Animation for Validation of Business System Specifications

Business System Engineers, responding to changes in the market place, are faced with the challenge of building increasingly complex and varied systems. Formal approaches and modeling tools, incorporated in the CASE technology, are used to aid the Requirements Engineering (RE) activity, which leads to a high level specification of Business Systems. The Validation of these specifications is a very delicate activity since it requires heavy stakeholder involvement and a consensus between stakeholders and analysts, who have quite different backgrounds and concerns. The Validation approach that is put forward in this paper, uses a set of conceptual modeling formalism and a set of formal scenarios, together with a mechanism to automatically generate them. In addition, the approach makes use of Animation techniques in order to visualize the scenarios. A system that implements the approach is also described in this paper

RethinkAI: Designing the Impact of AI in the Future of Work

The future of work is drastically changing due to the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into smart products and automated industry 4.0 processes. This requires the emergence of new design paradigms and educational approaches that develop our ability to navigate the ethical and social issues that AI brings. This research develops a new participatory method to address this gap in organisations. The paper focuses specifically on how to design the relationship of humans and AIs working together. It brings new ways on how to help organisations to explore this relationship, how to surface human and AI strengths and preferences on how these are combined when working together with AI. The research draws on how cultural differences affect AI development in the UK and Japan, to explore different ways of creating a coevolving, collaborative work relationship between humans and AI. The paper describes the design, development and evaluation of rethinkAI™, through a series of workshops, in the context of executive education with global engineering industries. RethinkAI™ was designed, tested and refined through a series of three workshops with business managers and evaluated in a final workshop with 24 multinational Chief Operating Officers (CFOs) in the engineering industry involved in the decisions of integrating AI into their products and processes. The paper analyses the results from its application and explores how this participatory method can be a valuable tool in surfacing the consequences of AI and robotics on work and designing collaborative ways for humans and AIs to work together. The analysis indicates that the use of human strengths and participatory design can help build up organisation’s ability in surfacing and mitigating social and ethical issues when designing AI into products and services. Designing the Relationship of humans and AI at work remains a significant topic of research and the work presented in this paper is a timely investigation and contribution to this topic

Robots With Personality: Designing Robotic Movement

How can we design movement in robots to work inclusively and creatively with humans? Human teams are most creative when diversity of human talent and personality strengths come together. How can we design robotic movement for creative practice? Posthumanism is also opening up a design space where intelligence can be rethought in an assemblage of humans and non-humans together with objects and technologies. You will explore hands-on the co-design process and tools that roboticists and designers used to design robotic movement for creative practice and to explore movement creatively. Play hands-on with the prototypes, exchange business cards with Dr. Meicy, explore how a rope can act with sophisticated robotic movements and be inspired to think of robots as one with our environment, in a prototype that reinvents the definition of “aquatic” robot. Design Research exhibition, showcasing the research methodology, research toolkit, robotic prototypes and finalised robot, as visiting Professor at University of Tokyo

RethinkAI: Designing the human and AI relationship in the future of work

The innovation landscape is drastically changing due to the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as whole industries are incorporating AI into smart products and automated processes. Designing AI for industry 4.0 requires revolutionary thinking. It requires the emergence of new design paradigms that build designers' ability to navigate the ethical and socioeconomic issues that AI brings in the future of work. This research develops RethinkAI™ a new participatory design method to address this gap. The paper focuses specifically on how to design the relationship of humans and AIs working together. RethinkAI™ builds an interactive, social way for designers and transdisciplinary teams to explore this relationship. It creates insights on how human and AI strengths can be designed together in a co-evolving relationship in the future of work. RethinkAI™ was designed, tested and refined through a series of three workshops. The method was evaluated in a final workshop with 24 multinational industry professionals, involved in the decisions of integrating AI into their products and processes. The paper analyses the results from its application. It explores how this participatory method can be a valuable and rich medium to stimulate new thinking into the current design paradigms of humans and AI systems interaction. The analysis indicates that the use of human strengths and participatory method can help develop designers’ agency in surfacing and mitigating social and ethical issues when designing AI into products and services. The paper concludes with a reflection on current insights and direction of further research

