ARISupport - Interaction support for augmented reality systems

The communication between user and software is a basic stage in any Interaction System project. In interactive systems, this communication is established by the means of a graphical interface, whose objective is to supply a visual representation of the main entities and functions present in the Virtual Environment. New ways of interacting in computational systems have been minimizing the gap in the relationship between man and computer, and therefore enhancing its usability. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to present a proposal for a non-conventional user interface library called ARISupport, which supplies ARToolKit applications developers with an opportunity to create simple GUI interfaces, and provides some of the functionality used in Augmented Reality systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.

Desarrollo de herramientas para la autoevaluación del Laboratorio de Procesado Digital de la Señal

Este proyecto tiene como objetivo el desarrollo de una herramienta que permita al alumno la autocorrección de prácticas de la asignatura de Procesado Digital de la Señal. La herramienta será diseñada por medio del GUI de Matlab, que permite la creación de interfaces gráficos de usuario para la interacción con el alumno, así él mismo podrá comprobar si los resultado obtenidos para el enunciado de la práctica facilitado son correctos. La evaluación del alumno se llevará a cabo pidiendo distintas respuestas sobre las prácticas y comparándolas posteriormente con los resultados correctos. El código invisible al usuario será el encargado de indicar si el resultado es correcto o no lo es. ABSTRACT. The aim of this project is to develop a tool for the students of Digital Signal Processing that help them self-correct their lab exercises. The tool will be designed using the Matlab GUI, which allows the creation of graphical user interfaces to interact with the student, who can check whether the results obtained are correct or not. The student will be asked about different results of the exercises and the answers will be compared with the correct results. A part of the tool hidden to the student will reveal to the lecturer the outcome of this comparison.

Construção tridimensional de atlas dos núcleos anteriores do tálamo a partir de cortes de um bloco de encéfalo

Tese de mestrado integrado em Engenharia Biomédica e Biofísica, apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa, através da Faculdade de Ciências, 2016

Information integration in molecular bioscience

Integrating information in the molecular biosciences involves more than the cross-referencing of sequences or structures. Experimental protocols, results of computational analyses, annotations and links to relevant literature form integral parts of this information, and impart meaning to sequence or structure. In this review, we examine some existing approaches to integrating information in the molecular biosciences. We consider not only technical issues concerning the integration of heterogeneous data sources and the corresponding semantic implications, but also the integration of analytical results. Within the broad range of strategies for integration of data and information, we distinguish between platforms and developments. We discuss two current platforms and six current developments, and identify what we believe to be their strengths and limitations. We identify key unsolved problems in integrating information in the molecular biosciences, and discuss possible strategies for addressing them including semantic integration using ontologies, XML as a data model, and graphical user interfaces as integrative environments.

Extending Science Gateway Frameworks to Support Big Data Applications in the Cloud

Cloud computing offers massive scalability and elasticity required by many scien-tific and commercial applications. Combining the computational and data handling capabilities of clouds with parallel processing also has the potential to tackle Big Data problems efficiently. Science gateway frameworks and workflow systems enable application developers to implement complex applications and make these available for end-users via simple graphical user interfaces. The integration of such frameworks with Big Data processing tools on the cloud opens new oppor-tunities for application developers. This paper investigates how workflow sys-tems and science gateways can be extended with Big Data processing capabilities. A generic approach based on infrastructure aware workflows is suggested and a proof of concept is implemented based on the WS-PGRADE/gUSE science gateway framework and its integration with the Hadoop parallel data processing solution based on the MapReduce paradigm in the cloud. The provided analysis demonstrates that the methods described to integrate Big Data processing with workflows and science gateways work well in different cloud infrastructures and application scenarios, and can be used to create massively parallel applications for scientific analysis of Big Data.

