Intelligent Web User Interfaces

This paper investigates the key components of an intelligent web user interface to facilitate online investment as a novel approach to compensating for the impersonality of e-commerce. By analyzing challenges to online brokerage services and evaluating key criteria for a viable intelligence system, we develop a decision tree based intelligent web user interfaces model. The resulting intelligent model is intended to help online shoppers avoid common mistakes by means of implicit reasoning, flexible knowledge granularity, and effective reasoning-by-exception, which is significantly different from the traditional approaches that largely rely on assistance from remote control knowledge engines. One of the key contributions of the intelligent web user interfaces model introduced in this paper is that it provides a heuristic guidance behind the scene for both online shoppers and online stores without extra structural constraints or financial burdens

Automated Dynamic Firmware Analysis at Scale: A Case Study on Embedded Web Interfaces

Embedded devices are becoming more widespread, interconnected, and web-enabled than ever. However, recent studies showed that these devices are far from being secure. Moreover, many embedded systems rely on web interfaces for user interaction or administration. Unfortunately, web security is known to be difficult, and therefore the web interfaces of embedded systems represent a considerable attack surface. In this paper, we present the first fully automated framework that applies dynamic firmware analysis techniques to achieve, in a scalable manner, automated vulnerability discovery within embedded firmware images. We apply our framework to study the security of embedded web interfaces running in Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) embedded devices, such as routers, DSL/cable modems, VoIP phones, IP/CCTV cameras. We introduce a methodology and implement a scalable framework for discovery of vulnerabilities in embedded web interfaces regardless of the vendor, device, or architecture. To achieve this goal, our framework performs full system emulation to achieve the execution of firmware images in a software-only environment, i.e., without involving any physical embedded devices. Then, we analyze the web interfaces within the firmware using both static and dynamic tools. We also present some interesting case-studies, and discuss the main challenges associated with the dynamic analysis of firmware images and their web interfaces and network services. The observations we make in this paper shed light on an important aspect of embedded devices which was not previously studied at a large scale. We validate our framework by testing it on 1925 firmware images from 54 different vendors. We discover important vulnerabilities in 185 firmware images, affecting nearly a quarter of vendors in our dataset. These experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach

Contextualizing the blogosphere: A comparison of traditional and novel user interfaces for the web

In this paper, we investigate how contextual user interfaces affect blog reading experience. Based on a review of previous research, we argue why and how contextualization may result in (H1) enhanced blog reading experiences. In an eyetracking experiment, we tested 3 different web-based user interfaces for information spaces. The StarTree interface (by Inxight) and the Focus-Metaphor interface are compared with a standard blog interface. Information tasks have been used to evaluate and compare task performance and user satisfaction between these three interfaces. We found that both contextual user interfaces clearly outperformed the traditional blog interface, both in terms of task performance as well as user satisfaction. © 2007 Laqua, S., Ogbechie, N. and Sasse, M. A

Web document summarisation: a task-oriented evaluation

We present a query-biased summarisation interface for Web searching. The summarisation system has been specifically developed to act as a component in existing Web search interfaces. The summaries allow the user to more effectively assess the content of Web pages. We also present an experimental investigation of this approach. Our experimental results shows the system appears to be more useful and effective in helping users gauge document relevance than the traditional ranked titles/abstracts approach

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

Sensory semantic user interfaces (SenSUI)

Rapid evolution of the World Wide Web with its underlying sources of data, knowledge, services and applications continually attempts to support a variety of users, with different backgrounds, requirements and capabilities. In such an environment, it is highly unlikely that a single user interface will prevail and be able to fulfill the requirements of each user adequately. Adaptive user interfaces are able to adapt information and application functionalities to the user context. In contrast, pervasive computing and sensor networks open new opportunities for context aware platforms, one that is able to improve user interface adaptation reacting to environmental and user sensors. Semantic web technologies and ontologies are able to capture sensor data and provide contextual information about the user, their actions, required applications and environment. This paper investigates the viability of an approach where semantic web technologies are used to maximize the efficacy of interface adaptation through the use of available ontology

A method for identifying communication breakdowns in user-interfaces

Businesses are increasingly communicating with their customers via web-based interfaces. However, users are experiencing a lack of guidance and support in the communication of these often complex services. This paper proposes a method for identifying where and why there is a breakdown in communication between the interface and the user. In creating the method, the importance and value of having such a method are considered and discussed, particularly for communication rich interfaces. The method is developed based on the results from user trials with a mortgage application interface using the existing evaluation method. Although the results from piloting the method suggest that it is useful for identifying communication breakdowns within the user-interfaces, more work is required before a definitive method can be produced. As a result of this study it appears that communication breakdowns are related either to the information within an interface or to the process

Agents, Believability and Embodiment in Advanced Learning Environments

On the World Wide Web we see a growing number of general HCI interfaces, interfaces to educational or entertainment systems, interfaces to professional environments, etc., where an animated face, a cartoon character or a human-like virtual agent has the task to assist the user, to engage the user into a conversation or to educate the user. What can be said say about the effects a human-like agent has on a student's performance? We discuss agents, their intelligence, embodiment and interaction modalities. In particular, we introduce viewpoints and questions about roles embodied agents can play in educational environment

The Ecce and Logen Partial Evaluators and their Web Interfaces

We present Ecce and Logen, two partial evaluators for Prolog using the online and offline approach respectively. We briefly present the foundations of these tools and discuss various applications. We also present new implementations of these tools, carried out in Ciao Prolog. In addition to a command-line interface new user-friendly web interfaces were developed. These enable non-expert users to specialise logic programs using a web browser, without the need for a local installation