phil@eecs.nwu.edu (William LeFebvre) (11/17/90)
This is another note that our executive director has asked me to repost.
If this is a duplicate, I apologize.
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Thanks to the assistance of Lin Brown and Emil Sarpa of Sun Microsystems, we
have been able to arrange for a special added attraction at the Sun User Group
Conference and Exhibit, San Jose, CA, December 2-5.
The Sun User Group Presents:
USER INTERFACE STRATEGIES '91
A Live Satellite Video Conference
Date: December 5, 1990
Time: 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Pacific
Location: Regency I Ballroom
Fairmont Hotel - San Jose,CA
[This broadcast coincides with the Sun User Group
Conference and Exhibit (December 3-5)]
Cost: Free admission to all conference registrants.
A full set of course materials will be available
for $30/set plus postage and handling.
Produced by the University of Maryland at College Park.
Overview: Four leaders in the field offer their perspectives on why the
user interface is a central focus for expanding applications of computers
in business, education, the home, etc. They offer their visions and
suggest exciting opportunities for the next decade's developments.
Demonstrations, new software tools, guiding principles, emerging theories,
and future scenarios will be presented.
Audience: User interface designers, programmers, software engineers,
interface evaluators, managers in the computing and communications fields,
technical writers, human factors specialists, trainers, marketing personnel.
Organized by Ben Shneiderman
Speakers:
Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland
User Interface Update
Andries van Dam, Brown University
Electronic Books: User Controlled Animation in a Hypermedia Framework
Elliot Soloway, University of Michigan
Interactive Learning Environments
Bill Curtis, MCC Human Interface Laboratory
Advanced User Interface Architectures and Software Tools
Lecture 1: 8:00-9:00 am PST (11:00am - Noon EST)
**********
User Interface Update
Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland
Rapid progress by researchers and developers during the past year
has opened up new opportunities:
1) Public Access via Touchscreen and Multi-media are substantially
improved - information kiosks, videodisk and home control panels,
database query, touchscreen keyboards, music and art instruments
2) Computer Supported Cooperative Work and the emergence of
groupware is supported by applications for education and business,
tour our new Teaching Theater by videotape
3) Home control systems become more attractive - Security,
entertainment, and comfort control, periodic scheduling for home
devices, taming your VCR, access to information resources and hypermedia.
Ben Shneiderman is Head of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory,
Professor of Computer Science, and Member of the Institute Advanced Computer
Studies all at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the
co-author of the recently published hyperbook/disk Hypertext Hands-On!, and
author of Designing the User Interface and Software Psychology. Dr.
Shneiderman is editor of the Ablex Publishers series on Human-Computer
Interaction, on the editorial board of 6 journals, the author of 125
technical papers, and the creator of the Hyperties hypertext system. He is
an international lecturer and consultant for many organizations including
Apple, AT&T, IBM, Library of Congress, NASA, and NCR.
Lecture 2: 9:30 am -10:25 am PST)
**********
Electronic books:
User-controlled animation in a hypermedia framework
Andries van Dam, Brown University
Electronic books have the potential of preserving the attractive properties
of paper books while ameliorating their shortcomings. A model for such
books, and indeed of a digital library, that is becoming increasingly
popular is that of a hypermedia database: a directed-graph-structured
collection with media such as text, dynamic graphics, video and audio at the
nodes. An essential ingredient is user control of the presentation's
content and format.
An important example of such interactivity is user-controlled, real-time 3D
(and 4D) animation derived from stored models of physical and abstract
objects and phenomena. Hypermedia electronic books will be used for such
applications as teaching and learning, research, technical documentation and
even electronic shopping. Brown University's Intermedia system and the
Animation Generation system will be shown.
Andries van Dam is a professor of Computer Science at Brown University and was
the department's first Chairman. He has been working for over 20 years on the
design of ``electronic books,'' based on high-resolution graphics displays, for
use in teaching and research. van Dam received his Ph.D. from the University
of Pennsylvania in 1966. A member of IEEE Computer Society, and ACM, he
helped to found and was an editor of Computer Graphics and Image Processing
and was an editor of ACM's Transactions on Graphics. In 1967, Professor van
Dam co-founded ACM's SIGGRAPH. He is the coauthor of the popular book
Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics, and its greatly expanded
successor, Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, published in June
1990. van Dam has received the IEEE Centennial Medal, State of Rhode Island
Governor's Science and Technology Award, and National Computer Graphics
Association's Academic Award. He is past Chairman of the Computer Research
Board, and Senior Consulting Scientist at Bloc Development and
ComputerVision.
