Chris Roast

Cognitive Dimensions of Notations: Design Tools for Cognitive Technology

The Cognitive Dimensions of Notations framework has been created to assist the designers of notational systems and information artifacts to evaluate their designs with respect to the impact that they will have on the users of those designs. The framework emphasizes the design choices available to such designers, including characterization of the users activity, and the inevitable tradeoffs that will occur between potential design options. The resuliing framework has been under development for over 10 years, and now has an active community of researchers devoted to it. This paper first introduces Cognitive Dimensions. It then summarizes the current activity, especially the results of a one-day workshop devoted to Cognitive Dimensions in December 2000, and reviews the ways in which it applies to the field of Cognitive Technology.

Analysis and design of human-robot swarm interaction in firefighting

In a variety of emergency settings robot assistance has been identified as highly valuable, providing remote, and thus safe, access and operation. There are many different forms of human-robot interactions, allowing a team of humans and robots to take advantage of skills of each team member. A relatively new area of research considers interactions between human and a team of robots performing as a swarm. This work is concerned with the interactive use of autonomous robots in fire emergency settings. In particular, we consider a swarm of robots that are capable of supporting and enhancing fire fighting operations co-operatively and we investigate how firefighters in the field work with such a swarm. This paper outlines some of the key characteristics of this emergency setting. It discusses possible forms of interactions with swarm robotics being examined in the GUARDIANS project. The paper addresses the use of assistive swarm robotics to support firefighters with navigation and search operations. It reports on existing firefighters operations and how human-swarm interactions are to be used during such operations. The design approaches for human-swarm interaction are described and the preliminary work in the area are outlined. The paper ends by linking current expertise with common features of emergency related interaction design.

Cognitive dimensions: Achievements, new directions, and open questions

The cognitive dimensions framework has inspired research both more and less varied than expected. In this paper, we revisit the original aims and briefly describe some subsequent research, to consider whether the original aims were too austere in rejecting knowledge-based dimensions; whether the dimensions can be shown to have real-world relevance; and whether their definitions can be improved, either piecemeal or by refactoring the entire set. We mention some issues that remain unexplored, and conclude by describing two different ventures into defining clear procedures for real-life application, operating in very different milieux but both accepting that the framework should be developed from its original formulation.

Whole body interaction

In this workshop we explore the notation of whole body interaction. We bring together different disciplines to create a new research direction for study of this emerging form of interaction

Towards quality requirements via animated formal specifications

Assuring a high quality requirements specification document involves both an early validation process and an increased level of participation. An approach and its supporting environment which combines the benefits of a formal system specification and its subsequent execution via a rapid prototype is reported. The environment assists in the construction, clarification, validation and visualisation of a formal specification. An illustrative case study demonstrates the consequences of assertions about system properties at this early stage of software development. Our approach involves the pragmatic combination of technical benefits of formal systems engineering based techniques with the context‐sensitive notions of increased participation of both developer and user stakeholders to move us closer towards a quality requirements specification document.

Designing user interaction with robots swarms in emergency settings

In this paper, we describe the development processes adopted for effective human centred design in the context of developing a human robot interface. The human robot interaction context is that of a working with a swarm of autonomous robots being developed to assist the process of search and rescue as carried out by fire fighters. The paper illustrates an approach to early design evaluation motivated by user centred design objectives. The conclusion from the study illustrates the value of early experiential feedback. In particular we show that the complex nature of professional practice in the high risk settings has significant influences upon the fitness for purpose.

User-comprehension of Euler diagrams

Euler diagrams are a diagrammatic system for representing and reasoning with set theoretic statements. Syntactic constraints called wellformedness conditions (WFCs) are often imposed with the intention of reducing comprehension errors, but there is little supporting empirical evidence that they have the desired effect. We report on experiments which support the theory that the WFCs are generally beneficial for novice user comprehension, but we discover that violating some individual WFCs, such as concurrency, can be beneficial. Furthermore, we examine a prioritisation of the WFCs, derived from the user comprehension results, which could be used to prioritise theoretical work on generation problems or to assist in the provision of a choice of a diagram to display to users, for instance. We have used similar materials to our previous ‘preference study’ for cross comparison purposes. This accumulation of work has motivated the development of a model of the user comprehension with the aim of more closely linking theoretical and empirical works examining effective notation design, general approaches to displaying notations and interacting with notations.

Evaluation of scanning user interfaces using real-time-data usage logs

This research concerns the use of Human Computer Interaction models to assist in the provision of the Electronic Assistive Technologies (EAT) for people with severe disabilities. The novel feature of this work is that the evaluation is conducted through the model-based analysis of automatically generated usage logs. This analysis provides a source of feedback to clinicians, which has previously been unavailable from assistive technology users. The overall aim of the research is to provide a set of tools to assist with the prescription and configuration of assistive technologies.

Designing for delay in interactive information retrieval

Abstract The relevance of timeliness in effective interaction has been recently recognized in HCI research. One area where users of a system consistently encounter varying system delays is that of interactive information retrieval. The effectiveness of information retrieval in an interactive context can be highly influenced by the computational delays encountered. This paper develops a framework for assessing the appropriateness of alternative interfaces and user tasks for systems in which significance of computational delays cannot be ignored. The framework is motivated by the ability of users to attune to the duration and pace of events in their environment. The framework is applied to interactive information retrieval, assessing alternative designs, and identifying how interface design details can enhance effective interactive information retrieval. The outcome of this assessment demonstrates that meeting temporal interface requirements can have a significant influence upon overall system design and the view of task adopted by users.

Exploring virtual reality and prosthetic training

Working together with health care professionals and a world leading bionic prosthetic maker we created a prototype that aims to decrease the time it takes for a transradial amputee to train how to use a Myoelectric prosthetic arm. Our research indicates that the Oculus Rift, Microsofts Kinect and the Thalmic Labs Myo gesture control armband will allow us to create a unique, cost effective training tool that could be beneficial to amputee patients.