Pen-based computing allows users to seamlessly add freeform ink annotations to dynamic digital documents. When these documents change, the annotations should adapt, or “refit”, in response to these changes. While previous studies have demonstrated ways of refitting, there have been few investigations in what the users expect to happen. In this paper, we report on an investigation into user expectations for refitting freeform ink annotations. We explored how the four main categories of annotations can be refitted and what user thought of each approach. Our findings indicate the approach depends on the user's overall preference and the category of annotation. Furthermore we suggest ways to implement freeform ink annotations on dynamic digital documents.

The Penan people of Malaysian Borneo were traditionally nomads of the rainforest. They would leave messages in the jungle for each other by shaping natural objects into language tokens and arranging these symbols in specific ways -- much like words in a sentence. With settlement, the language is being lost as it is not being used by the younger generation. We report here, a tangible system designed to help the Penan preserve their unique object writing language. The key features of the system are that: its tangibles are made of real objects; it works in the wild; and new tangibles can be fabricated and added to the system by the users. Our evaluations show that the system is engaging and encourages intergenerational knowledge transfer and thus has the potential to help preserve this language.

The least cognitively demanding way to create a diagram is to draw it with a pen. Yet there is also a need for more formal visualizations, that is, diagrams created using both traditional keyboard and mouse interaction. Our objective is to allow the creation of diagrams using traditional and stylus-based input. Having two diagram creation interfaces requires that changes to a diagram should be automatically rendered in the other visualization. Because sketches are imprecise, there is always the possibility that conversion between visualizations results in a lack of syntactic consistency between the two visualizations. We propose methods for converting diagrams between forms, checking them for equivalence, and rectifying inconsistencies. As a result of our theoretical contributions, we present an intelligent software system allowing users to create and edit diagrams in sketch or formal mode. Our proof-of-concept tool supports diagrams with connected and spatial syntactic elements. Two user studies show that this approach is viable and participants found the software easy to use. We conclude that supporting such diagram creation is now possible in practice.

Whilst robots are increasingly being deployed as social agents, it is still difficult to program them to interact socially. This is because current programming tools either require programmers to work at a low level or lack features needed to create certain aspects of social interaction. High level, domain specific tools with features designed specifically to meet the requirements of social interaction have the potential to ease the creation of social applications. We present a domain specific application programming interface (API) that is designed to meet the requirements of social interaction. The Cognitive Dimensions Framework was used as a design tool during the design process and the API was validated by implementing an exemplar application. The evaluation of the API showed that programmers with no robotics knowledge were positively impressed by the notation and that its organization, domain specific interfaces and object oriented nature positively affected several Cognitive Dimensions.

We describe the design of a web-based interactive learning environment that guides students' learning of visual aesthetics. With aesthetics, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. However, initially we take an element-by-element approach that aligns well to the SOLO Taxonomy and software components. Using the colour element as an exemplar, we trialled our online learning environment with 36 undergraduate students undertaking a Human-Computer Interaction course. The results suggest that students enjoy and engage in the process, indicating the potential of our structured approach to learning visual aesthetics within Human Computer Interaction education.

We describe the evaluation of a build awareness system that assists agile software development teams to understand current build status and who is responsible for any build breakages. The system uses ambient awareness technologies, providing a separate, easily perceived communication channel distinct from standard team workflow. Multiple system configurations and behaviours were evaluated. An evaluation of the system showed that, while there was no significant change in the proportion of build breakages, the overall number of builds increased substantially, and the duration of broken builds decreased. Team members also reported an increased sense of awareness of, and responsibility for, broken builds and some noted the system dramatically changed their perception of the build process making them more cognisant of broken builds.

Recent research has focused on tools that support the creation, review and sharing of student-generated content for peer learning. However, we know little about the student perspective of such activities. In this paper, we identify what students believe is most helpful for their learning by analysing open-ended comments from students engaged in creating, answering and reviewing exam-style questions generated by their peers. Students report learning about content and appropriate standards of work, both individually and through interaction with peer generated resources.

Recent interest in student-centric pedagogies have resulted in the development of numerous tools that support student generated questions. Previous evaluations of such tools have reported strong correlations between student participation and exam performance, yet the level of student engagement with other learning activities in the course is a potential confounding factor. We show such correlations may be explained by other factors, and we undertake a deeper analysis that reveals evidence of the positive impact question-generation activities have on student performance.

Prior empirical work on layout aesthetics for graph drawing algorithms has concentrated on the interpretation of existing graph drawings. We report on experiments which focus on the creation and layout of graph drawings: participants were asked to draw graphs based on adjacency lists, and to lay them out "nicely." Two interaction methods were used for creating the drawings: a sketch interface which allows for easy, natural hand movements, and a formal point-and-click interface similar to a typical graph editing system. We find, in common with many other studies, that removing edge crossings is the most significant aesthetic, but also discover that aligning nodes and edges to an underlying grid is important. We observe that the aesthetics favored by participants during creation of a graph drawing are often not evident in the final product and that the participants did not make a clear distinction between the processes of creation and layout. Our results suggest that graph drawing systems should integrate automatic layout with the user's manual editing process, and provide facilities to support grid-based graph creation.

