Over the years I have managed several research projects relating to advanced interfaces and have turned them into shipping products. Microsoft Comic Chat uses automatic illustration generation and the visual language of comics to present online conversations. Microsoft's Mobile Internet Toolkit renders web interfaces on a variety of mobile devices. Microsoft Surface is a multi-touch, object-sensing table-top display. More recently I have been advising start-ups in the mobile content/ubiquitous computing area. Juggling the competing interests of research and product development has been often interesting, sometimes painful, and always challenging. In my invited talk, I will discuss lessons learned while productizing interface technology, including selecting the product to ship, balancing research and product requirements, navigating management's whims of the day, setting goals, and evaluating the results, as well as what has worked and what has not, and why certain efforts have been more successful than others. Here I present a sampling of these lessons.

Article Compelling intelligent user interfaces—how much AI? Share on Authors: Larry Birnbaum ILS/Northwestern, 1890 Maple Avenue, Evanston IL ILS/Northwestern, 1890 Maple Avenue, Evanston ILView Profile , Eric Horvitz Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond WA Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond WAView Profile , David Kurlander Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond WA Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond WAView Profile , Henry Lieberman MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge MA MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge MAView Profile , Joe Marks MERL, 201 Broadway, Cambridge MA MERL, 201 Broadway, Cambridge MAView Profile , Steve Roth Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PAView Profile Authors Info & Claims IUI '97: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Intelligent user interfacesJanuary 1997 Pages 173–175https://doi.org/10.1145/238218.238319Online:06 January 1997Publication History 16citation637DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations16Total Downloads637Last 12 Months41Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Comics have a rich visual vocabulary, and people find them appealing.They are also an effective form of communication.We have built a system, called Comic Chat, that represents on-line communications in the form of comics.Comic Chat automates numerous aspects of comics generation, including balloon construction and layout, the placement and orientation of comic characters, the default selection of character gestures and expressions, the incorporation of semantic panel elements, and the choice of zoom factor for the virtual camera.This paper describes the mechanisms that Comic Chat uses to perform this automation, as well as novel aspects of the program's user interface.Comic Chat is a working program, allowing groups of people to communicate over the Internet.It has several advantages over other graphical chat programs, including the availability of a graphical history, and a dynamic graphical presentation.

Animations express a sense of process and continuity that is difficult to convey through other techniques. Although interfaces can often benefit from animation, User Interface Management Systems (UIMSs) rarely provide the tools necessary to easily support complex, state-dependent application output, such as animations. Here we describe Player, an interface component that facilitates sequencing these animations. One difficulty of integrating animations into interactive systems is that animation scripts typically only work in very specific contexts. Care must be taken to establish the required context prior to executing an animation. Player employs a precondition and postcondition-based specification language, and automatically computes which animation scripts should be invoked to establish the necessary state. Player’s specification language has been designed to make it easy to express the desired behavior of animation controllers. Since planning can be a timeconsuming process inappropriate for interactive systems, Player precompiles the plan-based specification into a state machine that executes far more quickly. Serving as an animation controller, Player hides animation script dependencies from the application. Player has been incorporated into the Persona UIMS, and is currently used in the Peedy application.

Many graphic tasks, such as the manipulation of graphical objects and the construction of user-interface widgets, can be facilitated by geometric constraints. However, the difficulty of specifying constraints by traditional methods forms a barrier to their widespread use. In order to make constraints easier to declare, we have developed a method of specifying constraints implicitly, through multiple examples. Snapshots are taken of an initial scene configuration, and one or more additional snapshots are taken after the scene has been edited into other valid configurations. The constraints that are satisfied in all of the snapshots are then applied to the scene objects. We discuss an efficient algorithm for inferring constraints from multiple snapshots. The algorithm has been incorporated into the Chimera editor, and several examples of its use are discussed.

We describe enhancements to graphical search and replace that allow users to extend the capabilities of a graphical editor. Interactive constraint-based search and replace can search for objects that obey user-specified sets of constraints and automatically apply other constraints to modify these objects. We show how an interactive tool that employs this technique makes it possible for users to define sets of constraints graphically that modify existing illustrations or control the creation of new illustrations. The interace uses the same visual language as the editor and allows users to understand and create powerful rules without conventional programming. Rules can be saved and retrieved for use alone or in combination. Examples, generated with a working implementation, demonstrate applications to drawing beautification and transformation.

Many tasks performed using computer interfaces are very repetitive. While programmers can write macros or procedures to automate these repetitive tasks, this requires special skills. Demonstrational systems make macro building accessible to all users, but most provide either no visual representation of the macro or only a textual representation. We have developed a history-based visual representation of commands in a graphical user interface. This representation supports the definition of macros by example in several novel ways. At any time, a user can open a history window, review the commands executed in a session, select operations to encapsulate into a macro, and choose objects and their attributes as arguments. The system has facilities to generalize the macro automatically, save it for future use, and edit it.

No abstract available.

Graphical search is a technique for finding all instances of a graphical pattern in a synthetic picture in which objects are regions bounded by lines and curves. The pattern may descirbe shape, color and other properties. Matched objects may be allowed to differ from the pattern in rotation and scale or may differ in shape by a specified tolerance. Graphical replace is a technique for replacing the shape, color, or other properties of matched objects with new properties described in a replacement pattern. Combined, the two techniques are similar to textual search and replace in text editors. Graphical search and replace can be used to make global changes to illustrations with repetitive patterns, independent of the means used to make those patterns. It can also be used to create a class of iterative or recursive shapes that can be specified by replacement rules.