Ian E. Smith

Techniques for addressing fundamental privacy and disruption tradeoffs in awareness support systems

This paper describes a fundamental dual tradeoff that occurs in systems supporting awareness for distributed work groups, and presents several specific new techniques which illustrate good compromise points within this tradeoff space. This dual tradeoff is between privacy and awareness, and between awareness and disturbance. Simply stated, the more information about oneself that leaves your work area, the more potential for awareness of you exists for your colleagues. Unfortunately, this also represents the greatest potential for intrusion on your privacy. Similarly, the more information that is received about the activities of colleagues, the more potential awareness we have of them. However, at the same time, the more information we receive, the greater the chance that the information will become a disturbance to our normal work. This dual tradeoff seems to be a fundamental one. However, by carefully examining awareness problems in the light of this tradeoff it is possible to devise techniques which expose new points in the design space. These new points provide different types and quantities of information so that awareness can be achieved without invading the privacy of the sender, or creating a disturbance for the receiver. This paper presents four such techniques, each based on a careful selection of the information transmitted.

A confederation of tools for capturing and accessing collaborative activity

This paper presents a confederation of tools, called Coral, that combine to support the real-time capture of and subsequent access to informal collaborative activities. The tools provide the means to initiate digital multimedia recordings, a variety of methods to index those recordings, and ways to retrieve the indexed material in other settings. The current system emerged from a convergence of the WhereWereWe multimedia work, the Tivoli LiveBoard application, and the Inter-Language Unification distributed-object programming infrastructure. We are working with a specific user community and application domain, which has helped us shape a particular, demonstrably useful, configuration of tools and to get extensive real-world experience with them. This domain involves frequent discussion and decision-making meetings and later access of the captured records of those meetings to produce accurate documentation. Several aspects of Coral--the application tools, the architecture of the confederation, and the multimedia infrastructure--are described.

HyperCafe: narrative and aesthetic properties of hypervideo

HyperCafe is an experimental hypermedia prototype, developed as an illustration of a general hypervideo system. This program places the user in a virtual cafe, composed primarily of digital video clips of actors involved in fictional conversations in the cafe; HyperCafe allows the user to follow different conversations, and offers dynamic opportunities of interaction via temporal, spatio-temporal and textual links to present alternative narratives. Textual elements are also present in the form of explanatory text, contradictory subtitles, and intruding narratives. Based on our work with HyperCafe, we discuss the components and a framework for hypervideo structures, along with the underlying aesthetic considerations.

Authoring and navigating video in space and time

A formal methodology is needed to integrate and exchange spatial and temporal properties in hypermedia and hypertext. We propose a generic framework to structure and dynamically present a new form of video- and text-based media called hypervideo. We developed a Hypervideo Engine and produced an experimental hypermedia work, HyperCafe, to illustrate the general properties and aesthetic techniques possible in such a medium.

Ultra-lightweight constraints

Constraint systems have been used for some time to implement various components of a user interface. High level support for flexible screen layou~t has been among the more important uses; layout constraints in a user interface toolkit provide a declarative mechanism for controlling the size and position of objects in an interactive display, along with an efficient update mechanism for maintaining display layouts automatically in the face of dynamic changes. This paper describes a new technique for implementing one-way layout constraints which overcomes a substantial limitation of previous systems. In particular, it allows constraints to be implemented in an extremely small amount of space — as little as 17 bits per constraint — and still maintain the level of performance needed for good interactive response. These ultralightweight constraints, while not handling all (cases, cover most relationships used for layout, and allow conventional constraints to be applied when needed. This paper will consider both a general technique for ultra-lightweight layout constraints and its specific implementation in a new JavaTM-basecl user interface toolkit.

Systematic output modification in a 2D user interface toolkit

In this paper we present a simple but general set of techniques for modifying output in a 2D user interface toolkit. We use a combination of simple subclassing, wrapping, and collusion between parent and output objects to produce arbitrary sets of composable output transformations. The techniques described here allow rich output effects to be added to most, if not all, existing interactors in an application, without the knowledge of the interactors themselves. This paper explains how the approach works, discusses a number of example effects that have been built, and describes how the techniques presented here could be extended to work with other toolkits. We address issues of input by examining a number of extensions to the toolkit input subsystem to accommodate transformed graphical output. Our approach uses a set of “hooks” to undo output transformations when input is to be dispatched.

The Knowledge Weasel hypermedia annotation system

We describe the organization and implementation of the Knowledge Weasel (KW) Hypermedia Annotation System which we are using to explore knowledge structuring by collaborative annotation. Knowledge Weasel incorporates many useful features: a common record format for representing annotations in different media for uniform access; dynamic user control of the presentation of annotations as a navigational aid global navigation using queries and local navigation using link following; support for collecting related sets of annotations into groups for contextual referenee and communication. KW purposely leverages off of free, publicly available software so it doesn’t require building specialized tools and also so it can be freely available. We discuss some of the issues involved with annotating non-textual material such as images and sound and conclude with a brief discussion of ongoing and future work.

Electronic mail previews using non-speech audio

Conventional (visual) glances give a quick overview of the overall properties of an object. An audw glance presents a similar overview aurally rather than visually. This paper describes an audio glance for electronic mail messages. This dynamically construed non-speech sound is designed to summarize the important properties of a message into a concise sound so that one may quickly preview a set of email messages to determine their important properties. This allows the user to make a quick assessment of, for example, the existence of messages from particular users or groups, or of responses to a recent message of importance. Along with the audio glance technique we present a “flash card” interface which provides very rapid access to the glance.

Wordspotting for voice editing and audio indexing

Wordspotting Wordspotting is the ability to locate a keyword or phrase in the context of fluent speech.The location of the keyword or phrase is identified, without the need to recognize the nonkeyword speech.Thus wordspotting differs from isolated word recognition [2], in which words to be recognized must be spoken in isolation, and continuous speechrecognition [1], in which eachword in the continuous stream must be recognized. Wordspotting is useful in tasks such as editing of voice audio and indexing into stored audio files. In voice editing, wordspotting is used to automatically find the boundaries of keywords or phrases for substitutions, deletions or insertions. This is in contrast to more traditional audio editors [3,4], in which boundaries for editing must be set manually, typically by trial and error using a visual display of the speech signal coupled with audio playback. Wordspotting also provides indexing by keywords into long audio files, thus allowing retrieval of specific information without the need to listen to the entire recording.

Supporting dynamic downloadable appearances in an extensible user interface toolkit

Most consumer products, from automobiles t,o breakfast cereals, pay significant attention to the visual appearance they present to the consumer. Designers of these .products normally create custom appearances that reflect things such as the functionality or purpose of the product, the market they are trying to reach, and the image, that the company creating the product is trying to create. As graphical user interfaces begin to fully penetrate the consumer market, we expect that similar customization of appearance will and should become part of every day practice in user interface design as well. This paper describes new user interface toolkit techniques designed to support dynamic, even downloadable, appearance* changes for graphical user interfaces. The long teF.goal of this work is to create a system of styles which is analogous to current systems of fonts. That is, to provide a system for applying a style of visual appearance to an interface independent of the content of the interface, and for allowing such styles to be developed at least partially independent of specific user interface components; even in many cases supporting custom interactive components that did not exist when a style was created.