Ignacio Aedo Cuevas

Hci for emergencies

Emergencies put people in a particular state of mind and often also in difficult physical situations. When de-signing information technology for emergencies, these two sides have to be taken into account in the various activities supporting design. This includes studying and understanding the users and the influential factors for good designs, engaging the users in the design process as well as evaluating designs in realistic ways. There are challenges specific to emergencies in all of these activities, as well as in new technologies ranging from wearable computing to distributed information systems. This workshop is meant as an opportunity for interdis-ciplinary discussion as well as practical hands-on ex-change of experiences regarding these challenges. The goal is to work towards a better understanding of the challenges, technologies, practices, and design meth-odologies relevant to HCI in emergencies.

Taxonomy for rich-user-interface components: towards a systematic development of RIAs

The development of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) is based on the selection, assembly, and tailoring of Rich-User-Interface (RUI) components. While the user interface design is usually guided by principles, guidelines, and heuristics, there are not mechanisms for systematically selecting RUI components. Moreover, there is a lack of homogeneous classification criteria that hinders the selection of components and increases the relevance of experience designing web applications. To ease the search and the choosing of components by web-developers, this paper presents a taxonomy for classifying RUI components. The development of such a taxonomy has been based on both the study of relevant resources from the UI domain and the opinions of experts.

Evaluation of an Agent-Mediated Collaborative Production Protocol in an Instructional Design Scenario

Distributed knowledge creation or production is a collaborative task that needs to be coordinated. A multiagent architecture for collaborative knowledge production tasks is introduced, where knowledge-producing agents are arranged into knowledge domains or marts, and a distributed interaction protocol is used to consolidate knowledge that is produced in a mart. Knowledge consolidated in a given mart can be in turn negotiated in higher-level foreign marts. As an evaluation scenario, the proposed architecture and protocol are applied to facilitate coordination during the creation of learning objects by a distributed group of instructional designers.