Publications
Here is an overview of my publications (chronologically per category). The author that presented the paper is indicated with *.
Conference papers
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Gummy for Multi-Platform User Interface Designs: Shape me, Multiply me, Fix me, Use meIn Proceedings of AVI 2008, the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, Napoli, Italy, May 28-30, 2008. [~27% acceptance; 117 submissions]AbstractDesigners still often create a specific user interface for every target platform they wish to support, which is time-consuming and error-prone. The need for a multi-platform user interface design approach that designers feel comfortable with increases as people expect their applications and data to go where they go. We present Gummy, a multi-platform graphical user interface builder that can generate an initial design for a new platform by adapting and combining features of existing user interfaces created for the same application. Our approach makes it easy to target new platforms and keep all user interfaces consistent without requiring designers to considerably change their work practice. -
Service-interaction Descriptions: Augmenting Services with User Interface ModelsTo appear in Proceedings of Engineering Interactive Systems 2007 IFIP WG2.7/13.4 10th Conference on Engineering Human-Computer Interaction, IFIP WG 13.2 1st Conference on Human-Centered Software Engineering and DSVIS - 14th Conference on Design Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems) , Salamanca, Spain, March 22-24, 2007. [~41% acceptance; 91 submissions]AbstractSemantic service descriptions have paved the way for flexible interaction with services in a mobile computing environment. Services can be automatically discovered, invoked and even composed. On the contrary, the user interfaces for interacting with these services are often still designed by hand. This approach poses a serious threat to the overall flexibility of the system. To make the user interface design process scale, it should be automated as much as possible. We propose to augment service descriptions with high-level user interface models to support automatic user interface adaptation. Our method builds upon OWL-S, an ontology for Semantic Web Services, by connecting a collection of OWL-S services to a hierarchical task structure and selected presentation information. This allows end-users to interact with services on a variety of platforms. -
A Generic Approach for Multi-Device User Interface Rendering with UIMLIn Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces V, Proceedings of CADUI 2006, Bucharest, Romania, June 5-8, 2006, pp. 175-182. Springer Netherlands, ISBN 978-1-4020-5819-6. [~40% acceptance; ~60 submissions]AbstractWe present a rendering engine for displaying graphical user interfaces on multiple devices. The renderer interprets a standardized XML-based user interface description language: the User Interface Markup Language (UIML). A generic architecture for the renderer is defined so that deployment of the engine on different devices implies only little effort. We show that our rendering engine can be used on iDTV set-top boxes, mobile phones, PDAs and desktop PCs, and smoothly integrates with both local and remote application logic. As a test bed for the UIML specification we also explore support for extensions to UIML that enable the user interface designer to maximize accessibility and target multiple devices and different types of users at once.
Short papers and posters
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Meta-GUI-Builders: Generating Domain-specific Interface Builders for Multi-Device User Interface CreationIn CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Florence, Italy, April 5-10, 2008, pp. 3189-3194. [~38% acceptance; 414 submissions]AbstractNowadays, there is a growing demand to design user interfaces that run on many devices. However, existing multi-device design approaches are not suitable for domain experts, whose input can be invaluable to come to a suitable user interface for a specific domain. Existing techniques often require the manipulation of high-level models and transformations which are difficult to interpret and predict by a domain expert without a technical background. We present Meta-GUI-Builders, a new generation of graphical user interface builder tools that allows domain experts to create multi-device GUI designs themselves. These tools automatically adapt their workspace to a specific domain by encapsulating domain-specific elements in the designer's tool palette. Engaging domain experts in a multi-device design approach is a first step towards creating aesthetic user interfaces that can be deployed on many devices, a combination that is hard to achieve with previous approaches.