Lecture 3: 10:35-11:30 am PST
**********
Interactive Learning Environments
Elliot Soloway, University of Michigan
The computer has long held great promise for education and training:
individualized instruction, mimicking that of a personal mentor, has been
the Holy Grail. However, years of experience with various approaches to
education and training (e. g., computer-assisted instruction (CAI),
intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), interactive video (IV)) has shown that
while there are clear strengths of each approach, there is no one approach
that is a cheap and easy path to the Holy Grail.
This talk surveys the major computer-based approaches to learning and
training. Demonstrations will illustrate the situations where each approach
provides advantages and provide design rules that can be applied in other
projects. Evidence is offered to show that CAI approaches can reduce time
to learn significantly (approximately 30%), while facilitating modest
improvement in performance (an increase of 10%). In contrast, the ITS model
can facilitate a much higher performance improvement (one standard
deviation), but at a higher cost (e. g., more computing resources or narrow
topic area). The next generation of interactive learning environments, e.
g. environments that support more active construction on the part of the
learner, and not just information delivery, have the potential for still
greater benefits.
Elliot Soloway is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He directs
the "Highly-interactive computing environments" project in the Artificial
Intelligence Lab. He and his group are exploring the roles that
multimedia-based, computer-aided design environments will play in
restructuring learning and training. He is the editor of the new journal,
Interactive Learning Environments (Ablex Press, Inc.), serves on the
Editorial Board of Human Computer Interaction, Journal of Educational
Computing Research, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, and has
authored over 100 papers. Soloway has consulted for IBM, Digital Equipment
Corp., Apple Computer, Arthur Anderson & Company, Educational Testing
Service, and NASA.
Lecture 4: Noon - 12:55 pm PST
**********
Advanced User Interface Architectures and Software Tools
Bill Curtis, MCC Human Interface Laboratory
The next generation of user interfaces will require computers to resolve
ambiguous inputs that may arrive simultaneously from modalities such as
voice, gesture, handwriting, etc. MCC's Human Interface Laboratory is
integrating the knowledge-based and media-based capabilities needed for
supporting these multi-modal interfaces. After discussing the capabilities
of current generation interface toolkits such as NeXTStep, MacApp, and OSF
Motif, this talk will discuss the technology developed and lessons
learned in our research on building such interface capabilities.
At the core of our multidisciplinary research is a blackboard system
tailored for user interface requirements. It provides a powerful runtime
architecture for integrating interface modalities and interpreting ambiguous
inputs. For instance, in building paper-and-pencil-like interfaces we are
integrating neural net and parsing capabilities for recognizing sketched
input that can range from characters, to equations, to diagrammatic
languages. The ability to integrate knowledge-based and media- based
capabilities will become more important as applications grow more data
intensive and place a greater premium on searching large information spaces,
creating interactive graphic representations of the data or objects, and
in providing tutorial assistance on-line (self-training interfaces).
Dr. Curtis is Director of MCC's Human Interface Laboratory pursuing
research on a new generation of user interface technology. Previously he
was a Director in MCC's Software Technology Program, which is developing a
new generation of technology for supporting the design of large systems.
Prior to joining MCC, Dr. Curtis was the Manager of Programming Trends
Analysis at ITT's Programming Technology Center; Manager of Software
Management Research in the Space Division of General Electric, and Research
Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. He has published over
80 articles on software engineering, human-computer interaction, and the
management of large systems development, and has edited two books: Human
Factors in Software Development (an IEEE tutorial) and Human Factors in
Computing Systems (CHI 1985 Proceedings). He is on the editorial boards of
the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction,
the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, and the Journal of Systems
and Software.
Discussion: 1:05pm - 2:00pm PST
Presenters will accept phoned-in questions from the live satellite audience.