The process of analyzing and using information is often collaborative in nature especially given the broad and multidisciplinary tasks that we must support today. Collaboration requires people to share "common ground", which is the knowledge that enables them to communicate and, more generally, to coordinate their activities. Common ground has been explored in a variety of systems, domains, and disciplines. Of particular interest are the new developments in online social environments (instant messaging, SMS, multiplayer virtual worlds) that have become quite popular. Collaborative information visualization environments can benefit from common ground advances that are not only in the collaborative visualization area but also from advances in online social environments. We expand the notion of common ground for visualization systems based on our experiences with two systems we have developed. CoMotion is a collaborative information visualization environment. Reality Instant Messaging is a system that provides lessons from new interactive online social environments.

Custom interfaces, which we call appliances, allow users to efficiently carry out specialized tasks. Without one, a user is often required to perform repetitive mechanical steps using general purpose interfaces, which we call tools. Much research has attempted to enable non-programmers to create appliances for themselves. We present a system in which a user can choose an example of the task behavior to be automated from a visualization of his past operations. The example is transformed into a visual language, using two simple rules to generalize from the single example to a class of tasks. The user can then edit this representation directly, or continue to refine the example using selective undo and redo. The visual representation can be transformed into an esthetically pleasing appliance by deleting irrelevant components, and rearranging, resizing, and relabeling other components. Restricting the domain to data analysis tasks enables a well-matched visual query language to be used. Appliance interactions are automatically provided by the underlying interactive visualization system in which the appliance is embedded. An observational study suggests that this system represents a useful point on the ease-of-use vs. expressive power tradeoff appropriate for data analysis, and that the ability to choose and modify examples after the fact is helpful.

The ability to quickly explore and compare multiple scenarios is an important component of exploratory data analysis. Yet today's interfaces cannot represent alternative exploration paths as a branching history, forcing the user to recognize conceptual branch points in a linear history. Further, the interface can only show information from one state at a time, forcing the user to use her memory to compare scenarios.

We address the problem of realizing communicative plans in graphics. Our approach calls for mapping communicative goals to conceptual tasks and then using task-based graphic design for selecting graphical techniques. In this paper, we present the mapping rules in several dimensions: data aggregation and selection, task synthesis, and task aggregation. Those rules have been incorporated in AutoBrief, a research system for multimedia explanation.

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

We claim that automatic multimedia presentation can be modeled by integrating two complementary approaches to automatic design: hierarchical planning to achieve communicative goals, and task-based graphic design. The interface between the two approaches is a domain and media independent layer of communicative goals and actions. A planning process decomposes domain-specific goals to domain-independent goals, which in turn are realized by media-specific techniques. One of these techniques is taskbased graphic design. We apply our approach to presenting information from large data sets using natural language and information graphics. Keywords Multimedia presentation, information seeking tasks, media allocation, information graphics, presentation planning. INTRODUCTION Understanding large data sets and explaining them to others via effective displays is a complex, laborious and time consuming activity. Analysts and other types of specialists on a daily and sometimes hourly basis explor...

Direct manipulation of visualizations is a powerful technique for performing exploratory data operations such as navigation, aggregation, and filtering.Its immediacy facilitates rapid, incremental, and ,reversible forays.into the *(data.However it does not provide for!reuse or modification of exploration sessions.This paper describes a visual query language, VQE, that adds these capabilities to a direct manipulation exploration environment called Visage.Queries and visualizations are' dynamically linked: operations on either one immediately update the other, in contrast to the feedforward sequence of database query followed by .visualization of results common in traditional systems.8, These features are supported by the architectural concept of threads,, which represent a sequence of navigation steps on particular objects.Because they are tied to, particular data objects, they can.be directly manipulated.: Because they represent operations, they can be generalized into queries.We expect this technique to apply to direct manipulation interfaces to any object-oriented system that represents both objects and the relationships among them.

Currently, there are many hypertext-like tools and database retrieval systems that use keyword search as a means of navigation. While useful for certain tasks, keyword search is insufficient for browsing databases of data-graphics. SageBook is a system that searches among existing datagraphics, so that they can be reused with new data. In order to fulfill the needs of retrieval and reuse, it provides: 1) a direct manipulation, graphical query interface; 2) a content description language that can express important relationships for retrieving data-graphics; 3) automatic description of stored data-graphics based on their content; 4) search techniques sensitive to the structure and similarity among data-graphics; 5) manual and automatic adaptation tools for altering data-graphics so that they can be reused with new data.

Article SDM: selective dynamic manipulation of visualizations Share on Authors: Mei C. Chuah School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , Steven F. Roth School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , Joe Mattis School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile , John Kolojejchick School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PAView Profile Authors Info & Claims UIST '95: Proceedings of the 8th annual ACM symposium on User interface and software technologyDecember 1995 Pages 61–70https://doi.org/10.1145/215585.215654Online:01 December 1995Publication History 45citation585DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations45Total Downloads585Last 12 Months24Last 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

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When working with large data sets, users perform three primary types of activities: data manipulation, data analysis, and data visualization. The data manipulation process involves the selection and transformation of data prior to viewing. This paper addresses user goals for this process and the interactive interface mechanisms that support them. We consider three classes of data manipulation goals: controlling the scope (selecting the desired portion of the data), selecting the focus of attention (concentrating on the attributes of data that are relevant to current analysis), and choosing the level of detail (creating and decomposing aggregates of data). We use this classification to evaluate the functionality of existing data exploration interface techniques. Based on these results, we have expanded an interface mechanism called the Aggregate Manipulator (AM) and combined it with Dynamic Query (DQ) to provide complete coverage of the data manipulation goals. We use real estate sales data to demonstrate how the AM and DQ synergistically function in our interface.

We present three novel tools for creating data graphics: (1) SageBrush, for assembling graphics from primitive objects like bars, lines and axes, (2) SageBook, for browsing previously created graphics relevant to current needs, and (3) SAGE, a knowledge-based presentation system that automatically designs graphics and also interprets a user's specifications conveyed with the other tools. The combination of these tools supports two complementary processes in a single environment: design as a constructive process of selecting and arranging graphical elements, and design as a process of browsing and customizing previous cases. SAGE enhances userdirected design by completing partial specifications, by retrieving previously created graphics based on their appearance and data content, by creating the novel displays that users specify, and by designing alternatives when users request them. Our approach was to propose interfaces employing styles of interaction that appear to support graphic design. Knowledge-based techniques were then applied to enable the interfaces and enhance their usability.

An automatic presentation system is an intelligent interface component which receives information from a user or application program and designs a combination of graphics and text that effectively conveys it. It is a facility that assumes the presentation responsibilities for other programs. An important research question has been how information should be specified or described by an application program for it to be presented by an automatic presenter. This paper proposes a taxonomy of information characteristics which would need to be provided to either human or computer designers for them to create presentations reflecting the individual needs of a diverse group of users. The proposed taxonomy of characteristics defines the representational goals for intelligent interfaces which reason about graphical displays.