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.