A Binary Classifier for Test Case Feasibility Applied to Automatically Generated Tests of Event-Driven Software

Modern software application testing, such as the testing of software driven by graphical user interfaces (GUIs) or leveraging event-driven architectures in general, requires paying careful attention to context. Model-based testing (MBT) approaches first acquire a model of an application, then use the model to construct test cases covering relevant contexts. A major shortcoming of state-of-the-art automated model-based testing is that many test cases proposed by the model are not actually executable. These \textit{infeasible} test cases threaten the integrity of the entire model-based suite, and any coverage of contexts the suite aims to provide. In this research, I develop and evaluate a novel approach for classifying the feasibility of test cases. I identify a set of pertinent features for the classifier, and develop novel methods for extracting these features from the outputs of MBT tools. I use a supervised logistic regression approach to obtain a model of test case feasibility from a randomly selected training suite of test cases. I evaluate this approach with a set of experiments. The outcomes of this investigation are as follows: I confirm that infeasibility is prevalent in MBT, even for test suites designed to cover a relatively small number of unique contexts. I confirm that the frequency of infeasibility varies widely across applications. I develop and train a binary classifier for feasibility with average overall error, false positive, and false negative rates under 5\%. I find that unique event IDs are key features of the feasibility classifier, while model-specific event types are not. I construct three types of features from the event IDs associated with test cases, and evaluate the relative effectiveness of each within the classifier. To support this study, I also develop a number of tools and infrastructure components for scalable execution of automated jobs, which use state-of-the-art container and continuous integration technologies to enable parallel test execution and the persistence of all experimental artifacts.

EasyInterface: a toolkit for the rapid development of GUIs for research prototype tools

During the lifetime of a research project, different partners develop several research prototype tools that share many common aspects. This is equally true for researchers as individuals and as groups: during a period of time they often develop several related tools to pursue a specific research line. Making research prototype tools easily accessible to the community is of utmost importance to promote the corresponding research, get feedback, and increase the tools’ lifetime beyond the duration of a specific project. One way to achieve this is to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that facilitate trying tools; in particular, with web-interfaces one avoids the overhead of downloading and installing the tools. Building GUIs from scratch is a tedious task, in particular for web-interfaces, and thus it typically gets low priority when developing a research prototype. Often we opt for copying the GUI of one tool and modifying it to fit the needs of a new related tool. Apart from code duplication, these tools will “live” separately, even though we might benefit from having them all in a common environment since they are related. This work aims at simplifying the process of building GUIs for research prototypes tools. In particular, we present EasyInterface, a toolkit that is based on novel methodology that provides an easy way to make research prototype tools available via common different environments such as a web-interface, within Eclipse, etc. It includes a novel text-based output language that allows to present results graphically without requiring any knowledge in GUI/Web programming. For example, an output of a tool could be (a structured version of) “highlight line number 10 of file ex.c” and “when the user clicks on line 10, open a dialog box with the text ...”. The environment will interpret this output and converts it to corresponding visual e_ects. The advantage of using this approach is that it will be interpreted equally by all environments of EasyInterface, e.g., the web-interface, the Eclipse plugin, etc. EasyInterface has been developed in the context of the Envisage [5] project, and has been evaluated on tools developed in this project, which include static analyzers, test-case generators, compilers, simulators, etc. EasyInterface is open source and available at GitHub2.

The DIADEM Software Development Methodology extended to Multimedia Interfaces

DIADEM, created by THOMSON-CSF, is a methodology for specifying and developing user interfaces. It improves productivity of the interface development process as well as quality of the interface. The method provides support to user interface development in three aspects. (1) DIADEM defines roles of people involved and their tasks and organises the sequence of activities. (2) It provides graphical formalisms supporting information exchange between people. (3) It offers a basic set of rules for optimum human-machine interfaces. The use of DIADEM in three areas (process control, sales support, and multimedia presentation) was observed and evaluated by our laboratory in the European project DIAMANTA (ESPRIT P20507). The method provides an open procedure that leaves room for adaptation to a specific application and environment. This paper gives an overview of DIADEM and shows how to extend formalisms for developing multimedia interfaces.

