Paul J. Lyons

Use cases for abnormal behaviour detection in smart homes

While people have many ideas about how a smart home should react to particular behaviours from their inhabitant, there seems to have been relatively little attempt to organise this systematically. In this paper, we attempt to rectify this in consideration of context awareness and novelty detection for a smart home that monitors its inhabitant for illness and unexpected behaviour. We do this through the concept of the Use Case, which is used in software engineering to specify the behaviour of a system. We describe a set of scenarios and the possible outputs that the smart home could give and introduce the SHMUC Repository of Smart Home Use Cases. Based on this, we can consider how probabilistic and logic-based reasoning systems would produce different capabilities.

Exploring the responsibilities of single-inhabitant Smart Homes with Use Cases

This paper makes a number of contributions to the field of requirements analysis for Smart Homes. It introduces Use Cases as a tool for exploring the responsibilities of Smart Homes and it proposes a modification of the conventional Use Case structure to suit the particular requirements of Smart Homes. It presents a taxonomy of Smart-Home-related Use Cases with seven categories. It draws on those Use Cases as raw material for developing questions and conclusions about the design of Smart Homes for single elderly inhabitants, and it introduces the SHMUC repository, a web-based repository of Use Cases related to Smart Homes that anyone can exploit and to which anyone may contribute.

Tools for the selection of colour palettes

We survey tools for colour selection, reviewing their shortcomings and strengths, and suggest a way of integrating their best features into a single tool.

A visual environment for real-time image processing in hardware (VERTIPH)

Real-time video processing is an image-processing application that is ideally suited to implementation on FPGAs. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a number of existing languages and hardware compilers that have been developed for specifying image processing algorithms on FPGAs. We propose VERTIPH, a new multiple-view visual language that avoids the weaknesses we identify. A VERTIPH design incorporates three different views, each tailored to a different aspect of the image processing system under development; an overall architectural view, a computational view, and a resource and scheduling view.

The oval menu-evolution and evaluation of a widget

This paper describes the development and heuristic evaluation of the oval menu, a widget for use in applications for drawing networks and similar linked structures. It is a variety of pie menu, capable of being organised as a hierarchy and of having its contents updated dynamically. Thus it is suitable for environments where libraries of components are created and used. Care has been taken to optimise it for use as a direct manipulation tool. The oval menu has been implemented for use on PC and PC-compatible computers running Windows and Windows95. It is written in Microsoft Visual C++ and uses the Microsoft Foundation Classes. It is a DLL, and the component libraries it uses are also DLLs, so it is easily adaptable for use by other applications.

Nine Tools for Generating Harmonious Colour Schemes

We survey a number of tools that have been developed for generating sets of colours according to commonly accepted rules for colour harmony. Informal manual techniques for generating harmonious sets of colours have been known and used for at least a century. Although superficially simple, they have not been precise techniques, as pigment-based and dye-based colouring techniques are not susceptible to accurate measurement, in terms of area of colour used or mathematical relationships between colours, and mathematical analysis does not appeal strongly to the design community. Now the historical separation between engineering and design has narrowed. First, the development of colour television brought numerical precision into colour specification. Secondly, in computers, the medium for colour representation and the tool for calculating colour parameters have been integrated. Consequently, it has also become feasible to derive sets of harmonious colours automatically.

User evaluation and overview of a visual language for real time image processing on FPGAs

FPGAs are often used for image processing, but existing FPGA design tools lack syntactic constructs for some specialized activities that are important in this field, such as timing, resource handling and scheduling. This forces the developer to work at too low a level and makes it difficult to produce a genuinely hierarchically decomposed design. This paper outlines these deficiencies, as the background for an overview of and justification for each of three views in VERTIPH, a visual programming language for defining image processing algorithms on FPGAs. This updates the overview presented in [1]. The paper then presents the results of two user evaluations of VERTIPH, a pre-implementation paper-based user evaluation which found no major changes were required and a post-(partial)-implementation user evaluation. The latter evaluated the novel parts of the language using participants experienced in the field. The key parts of VERTIPH were found to be useful visualisations for the developers, and the only major problem was the interaction required for defining type-connections between views.

Approximate Graphical Methods for Inverse Regression

Graphical procedures can be useful for illustrating and evaluating the process of inverse regression. We first review some simple and well-known graphical approaches for univariate linear and nonlinear models. We then propose a new graphical tool applicable to situations where the response is bivariate and repeated measures data are available. The proposed method is illustrated with an example of the age determination of tern chicks using measurements on body weight and wing length.

Incorporating groups into a mathematical model of color harmony for generating color schemes for computer interfaces

We describe an approach to developing a mathematical model of color harmony. This will be applied in the color harmonizer, an automated tool for coloring computer interfaces and Web sites. The tool will incorporate a color harmony engine that can incorporate a variety of theories for color harmony, and in the first instance, will use the rules proposed by Munsell and adapted to use in computer displays. We describe abstract and concrete color schemes, the Chromotome (a tool developed to facilitate the selection of colors) and techniques for grouping interface elements.

Towards a visual notation for pipelining in a visual programming language for programming FPGAs

VERTIPH is a visual language designed to aid in the development of image processing algorithms on FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). We justify the use of a visual language for this purpose, and describe the key parts of VERTIPH. One aspect of importance is how to clearly and efficiently represent a pipeline of processors, and in particular distinguish a pipeline from the simpler serial or parallel structures. This paper develops a number of pipeline representations, discussing the rationale behind and limitations associated with each representation. The culmination of this development is the Sequential Pipeline with Detailed Bars, visually an efficient and unambiguous representation.