The Human in the Loop: User Participation in Self-Adaptive Software

Self-adaptive software provides a profound solution for adapting applications to changing contexts in dynamic and heterogeneous environments. Having emerged from Autonomic Computing, it incorporates fully autonomous decision making based on predefined structural and behavioural models. The most common approach for architectural runtime adaptation is the MAPE-K adaptation loop implementing an external adaptation manager without manual user control. However, it has turned out that adaptation behaviour lacks acceptance if it does not correspond to a user’s expectations – particularly for Ubiquitous Computing scenarios with user interaction. Adaptations can be irritating and distracting if they are not appropriate for a certain situation. In general, uncertainty during development and at run-time causes problems with users being outside the adaptation loop. In a literature study, we analyse publications about self-adaptive software research. The results show a discrepancy between the motivated application domains, the maturity of examples, and the quality of evaluations on the one hand and the provided solutions on the other hand. Only few publications analysed the impact of their work on the user, but many employ user-oriented examples for motivation and demonstration. To incorporate the user within the adaptation loop and to deal with uncertainty, our proposed solutions enable user participation for interactive selfadaptive software while at the same time maintaining the benefits of intelligent autonomous behaviour. We define three dimensions of user participation, namely temporal, behavioural, and structural user participation. This dissertation contributes solutions for user participation in the temporal and behavioural dimension. The temporal dimension addresses the moment of adaptation which is classically determined by the self-adaptive system. We provide mechanisms allowing users to influence or to define the moment of adaptation. With our solution, users can have full control over the moment of adaptation or the self-adaptive software considers the user’s situation more appropriately. The behavioural dimension addresses the actual adaptation logic and the resulting run-time behaviour. Application behaviour is established during development and does not necessarily match the run-time expectations. Our contributions are three distinct solutions which allow users to make changes to the application’s runtime behaviour: dynamic utility functions, fuzzy-based reasoning, and learning-based reasoning. The foundation of our work is a notification and feedback solution that improves intelligibility and controllability of self-adaptive applications by implementing a bi-directional communication between self-adaptive software and the user. The different mechanisms from the temporal and behavioural participation dimension require the notification and feedback solution to inform users on adaptation actions and to provide a mechanism to influence adaptations. Case studies show the feasibility of the developed solutions. Moreover, an extensive user study with 62 participants was conducted to evaluate the impact of notifications before and after adaptations. Although the study revealed that there is no preference for a particular notification design, participants clearly appreciated intelligibility and controllability over autonomous adaptations.

Ka-Map: an interactive web-mapping application

ka-Map ("ka" as in ka-boom!) is an open source project that is aimed at providing a javascript API for developing highly interactive web-mapping interfaces using features available in modern web browsers. ka-Map currently has a number of interesting features. It sports the usual array of user interface elements such as: interactive, continuous panning without reloading the page; keyboard navigation options (zooming, panning); zooming to pre-set scales; interactive scalebar, legend and keymap support; optional layer control on client side; server side tile caching

Variables psicológicas en el control de interfaces cerebro-computadora.

Resumen tomado de la publicación

Adaption of Courses and Learning Environment to the User Context in dotLRN

The explosive growth of Internet during the last years has been reflected in the ever-increasing amount of the diversity and heterogeneity of user preferences, types and features of devices and access networks. Usually the heterogeneity in the context of the users which request Web contents is not taken into account by the servers that deliver them implying that these contents will not always suit their needs. In the particular case of e-learning platforms this issue is especially critical due to the fact that it puts at stake the knowledge acquired by their users. In the following paper we present a system that aims to provide the dotLRN e-learning platform with the capability to adapt to its users context. By integrating dotLRN with a multi-agent hypermedia system, online courses being undertaken by students as well as their learning environment are adapted in real time

TU Graz: Course: 707.000 Web Science and Web Technology: Lecture 11: User Intentions and Intentional Structures on the Web

Search engines - such as Google - have been characterized as "Databases of intentions". This class will focus on different aspects of intentionality on the web, including goal mining, goal modeling and goal-oriented search. Readings: M. Strohmaier, M. Lux, M. Granitzer, P. Scheir, S. Liaskos, E. Yu, How Do Users Express Goals on the Web? - An Exploration of Intentional Structures in Web Search, We Know'07 International Workshop on Collaborative Knowledge Management for Web Information Systems in conjunction with WISE'07, Nancy, France, 2007. [Web link] Readings: Automatic identification of user goals in web search, U. Lee and Z. Liu and J. Cho WWW '05: Proceedings of the 14th International World Wide Web Conference 391--400 (2005) [Web link]

A user receiving help at Hartley Library reception desk 3

An image of a user receiving help at Hartley Library reception desk, taken 2009.

A user receiving help at Hartley Library reception desk 2

An image of a user receiving help at Hartley Library reception desk, taken 2009

A user receiving help at the subject enquiry desk

An image of a user sitting down while receiving help at the subject enquiry desk, taken 2009

A user receiving help at the Hartley Library reception desk 1

An image of a user receiving help at the Hartley Library reception desk, taken 2009

Laser User Registration Form

Blank laser user registration form

Adobe Connect Quick User Guide for tutors

This brief guide (two sides of A4) is a reminder sheet for tutors and research staff who wish to hold meetings online using Adobe Connect

Adobe Connect Quick User Guide for Students

This one-side-of-A4 guide is a reminder of most of the things that students need to know to have meetings online.

Adobe Connect Quick User Guide to setting up your PC

This one-side-of-A4 guide discusses setting up your audio correctly and installing the Connect browser add-in.

Share Manager User Guide

This user guide outlines the functionality of the new Share Manager.

A User-Centric Approach to eCertificate for Electronic Identities (eIDs) Management in Mobile Environment

The use of electronic documents is constantly growing and the necessity to implement an ad-hoc eCertificate which manages access to private information is not only required but also necessary. This paper presents a protocol for the management of electronic identities (eIDs), meant as a substitute for the paper-based IDs, in a mobile environment with a user-centric approach. Mobile devices have been chosen because they provide mobility, personal use and high computational complexity. The inherent user-centricity also allows the user to personally manage the ID information and to display only what is required. The chosen path to develop the protocol is to migrate the existing eCert technologies implemented by the Learning Societies Laboratory in Southampton. By comparing this protocol with the analysis of the eID problem domain, a new solution has been derived which is compatible with both systems without loss of features.