Gravity well visibility in haptic interfaces for motion-impaired

Haptic computer interfaces provide users with feedback through the sense of touch, thereby allowing users to feel a graphical user interface. Force feedback gravity wells, i.e. attractive basins that can pull the cursor toward a target, are one type of haptic effect that have been shown to provide improvements in "point and click" tasks. For motion-impaired users, gravity wells could improve times by as much as 50%. It has been reported that the presentation of information to multiple sensory modalities, e.g. haptics and vision, can provide performance benefits. However, previous studies investigating the use of force feedback gravity wells have generally not provided visual representations of the haptic effect. Where force fields extend beyond clickable targets, the addition of visual cues may affect performance. This paper investigates how the performance of motion-impaired computer users is affected by having visual representations of force feedback gravity wells presented on-screen. Results indicate that the visual representation does not affect times and errors in a "point and click" task involving multiple targets.

Interfaces culturais de Mallarmé à World Wide Web

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Accessing networked services : a user interface design problem

This research investigates the general user interface problems in using networked services. Some of the problems are: users have to recall machine names and procedures to. invoke networked services; interactions with some of the services are by means of menu-based interfaces which are quite cumbersome to use; inconsistencies exist between the interfaces for different services because they were developed independently. These problems have to be removed so that users can use the services effectively. A prototype system has been developed to help users interact with networked services. This consists of software which gives the user an easy and consistent interface with the various services. The prototype is based on a graphical user interface and it includes the following appJications: Bath Information & Data Services; electronic mail; file editor. The prototype incorporates an online help facility to assist users using the system. The prototype can be divided into two parts: the user interface part that manages interactlon with the user; the communicatIon part that enables the communication with networked services to take place. The implementation is carried out using an object-oriented approach where both the user interface part and communication part are objects. The essential characteristics of object-orientation, - abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism - can all contribute to the better design and implementation of the prototype. The Smalltalk Model-View-Controller (MVC) methodology has been the framework for the construction of the prototype user interface. The purpose of the development was to study the effectiveness of users interaction to networked services. Having completed the prototype, tests users were requested to use the system to evaluate its effectiveness. The evaluation of the prototype is based on observation, i.e. observing the way users use the system and the opinion rating given by the users. Recommendations to improve further the prototype are given based on the results of the evaluation. based on the results of the evah:1ation. . .'. " "', ':::' ,n,<~;'.'

Towards a Catalog of Usability Smells

This paper presents a catalog of smells in the context of interactive applications. These so-called usability smells are indicators of poor design on an application’s user interface, with the potential to hinder not only its usability but also its maintenance and evolution. To eliminate such usability smells we discuss a set of program/usability refactorings. In order to validate the presented usability smells catalog, and the associated refactorings, we present a preliminary empirical study with software developers in the context of a real open source hospital management application. Moreover, a tool that computes graphical user interface behavior models, giving the applications’ source code, is used to automatically detect usability smells at the model level.

User-interface technologies for the industrial environment: towards the cyber-factory

In the past few years the so-called gadgets like cellular phones, personal data assistants and digital cameras are more widespread even with less technological aware users. However, for several reasons, the factory-floor itself seems to be hermetic to this changes ... After the fieldbus revolution, the factory-floor has seen an increased use of more and more powerful programmable logic controllers and user interfaces but the way they are used remains almost the same. We believe that new user-computer interaction techniques including multimedia and augmented rcaliry combined with now affordable technologies like wearable computers and wireless networks can change the way the factory personal works together with the roachines and the information system on the factory-floor. This new age is already starting with innovative uses of communication networks on the factory-floor either using "standard" networks or enhancing industrial networks with multimedia and wireless capabilities.

User friendly knowledge acquisition system for medical devices actuation

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Biomédica

Mobile persuasive interfaces for public ambient displays

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática