existing plasticity tools to the groupware design. The aim is to offer the benefits from plasticity and awareness jointly, trying to reach a real collaboration and a deeper understanding of multi-environment groupware scenarios. In particular, this paper presents a conceptual framework aimed at being a reference for the generation of plastic User Interfaces for collaborative environments in a systematic and comprehensive way. Starting from a previous conceptual framework for individual environments, inspired on the model-based approach, we introduce specific components and considerations related to groupware

Adaptive interaction multi-agent systems in e-learning/e-teaching on the web

In this paper we propose to include two up-to-date separate concepts, namely social computing and usability metrics, in intelligent interaction agents to enhance a user-centred, adaptive human-computer interaction (HCI) on the Web. Social computing refers to the application of sociological understanding to the design of interactive systems. Usability metrics are software quality metrics with a long history of successful application in software engineering. We introduce preference metrics, which quantify the subjective evaluations and preferences of users, and performance metrics, which measure the actual use of working software, as suggested parameters that enable user interface adaptation. From all terms, a new user-centred and adaptive interaction multi-agent model and architecture is proposed in e-learning/e-teaching on the Web

A multi-agent system architecture for the adaptation of user interfaces

Nowadays the design of user interfaces has become a discipline of great importance in Software Engineering, mainly due to the increasing impact that a high quality user interface has in the success of a software product. However, the growing diversity in interaction devices and techniques has raised a big expectation for the design of both methods and architectures able to cope with context of use heterogeneity issues in an intelligent way. Multi-agent systems jump into scene as an alternative to design the adaptation capabilities required to cope with this problem in a natural manner

A Seamless Development Process of Adaptive User Interfaces Explicitly Based on Usability Properties

This work is aimed at the specification of usable adaptive user interfaces. A model-based method is used, which have been proved useful to address this task. A tool is introduced for the specification of user interfaces for highly interactive systems within a user-centred point of view, task-driven and context-aware. The specification created is described in terms of abstract interaction objects that are translated into concrete interaction objects for each particular platform. To perform this translation case-based reasoning is used in order to provide the required heuristics. An adaptive engine is also proposed to improve the usability at runtime by means of a multi-agent system

A seamless development process of adaptive user interfaces explicitly based on usability properties

This work is aimed at the specification of usable adaptive user interfaces. A model-based method is used, which have been proved useful to address this task. A tool is introduced for the specification of user interfaces for highly interactive systems within a user-centred point of view, task-driven and context-aware. The specification created is described in terms of abstract interaction objects that are translated into concrete interaction objects for each particular platform. To perform this translation case-based reasoning is used in order to provide the required heuristics. An adaptive engine is also proposed to improve the usability at runtime by means of a multi-agent system