Kishore Sundaram Swaminathan

Interaction design for large displays

W We think that large displays will become commonplace for home and office computers before the turn of the century. And interface design for large displays will require new ways of thinking about human-computer interaction. At Andersen Consultings Center for Strategic Technology Research, we recently built a demonstration prototype called Prairie that works with a display size of almost 6 feet by 3 feet and a resolution of 2400 by 1200 pixels (see Figure 1). In this paper, we use the Prairie system to illustrate many of the design issues that arise when designing for a large display.

In search of a new generation of knowledge management applications

Todays typical Knowledge Management systems are not much different from document management systems. In both cases, the retrieval process involves entering a set of keywords and then browsing through a list of documents related to those keywords found by the systems. If Knowledge Management is to live up to its promises, a new generation of Knowledge Management-enabled applications has to be developed. The information has to be presented beyond just a list of documents. Applying data mining techniques to these systems is one of the few promising avenues that may yield a new set of applications. This paper describes our on-going research effort to extract and mine information from one of the largest private Knowledge Management systems in the world.

Creating Web Services From GUI-Based Applications

Graphical user interface (GUI) applications (GAPs) are ubiquitous and provide various services. However, it is difficult to make GAPs exchange information (i.e., interoperate) especially if they are closed and monolithic. Unlike GAPs, Web services are applications that are designed to interoperate over the Internet. Thus a fundamental problem of interoperability is how to reengineer GAPs into Web services efficiently and noninvasively. We propose a novel generic approach for creating Web services from GAPs. This approach combines a nonstandard use of accessibility technologies for accessing and controlling GAPs in a uniform way with a visualization mechanism that enables nonprogrammers to create Web services by performing point-and-click, drag-and-drop operations on GAPs. We built a tool based on our approach and created Web services that control two closed and monolithic commercial GAPs with this tool. Our evaluation suggests that our approach is effective and it can be used to create Web services from nontrivial GAPs.

Prairie (video program) (abstract only): a conceptual framework for a virtual organization

Prairie is a simulation prototype or vision, demonstrating how individuals may work together in a virtual work enviroment designed for a whole enterprise. Prairie addresses various organizational and social issues exacerbated by distance and time. By using the concept of communities and by extending physical interaction cues to others across distance and time, we demonstrate possible solutions to these issues. In Prairie, people and information are organized into mission-based (organizational units), goal-based (project teams) and interest-based (special interest groups) hierarchies for ease of navigation. A worker may alternately navigate to communities by using personal links from their private virtual desktops. Each community has two areas. One area contains the information germane to a community, that is pushed or pulled depending on the nature of the information. Each community also has an area with a shared view where community members can meet or congregate. Presence in these community areas range from seeing thumbnail photos to holding a video-conference. The shared view facilitates ad hoc, informal interactions which are important for maintaining and building social networks and organizational culture. We believe the framework for Prairie is flexible, integrated, and scaleable so it can be adapted to model other organizations, communities, and processes.