Interaction and Distance Education

Distance learning can be supported by accurately designed learning environments. Such environments should be maintained consistend even offline, to guarantee continuity to the student's experience. Moreover personal connections among different topics of different areas should be allowed

Proceedings of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces AVI 08

The 9th edition of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, (Naples on May 29--31 2008), follows in the tradition of previous editions, in hosting an impressive collection of contributions on the most diverse topics related to interaction, from design of interactive environments to new multi-touch interaction, from information visualization to presentation layout, from exploration of virtual spaces, to provision of services based on localisation in the real world, to name just a few. The main categories proposed for this edition of AVI were Interaction models and techniques, Interactive visualization, Interactive systems, and User interaction studies, and we were most pleased with a very good response from the interaction community on all of these subjects. We received 117 full papers, 36 poster papers and 18 demo papers. Each paper, independently of the category, was reviewed by 3 members of the Programme Committee, and in cases of controversy, discussions among the reviewers and with the Program Chairs ensued. In particular, the Demo Chair Phil Cox was instrumental in promoting and setting up the demo programme. The Programme Committee members were particularly attentive on evaluating both experimental and conceptual support for the statements in the papers and in many cases proposed effective ways to revise the papers In the end, 32 submissions were accepted as oral presentations, 42 as poster presentations, and 12 as demo presentations. All these contributions are included in these Proceedings. We think that this collection of works is a good representative of both the state of the art and of the vitality of the community interested in interaction at large, and we are proud to see many returning authors, who see AVI as the natural venue for disseminating their new ideas, as well as many new researchers, who test their achievements in a harsh competition. We hope to see more and more of these categories of authors in future AVIs. The scientific programme of AVI 2008 is completed by 3 excellent invited speeches, two tutorials and two workshops. This is the right place to acknowledge the contribution of all those who helped make AVI a successful event once again

Evaluating web sites: exploiting user's expectations

A new goal-based approach to measure usability of web sites is presented, strongly taking into account the customers' expectations, which are often hardly foreseeable as a whole. After a general discussion on web site design issues, we present a short survey of evaluation methods currently used for web sites. We next introduce a new taxonomy of site categories in a three-dimensional space, derived from Aristotle's rhetorical triangle, including different aspects of the site designer's goals. In our approach, we use this taxonomy to identify a number of sites belonging to the same category, in order to carry out a comparative analysis of their features. This analysis is the basis for a two-shot generation of a form for the evaluation of that category of sites. In the first shot, the users fill a generic evaluation form, acquainting them with sites characteristics. They are next asked to perform specific tasks of their choice, according to what they expect from a site of the given category. They note their impressions and list those features they found useful, the analysis of their comments is exploited to formulate statements specific to the given category, to be added to the initial form (second shot). We found that the responses to the second, expanded form, provide more comprehensive criteria for site evaluation, and turn helpful to precisely locate flaws in site functionalities. After testing, our methodology has proved very promising and may be applied for the evaluation of any other site category, most of all those providing a set of special services. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces - AVI 2002 - In cooperation with ACM-SIGCHI, ACM-SIGMM, SIGCHI Italy

We are faced everyday with an enormous amount of information: from television, from the newspapers, from the web, at the same time we also own a number of personal gadgets: cellular phone, personal and portable computers, personal assistants...yet we have difficulties in filtering, highlighting and using the information we really need. When users search specific information on the web, very often they run into difficulties and find other types of data (perhaps even interesting) but different from the ones they were searching. In a world where communication is one of the most important issues for succeeding in life (sitting for exams, undergoing a hiring interview, writing reports and, above all, interacting with others) we all need good interfaces - not only between humans and programs, but more often than not, between different kinds of humans. The Mid-East crisis is a very good example, unfortunately. We have been organizing the AVI International Workshops having - at the back of our minds - the idea that no application program may be really successful if its corresponding interface is not geared towards human capabilities. Usability studies have proved, in a number of cases, that if the user does not participate in the design process of a system (and of its interface) it is very unlikely that such system will meet the user's needs. Due to such experience in the design and evaluation of interfaces, we feel that there are important issues to be discussed like the relevance of the cultural background of users, the different information interaction strategies, the conditions and constraints of attention focusing, the design and evaluation of visual tools for improving understandability, learnability and plain usage. The invited speakers of the AVI '02 edition in Trento are well known in the area of interface design and will provide us with their insight and forecasting of what is round the corner in the next years pertaining to the above subject. The accepted papers (less than one out of three) report on very recent work using a variety of technologies like virtual reality, information visualization, icon design...whilst the system papers that will be demonstrated give us a glance at potentially new applications for improving human computer interaction, for increasing multimodality and even pioneering musical interfaces

Indexing pictorial documents by their content: A survey of current techniques

To efficiently solve the image retrieval problem in an image database, many techniques have been devised addressing the requirements of different applications. Present information management systems exploit these techniques to allow querying of pictorial documents archives. To do this, the first step is to extract relevant keys from the image content itself, so that images are not treated as illustrative appendices of textual documents. Even more important, the search process is not restricted to external attributes such as the storing date or the archive number. The kind of characteristics used to build the database index depends on the users' information needs for a given cognitive environment. Currently, the focus is on image color statistics and patterns (textures), on shapes and their spatial relations, or on a combination of these. This paper reviews indexing methods that are significant examples of techniques presently used

Successful Visual Human-Computer Interaction is Undecidable

We propose a model of visual interactive computing and define a family of visual languages which abstract some of its features. We prove that the problem whether or not successful communications exist is not decidable. (A human-computer communication by means of a visual language is successful when all human commands, in the form of pictures composed of icons, are correctly interpreted and answered by the computer.) The proof makes use of a codification of the Post Correspondence Problem by means of icons and pictures. This result warns about possible limitations of a purely algorithmic treatment of interactive computing via visual language

An analysis and case study of digital annotation

Digital annotation of multimedia objects is an activity central to many important tasks, such as studying, commenting on, indexing and retrieving. Although annotation is becoming widespread, a formal account of it is lacking. We argue that an algebraic definition of the functions and of the data types involved in digital annotation is essential in the design of tools. Moreover, it allows designers to establish syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of the annotation activity. This paper starts this enterprise by providing a formal analysis of digital annotations, seen as special types of documents dependent on the existence of other documents. This analysis allows a distinction to be made between annotations and other types of digital entities. Moreover, we identify operations and procedures that should be enabled by annotation systems. As a case study, the UCAT annotation system is described