With grant funding from the National Science Foundation, we are developing the CodeTrainer Content Authoring System, a mechanism that allows educators to create and contribute their own curriculum content and align that content with the features of our larger intelligent tutoring system, CodeTrainer. Through a series of user studies, we evaluated the needs of computer science educators for both curriculum content and appropriate user interface. Results from these studies indicate that computer science educators would find CodeTrainer a useful tool, and offered suggestions for improving the usability. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1113692.

Can a single, universal speech interface look-and-feel be used to effectively control a wide variety of appliances? Can such an interface be automatically derived from a functional appliance specification? We built the Speech Graffiti Personal Universal Controller (SG-PUC), a universal interface and framework for human-appliance speech interaction, as a proof-of-concept. Its specification language and communications protocol effectively separate the SG-PUC from the appliances that it controls, enabling mobile and universal speech-based appliance control. To realize such an automatically derived dialog system, the controller employs a universal control language. The development of interfaces to numerous appliances and the results of user studies demonstrate the usefulness of the SG-PUC, indicating that high quality and low cost human-appliance speech interface can be largely appliance agnostic. This investigation also helps to validate the principles of Speech Graffiti as a speech interface paradigm, and provides a baseline for future studies in this area.

Several industrial and academic research groups are working to simplify the control of appliances and services by creating a truly universal remote control. Unlike the preprogrammed remote controls available today, these new controllers download a specification from the appliance or service and use it to automatically generate a remote control interface. This promises to be a useful approach because the specification can be made detailed enough to generate both speech and graphical interfaces. Unfortunately, generating good user interfaces can be difficult. Based on user studies and prototype implementations, this paper presents a set of requirements that we have found are needed for automatic interface generation systems to create high-quality user interfaces.

One of the acknowledged impediments to the widespread use of speech interfaces is the portability problem, namely the considerable amount of labor, data and expertise needed to develop such interfaces in new domains. Under the Universal Speech Interface (USI) project, we have designed unified look-and-feel speech interfaces that employ semi-structured interaction and thus obviate the need for data collection. More importantly, the unified structure of USI-compliant interfaces makes possible the automatic generation of new interfaces from a terse, high-level specification. In this paper, we describe an application generator and accompanying toolkit that allow even non-programmers to generate and use fully functional speech interfaces to their chosen database in less than 15 minutes.

The personal universal controller (PUC) is an approach for improving the interfaces to complex appliances by introducing an intermediary graphical or speech interface. A PUC engages in two-way communication with everyday appliances, first downloading a specification of the appliance's functions, and then automatically creating an interface for controlling that appliance. The specification of each appliance includes a high-level description of every function, a hierarchical grouping of those functions, and dependency information, which relates the availability of each function to the appliance's state. Dependency information makes it easier for designers to create specifications and helps the automatic interface generators produce a higher quality result. We describe the architecture that supports the PUC, and the interface generators that use our specification language to build high-quality graphical and speech interfaces.