Although a number of existing systems support student-generated multiple choice questions, such questions tend to focus on lower-order cognitive skills. Free response questions are frequently used to evaluate higher-order thinking, but supporting student-generated free-response questions is challenging. StudySieve is a web-based tool that extends student-generated questions to the free-response domain.

Euler diagrams form the basis of various visual languages but tool support for creating them is generally limited to generic diagram editing software using mouse and keyboard interaction. A more natural and convenient mode of entry is via a sketching interface which facilitates greater cognitive focus on the task of diagram creation. Previous work has developed sketching interfaces for Euler diagrams drawn with ellipses. This paper presents SketchSet, the first sketch tool for Euler diagrams whose curves can be circles, ellipses, or arbitrary shapes. SketchSet allows the creation of formal diagrams via point and click interaction. The user drawn diagram, in sketched or formal format, is automatically converted to a diagram in the other format, thus maintaining both views. We provide a mechanism that allows semantic differences between the sketch and the formal diagram to be rectified automatically. Finally, we present a user study that evaluates the effectiveness of the tool.

We present McSig, a multimodal system for teaching blind children cursive handwriting so that they can create a personal signature. For blind people handwriting is very difficult to learn as it is a near-zero feedback activity that is needed only occasionally, yet in important situations; for example, to make an attractive and repeatable signature for legal contracts. McSig aids the teaching of signatures by translating digital ink from the teacher's stylus gestures into three non-visual forms: (1) audio pan and pitch represents the x and y movement of the stylus; (2) kinaesthetic information is provided to the student through a force-feedback haptic pen that mimics the teacher's stylus movement; and (3) a physical tactile line on the writing sheet is created by the haptic pen. McSig has been developed over two major iterations of design, usability testing and evaluation. The final step of the first iteration was a short evaluation with eight visually impaired children. The results suggested that McSig had the highest potential benefit for congenitally and totally blind children and also indicated some areas where McSig could be enhanced. The second prototype incorporated significant modifications to the system, improving the audio, tactile and force-feedback. We then ran a detailed, longitudinal evaluation over 14 weeks with three of the congenitally blind children to assess McSig's effectiveness in teaching the creation of signatures. Results demonstrated the effectiveness of McSig—they all made considerable progress in learning to create a recognizable signature. By the end of ten lessons, two of the children could form a complete, repeatable signature unaided, the third could do so with a little verbal prompting. Furthermore, during this project, we have learnt valuable lessons about providing consistent feedback between different communications channels (by manual interactions, haptic device, pen correction) that will be of interest to others developing multimodal systems.

Developers ought to maintain awareness of the status of a software project. However, there are very few recorded best practices for defining what constitutes relevant status information and the appropriate modalities for communicating this information. In this industry case study, we conducted in-depth interviews with members of an agile development team. We found that their daily work practices, while well-defined and regular, were heavily influenced by the status information they integrated from a number of sources. In particular, continuous integration builds had a substantial effect on the team's workflow. Based on our findings, we provide a set of guidelines for build monitoring systems which encourage collective and individual responsibility while working within the established team environment.

"McSig" is a multimodal teaching and learning environ-ment for visually-impaired students to learn character shapes, handwriting and signatures collaboratively with their teachers. It combines haptic and audio output to realize the teacher's pen input in parallel non-visual modalities. McSig is intended for teaching visually-impaired children how to handwrite characters (and from that signatures), something that is very difficult without visual feedback. We conducted an evaluation with eight visually-impaired children with a pretest to assess their current skills with a set of character shapes, a training phase using McSig and then a post-test of the same character shapes to see if there were any improvements. The children could all use McSig and we saw significant improvements in the character shapes drawn, particularly by the completely blind children (many of whom could draw almost none of the characters before the test). In particular, the blind participants all expressed enjoyment and excitement about the system and using a computer to learn to handwrite.

The focus of this research is to develop general diagram recognition techniques based on quantitative experiments using machine learning to determine the most significant ink features and effective algorithms for use throughout the recognition process. This should improve on existing recognition success rates.

Diagrams are widely used as abstract models of systems. The act of creating the initial diagram is a common problem solving strategy. Most diagrams are conceived and created with an old-fashioned pen on a piece of blank paper or a whiteboard. Current widget based tools, in contrast, are unsuitable for early design support because of the constraints they place on the user. Sketch diagramming tools provide the unrestrained interface of paper and the document preparation support of computers. However there are many outstanding challenges before we can provide really good sketch tools for tasks such as diagramming.

Crafting a good user experience requires skills in several disciplines. Few people have this breadth of knowledge, and undergraduate computer science students are no exception. Encouraging computer science students to appreciate the ways that other disciplines contribute to Human Computer Interaction is important, yet difficult. Our students learn about this disciplinary interdependence through peer teaching as part of a group project. Each group contains students with complementary skills and we expect a transfer of knowledge. Here we discuss the educational theory behind the project, the project's essential elements and an evaluation of how it aids learning. The model we have developed could be easily adapted for other courses which draw on diverse skills.

Hand-drawn designs and annotations are a common, human-centric approach frequently used during software design and code inspection. We describe our research experiences of adding support for hand-drawn design and annotation to three Integrated Development Environments (IDEs): a software design tool; a user interface design tool; and a programming tool. The aim of this work is to provide users with more natural interaction techniques seamlessly integrated into their IDEs through the use of hand-drawn diagrams, layouts and code mark-ups.