Noi Sukaviriya

Steerable interfaces for pervasive computing spaces

This paper introduces a new class of interactive interfaces that can be moved around to appear on ordinary objects and surfaces anywhere in a space. By dynamically adapting the form, function, and location of an interface to suit the context of the user, such steerable interfaces have the potential to offer radically new and powerful styles of interaction in intelligent pervasive computing spaces. We propose defining characteristics of steerable interfaces and present the first steerable interface system that combines projection, gesture recognition, user tracking, environment modeling and geometric reasoning components within a system architecture. Our work suggests that there is great promise and rich potential for further research on steerable interfaces.

User-centered design and business process modeling: cross road in rapid prototyping tools

Fast production of a solution is a necessity in the world of competitive IT consulting business today. In engagements where early user interface design mock-ups are needed to visualize proposed business processes, the need to quickly create UI becomes prominent very early in the process. Our work aims to speed up the UI design process, enabling rapid creation of low-fidelity UI design with traditional user-centered design thinking but different tooling concepts. This paper explains the approach and the rationale behind our model and tools. One key focal point is in leveraging business process models as a starting point of the UI design process. The other focal point is on using a model-driven approach with designer-centered tools to eliminate some design overheads, to help manage a large design space, and to cope with changes in requirements. We used examples from a real business engagement to derive and strengthen this work.

Augmenting a retail environment using steerable interactive displays

This paper describes a prototype retail environment in which information interactions occur in situ, within the actual space of the merchandise. By combining a steerable projected display and recognition of user gestures and actions, and user position tracking through peripheral cameras, we have developed several innovative interaction techniques designed to augment the reality of a retail store.

Model-driven approach for managing human interface design life cycle

Designing a large application user interface is an iterative process. Commonly used tools lack models to support this iterative process. Research on model-driven UI design has over the years focused on modeling UI at a higher level of abstraction but lacked support during in the iteration process. This paper briefly presents the context of our research - transforming a business model into a base UI model for further customization. Specifically, we present a feature that helps reflect changes from the business model in the user interface design tool. We designed it so that the human designers can choose to react to these changes as they see appropriate. The technique is one of our attempts to apply the model-drive approach to better support design iteration through requirement changes.

An Architecture and Framework for Steerable Interface Systems

Steerable Interfaces are emerging as a new paradigm used in realizing the vision of embodied interaction in ubiquitous computing environments. Such interfaces steer relevant input and output capabilities around space, to serve the user when and where they are needed. We present an architecture and a pr o- gramming framework that enable the development of Steerable Interface appli- cations. The distributed multi-layer architecture provides applications with ab- stractions to services of several novel components - for instance, steerable pro- jection, steerable visual interaction detection, and geometric reasoning. The programming framework facilitates integration of the various services while hiding the complexity of sequencing and synchronizing the underlying compo- nents.

Using User Interface Design to Enhance Service Identification

User interface (UI) design is an integral part of the software design process. The UI design not only outlines the look and feel of the system, but also helps in flushing out the requirements - by identifying what data is visible to and processed by different users. However, in any SOA methodology, UI design is typically considered out of scope. In this paper, we highlight the importance of UI design specification in the SOA landscape, from a service- identification perspective. Service identification, which is a key activity in any SOA-based development, involves specification of business requirements as a set of granular service definitions. We propose an approach for harvesting the UI design specification to define service requirements for the intended system; more specifically in terms of information and business service requirements. Our approach consists of the following steps: (1) capture user interface design in a format amenable to automated analysis, with appropriate references to data and process models, (2) identify requirements for information services from data that is displayed in the user interface, and (3) identify business service requirements from the UI navigation flow and the links between the UI and the business process model. To illustrate our approach, we present a case study using the Amazon associate Web services. The study demonstrates how the use of UI designs can lead to better service identification. The proposed approach can complement any existing SOA methodology that follows a top-down approach to identify services.

Augmented collaborative spaces

As collaborative environments evolve beyond the desktop, we see the emergence of a new class of augmented collaborative spaces that employ various devices and technologies to merge electronic information with physical space to support collaboration, both local and remote. To be effective, such spaces should give people the flexibility to combine their individual resources with the resources available in the space, while presenting appropriate information, taking into account the larger process within which a collaborative activity takes place. This demands richer ways of capturing content and actions, new ways of presenting multimodal information, and developing an architecture and infrastructure that unifies individuals, spaces, and processes to facilitate collaboration. Our work in steerable interfaces represents a first step in this direction.

Incident Ticket Analytics for IT Application Management Services

An important IT service outsourcing business is to resolve incidents related to IT infrastructures our clients contract our company to support. Incidents are recorded as structured and unstructured data in tickets, which contain various characteristics about the incidents including timestamps, description and resolution Analyzing such incident tickets becomes a critical task in managing the operations of the service in order to keep the operations within the agreed upon service level agreement. Ticket analytics is essential to identify anomalies and trends, as well as detect unusual patterns in the operations; such analysis is hard to do manually especially for large accounts with complex organization and scopes. This paper focuses on ticket analytics and some key statistical techniques applied in the analyses. Finally, we use real-data examples to demonstrate these techniques and discuss major challenges of ticket analyses.

Reflection of a Year Long Model-Driven Business and UI Modeling Development Project

Model-driven software development enables users to specify an application at a high level --- a level that better matches problem domain. It also promises the users with better analysis and automation. Our work embarks on two collaborating domains --- business process and human interactions --- to build an application. Business modeling expresses business operations and flows then creates business flow implementation. Human interaction modeling expresses a UI design, its relationship with business data, logic, and flow, and can generate working UI. This double modeling approach automates the production of a working system with UI and business logic connected. This paper discusses the human aspects of this modeling approach after a year long of building a procurement outsourcing contract application using the approach --- the result of which was deployed in December 2008. The paper discusses in multiple areas the happy endings and some heartache. We end with insights on how a model-driven approach could do better for humans in the process.

A portable system for anywhere interactions

Interactions have taken off from the confinement of a single screen into various personal devices. Projected an interface onto different parts of a physical environment is an escape beyond traditional display devices. Imagine that any walls or floors can turn into a direct manipulation space without a lot of effort. This demonstration of ED-lite, a combination of a laptop, custom software, off-the-shelf digital camera and projector, shows projected interfaces with interactions on any surfaces including those not necessarily perpendicular to the projector. ED-lite is a derivation of our previous work on Everywhere Displays (ED) and steerable interfaces. This portable version has an automatic calibration feature that makes applications usable on any surfaces in a drop. More importantly, it is now possible to be taken on the road for demonstrations.