A software toolkit for web-based virtual environments based on a shared database

We propose a software toolkit for developing complex web-based user interfaces, incorporating such things as multi-user facilities, virtual environments (VEs), and interface agents. The toolkit is based on a novel software architecture that combines ideas from multi-agent platforms and user interface (UI) architectures. It provides a distributed shared database with publish-subscribe facilities. This enables UI components to observe the state and activities of any other components in the system easily. The system runs in a web-based environment. The toolkit is comprised of several programming and other specification languages, providing a complete suite of systems design languages. We illustrate the toolkit by means of a couple of examples

Effectiveness of Visualisations for Detection of Errors in Segmentation of Blood Vessels

Vascular disease diagnosis often requires a precise segmentation of the vessel lumen. When 3D (Magnetic Resonance Angiography, MRA, or Computed Tomography Angiography, CTA) imaging is available, this can be done automatically, but occasional errors are inevitable. So, the segmentation has to be checked by clinicians. This requires appropriate visualisation techniques. A number of visualisation techniques exist, but there has been little in the way of user studies that compare the different alternatives. In this study we examine how users interact with several basic visualisations, when performing a visual search task, checking vascular segmentation correctness of segmented MRA data. These visualisations are: direct volume rendering (DVR), isosurface rendering, and curved planar reformatting (CPR). Additionally, we examine if visual highlighting of potential errors can help the user find errors, so a fourth visualisation we examine is DVR with visual highlighting. Our main findings are that CPR performs fastest but has higher error rate, and there are no significant differences between the other three visualisations. We did find that visual highlighting actually has slower performance in early trials, suggesting that users learned to ignore them

A quality-of-data aware mobile decision support system for patients with chronic illnesses

We present a mobile decision support system (mDSS) which runs on a patient Body Area Network consisting of a smartphone and a set of biosensors. Quality-of-Data (QoD) awareness in decision making is achieved by means of a component known as the Quality-of-Data Broker, which also runs on the smartphone. The QoD-aware mDSS collaborates with a more sophisticated decision support system running on a fixed back-end server in order to provide distributed decision support. This distributed decision support system has been implemented as part of a larger system developed during the European project MobiGuide. The MobiGuide system is a guideline-based Patient Guidance System designed to assist patients in the management of chronic illnesses. The system, including the QOD-aware mDSS, has been validated by clinicians and is being evaluated in patient pilots against two clinical guidelines

Building a framework for developing interaction models: Overview of current research in dialogue and interactive systems

This text is an overview of literature relevant to the development and modelling of interactive systems. It is the most comprehensive part of the documentation I made during the literature research stage of my PhD project, which should result in a modelling framework for interactive systems. More precisely, the scope of this project is natural language, multimodal, and virtual reality systems, and ways of modelling the dynamics of interaction of such systems for the purpose of aiding system development. The topics addressed in this text naturally include existing systems and modelling techniques, but theoretical frameworks and methodological issues are also addressed. Short introductions are given to cognitive psychology, semiotics, communication models, and HCI. Systems and strategies are reviewed, covering the topics multimodality, redundancy and confirmation, and ways of modelling dialogue and task structure. Methodological issues are reviewed, in particular some methodologies, and strategies for design/implementation and analysis/evaluation. Finally, some conclusions are given, as well as an indication of the directions of my future research

Process- and Agent-Based Modelling Techniques for Dialogue Systems and Virtual Environments

This text presents results of ongoing research, which is aimed at developing a framework for developing multimodal natural language dialogue systems operating within virtual environments. The aspects of multimodality and presence in a virtual environment are chosen as the main focus of this research. It may be argued that specification techniques would form the basis of such a framework. Therefore, a general overview and evaluation is given of existing specification techniques for interactive systems, based on both literature and previous research results. This includes the object-oriented model, process algebras, interactor models, and agent systems. Agent systems are further subdivided into intentional logics, production rule systems, agent communication languages, agent platforms, and agent architectures. A new agent system is proposed, which is based on update notification mechanisms as found in interactor models, and the `facilitator' function as found in some agent platfo..