Workshop papers
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Making Bits and Atoms Talk Today: A Practical Architecture for Smart Object InteractionIn Proceedings of DIPSO 2007, Ubicomp 2007 Workshop Proceedings, Innsbruck, Austria, September 16, 2007, pp. 331-336. ISBN 978-3-00-022599-4.AbstractBringing together the physical and digital worlds has been the subject of research for some time now. In particular, a number of successful prototypes that link physical objects with digital information (often called smart object systems) have already been presented. However, a generally accepted architecture to design such systems has not yet emerged. This paper presents a reusable and practical framework for developing smart object applications today. At the basis of our approach lies the use of Semantic Web technology to drive interaction between the physical and digital worlds. We used this framework to develop SemaNews, a novel application that combines the advantages of digital news feeds with those of physical newspapers. To verify the reusability of our architecture, we built a second prototype in a different application domain: STalkingObjects provides the basic components of a store of the future. -
Tangible Mashups: Exploiting Links between the Physical and Virtual WorldIn Proceedings of WoSSIoT'07, EuroSys 2007 workshop, Lisbon, Portugal, March 20, 2007, pp. 1-5.AbstractThe link between corresponding physical and virtual worlds has been the subject of research for many years now. The instantiation of this link was often a complex task that involved special purpose techniques to identify and search for the virtual information that belongs to a selected physical object. It is since the conception of physical tagging technologies such as RFID that physical objects can carry their own virtual information. In this paper we show a simple yet effective approach to extract the virtual information of physical objects and aggregate it in a sensible way for the user. We rely on Web 2.0 techniques to accomplish this. A useful side-effect of our approach is the fact that a set or mashup of physical objects leads to a mashup of their related information in the virtual world. -
Constraint Adaptability of Multi-Device User InterfacesIn Proceedings of MAFOC '06, CEUR-WS Vol-198, CHI'2006 workshop, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, April 22-23, 2006.AbstractMethods to support the creation of multi-device user interfaces typically use some type of abstraction of the user interface design. To retrieve the final user interface from the abstraction a transformation will be applied that specializes the abstraction for a particular target platform. The User Interface Markup Language (UIML) offers a way to create multi-device user interface descriptions while maintaining the consistency of certain aspects of a user interface across platforms. We extended the UIML language with support for layout constraints. Designers can create layout templates based on constraints that limit the ways a user interface can rearrange across platforms. This results in a higher degree of consistency and reusability of interface designs. -
ImogI: Take Control over a Context-Aware Electronic Mobile Guide for MuseumsIn Proceedings of HCI in Mobile Guides, in conjunction with Mobile HCI 2004, September 13, 2004, Glasgow, Scotland.
AbstractCultural/Tourist mobile guides are becoming common aids to combine information transfer with a guidance service. Mobile guides for pedestrians provide their users with location-specific information, e.g. based on GPS coordinates. In certain situations the process of giving location-specific information is relatively static, such as in a city where the buildings and tourist sites are not likely to move over time. In a museum on the other hand, artifacts will move around the available area as exhibitions change. In this case information can not be related to a particular location but has to be related to the proximity of certain artifacts. Moreover, besides the proximity of physical objects there are also other parameters that constitute the context of use like the user profile, speed of the user, … In this paper, we propose ImogI, a mobile guide that incorporates context-sensitive user interfaces. We explain how the design of ImogI is inspired by ambient intelligent environments, and which parts of the system/tools have been realized up to now. ImogI explores the boundaries of context-driven adaptivity of the user interface, and therefore we conclude this paper with a description of the preliminary results of a formal user experiment.
Theses
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Study and implementation of widget set independent layout management for UIMLMaster's thesis, June 2005.
AbstractThe growing diversity of computing environments requires a new, more efficient methodology for developing user interfaces. With traditional techniques one develops a user interface per computing platform. There is a plethora of existing research available on the development of multi-device user interfaces. We can conclude that it is mostly clear how to deduce a set of generic widgets. It is however difficult to generalize the different layout mechanisms widget sets use.
We present a generic, constraint-based layout mechanism. It relies only on the least common denominator of layout management: absolute positioning. A constraint solver is used to find values for the position and size of each widget, while adhering to the imposed constraints. These positions and sizes are then set using absolute positioning.
Automated layout management, although greatly improving on speed compared to designing a layout by hand, is not guaranteed to produce satisfying results. Human interference is usually still needed. There are many recurring tasks in user interfaces (e.g. providing a username and password). For each task, a suitable layout must be determined. Our method supports layout patterns which enable the designer to reuse existing layouts which have proven to be usable and aesthetically pleasing.
Our method will be based on the UIML language. While UIML succesfully achieves abstraction in many ways, there is no generic way to specify the layout. This makes it more difficult to use a single UIML document for several widget sets, since each widget set requires its own specific layout description. We do not seek to complement the UIML specification with a generic, multi-modal layout mechanism though: it is limited to 2D graphical user interfaces.
For the practical part of this thesis, we integrated the layout specification in Uiml.net, an open source renderer for UIML. We also developed Cassowary.net, a port of the Cassowary constraint solving toolkit to the .NET platform, which is used to solve the layout constraints.
