mwang@watmath.UUCP (mwang) (04/01/85)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO SEMINAR ACTIVITIES COMPUTER GRAPHICS SEMINAR - Thursday, April 11, 1985. Prof. A. Shaw of the University of Washington will speak on ``Specification and Generation of User Inter- faces''. TIME: 3:30 PM ROOM: MC 5158 ABSTRACT Some of the most interesting features of current and predicted human-machine interfaces include the widespread use of high precision raster graphics, increased concurrency, interleaving of command languages for each of the objects that are simultane- ously active, and interacting through familiar working paradigms, such as desktop models and templates. Our research efforts, which emphasize these features, have three related goals. The first is to produce a satis- factory model and definition of the constituents of interfaces that is both independent of applications programs and also independent of particular input- output device drivers. The second part of our work is to design formal specification methods for interface objects and their ``command'' languages. Lastly, our aim is to develop techniques for the automatic genera- tion of user interfaces, especially fast prototyping using our specification methods. The talk will concentrate on some of our recent work on specifications, which has language and object defini- tion components. Our methods are based first on the use of flow expressions (a universal notation which extends regular expressions with operators for denoting and controlling interleaving) for describing languages at both the human and applications program interfaces. Second, we use axiomatic algebraic descriptions for defining the objects of the interface. A careful com- bination of the two provides a complete specification scheme for user interfaces.