James R. Rhyne

Communication and information retrieval with a pen-based meeting support tool

We-Met (Window 13nvirontnent-Meeting Enhancement Tools) is a prototype pen-based tool designed to support both the communication and information retrieval needs of stnall group meetings. The first part of this paper describes We-Met and the rationale for its design, the second discusses findings from an empirical study of the use of We-Met for group communication, ami the third discusses findings from a study of the search and retrieval of information from non-computer based meetings conducted to provide insight into how to facilitate these activities in We-Met. ‘Ile paper identifies potential comtnunication process gains due to the pen-based interface style, opportunities for the facilitation of information retrieval in a pen-based tool, and functionality/interface challenges in the design of a tool to support small group mwt i rigs.

Tools for supporting the collaborative process

Collaborative software has been divided into two temporal categories: synchronous and asynchronous. We argue that this binary distinction is unnecessary and harmful, and present a model for collaboration processes (i.e. the temporal record of the actions of the group members) which includes both synchronous and asynchronous software as submodels. We outline an object–oriented toolkit which implements the model, and present an application of its use in a pen–based conferencing tool.

Dialogue management for gestural interfaces

Gestural interfaces are electronic analogues to pencil and paper. Since the effectiveness of such interfaces depends heavily on enduser familiarity with pencil markup of printed documents, the interface must conform to the users behaviour and not rely on educating the enduser. Spatial relationships among the gestural forms partially determine the syntactic interpretation of gestures, along with information about the context in the neighborhood of the gesture. Temporal grouping of gestural forms is more important than their temporal sequence. Such characteristics suggest a form of dialogue recognition in which rules do not specify temporal ordering of forms, and in which multiple parses are carried out in parallel.

Gesturing with shared drawing tools

This paper repofis on how people used a pen-based shared drawing application in support of their needs for gesturing in a collaborative drawing task.

Extensions to C for interface programming

Extending the facilities available to a programmer can be more productive, flexible, and appealing when done via additions to the syntax and semantics of the programming language, than when done by way of procedure packages. Database programming, for example, is now routinely done using query languages that are embedded in programming languages. Interaction dialog programming can be greatly simplified by use of a specification language. Dialog languages are not often integrated with a programming language. In this report, a set of extensions to the C language are presented. These extensions provide a rule-based sublanguage for describing interaction dialogs. A translator and interpreter have been constructed for the extended (C + Dialog) language, and used in a research project investigating gestural interfaces.

Issues limiting the acceptance of user interfaces using gesture input and handwriting character recognition (panel)

Recently there has been increasing attention to character recognition/graphical user interfaces under the name of “gesture input”. This technique actually has a long history: “sketch recognition” interfaces of 15 or more years ago were highly praised [Applicon 73], and user interfaces using handwriting input before the wide use of text keyboards were one of the first research goals in computer science [Bledsoe 59]. The underlying character and symbol recognition technologies have been a major research area in their own right since the early 1950s [Suen 80]. The last two years have seen an upsurge in the number of developments in this area, both from commercial companies attempting to exploit new character and symbol recognition technologies, [CIC 85] [Pencept 84] [Cooper 82] and from researchers starting from fundamental questions in user interactions [Buxton 86] [Wolf 86]. However, one question still remains: “Why has this set of techniques had so little impact on user interface design practice, despite its long history and promise?” This panel discussion should give many answers to this question. Panelists include the leading commercial developers of handwriting input products, well-known researchers in the psychological aspects of graphical user interactions, and representatives of the research community for character recognition. The issue of supporting this type of interface is very timely: recent standardization efforts such as PHIGS and GKS for graphics interactions are known to have the unfortunate side effects of excluding some of the current user interface designs using this class of technology [10].

A Taxonomic Approach to Understanding Direct Manipulation

This paper presents a taxonomy for user interface techniques which is useful in understanding direct manipulation interfaces. The taxonomy is based on the way actions and objects are specified in the interface. We suggest that direct manipulation is a characteristic shared by a number of different interface techniques, rather than a single interface style. A relatively new interface method, gesture, is also described in terms of the taxonomy and some observations are made on its potential.

Collaboration through shared event histories (abstract): a position paper

Maintenance of equivalent state among the replicas of a distributed CSCW application is seen as a difficult problem, requiring some degree of collaboration awareness in the application and perhap s in the system platform as well . In particular, Lauwers et al . note the difficulty of insuring that al l application replicas see the events in a semantically equivalent order . The result of solving this difficult problem is complicated code that is hard to make free of synchronization errors . In this positio n paper, we propose a slightly novel mechanism for maintenance of equivalent state, consisting of pro tocols for sharing of event histories, and for maintaining synchronized clocks . A history is a unique ordering of events which leads an application from a starting state to a final state . Additionally, w e argue that event histories are useful for other purposes, e .g. to permit reviews of the process of a meeting, to allow the group to change its mind without losing information previously generated, an d to serve as a base from which to construct multi—media, CSCW applications .

WeMet: progress report on a pen-based meeting support tool

WeMet (Window Environment Meeting Enhancement Tool), is a prototype pen-based meeting support tool which allows meeting participants in the same or different room to share a work-space for sketching and writing or for the presentation of images. In addition to facilitating real-time communication among participants. WeMet enables the review and selective retrieval of meeting information, during or after the meeting. This presentation describes the rationale for key functionality and interface decisions in the design of WeMet, and reports on the experiences of users with the prototype to date.