Virtual Cultural Identities

Virtual environments and the Internet provide an important medium for interactive collaborative learning. Immersive Virtual Environments appear able to support intuitive interaction techniques and metaphors. Our Identity Authoring Approach is aimed at our multicultural global society, and allows for multiple identities / persona to be created and used as interaction metaphors by users. The approach can be used to generate virtual environments in which the interaction is both intuitive and adaptable to the cultural background of the user, taking into account issues such as gendered and age-based identities. The approach is exemplified by focusing on interaction in virtual learning environments that engage and facilitate the introduction and experience of different cultures, by different users

Mixed Reality Productions of the Future

Augmented and Mixed Reality has been used in a variety of applications within the scientific and industrial communities, and edutainment (education through entertainment) and interactive installations in public spaces. However, the great potential of these technologies has very rarely been explored within a broadcasting context. BBC is developing the creative concepts and prototype production tools that would innovate broadcast production and enhance audience experience, based on and extending state-of-the-art research in Mixed Reality. This paper presents preliminary results from the introduction of AR technologies in a public service entertainment organization, such as the BBC, and then focuses on the production tools and interactive productions developed. The paper also summarizes technical issues that would allow use of this approach in multiple environments, such as in studios, classrooms and in the home

Interactive Cultural Experiences using Virtual Identities

People create meaning through narratives or stories. Every culture has stories that are passed along from generation to generation. Culture influences our perspectives, values and behaviour. The story metaphor has been used in Multimedia and Virtual Environments to create interactive stories. Interactive stories enable users to interactively explore the story world and to be actively involved in the outcome of the story. Virtual environments are much richer in terms of freedom of navigation and ease of interaction. Projection-based systems in particular, don’t bind the user to a predefined path and enables the user to have a hands-on experience through immersion and interaction with the virtual world. Our approach for authoring interactive stories in virtual cultural environments allows the creation of several virtual identities, through whose eyes the user perceives the virtual world. Each identity is empowered with knowledge about itself and its perception about and embodiment in the virtual world. This approach allows free interaction and navigation that is appropriate for the specific virtual identity in the culture that is being experienced. This enables the user to experience the culture from many different angles and to get a true reflection and cultural experience

Towards Immersive Telepresence SCHLOSSTAG’97

Today’s technology and advances in networking and multimedia systems stimulate a change in the way business is carried out, making it a globally distributed process, in which communication and collaboration of geographically dispersed group is of vital importance. Teleconferencing and collaborative telepresence systems that provide high-degree of copresence give enough evidences that projective VR systems when combined with multimedia facilities, such as real-time video and audio, can greatly facilitate the communication and collaboration over distance in a variety of application areas. The approach presented in this paper, creates an environment where remote participants not only meet as if face to face, but also share the same virtual space and perform common tasks. Multimedia datastreams, such as live stereo-video and audio, from a projective VR system are transmitted and integrated into the virtual space of another participant at a distant VR system, allowing geographically separated groups to meet in a common virtual space, while maintaining eyecontact, gaze awareness and body language

Use of Scenarios for Validation of Conceptual Specifications

The development of a large information system is generally regarded as one of the most complex activities undertaken by organisations. Boehm has reported that although only 6 percent of project's cost and between 9 and 12 percent of the project's duration is spent in the requirements phase, it costs between five and ten times more to repair errors during coding than during the requirements phase. Development and customer organisations could save a lot of time and money if they could detect and correct a fraction of the errors then, rather than later. This task is supported by the process of verification and validation of requirements specifications, which basic objectives are to identify and resolve software problems and highrisk issues early in the software life cycle. Verification and Validation activities produce their best results when performed as soon as possible and involve user feedback

Visualisation for validation

Animation is a multiple graphical view of a process in action. Animation has been successfully employed in programming for designing, developing and debugging programs or monitoring their performance. This paper advocates that many benefits can be accrued from the use of visualisation techniques for the purpose of validating conceptual specifications during Requirements Engineering. To this end, the paper describes a visualisation system which makes use of three interrelated conceptual models and their metamodel represented uniformly in a repository and an animation algorithm which generates graphical views corresponding to the behaviour of an application domain as specified by the conceptual models