Background: Software agents are becoming increasingly common in the engineering of software systems. We explore the use of humans in creating benchmarks for the evaluation of software agents. In our case studies, we address the domain of instructable software agents (e-students) as proposed by the Bootstrapped Learning project [Oblinger, 2006]. Aim: Our aim is to define and refine requirements, problem solving strategies, and evaluation methodologies for e-students, paving the way for rigorous experiments comparing e-student performance with human benchmarks. Method: Little was known about what factors would be critical, so our empirical approach is exploratory case studies. In two studies covering three distinct groups, we use human subjects to develop an evaluation curriculum for e-students, collecting quantitative data through online quizzes and tests and qualitative data through observation. Results: Though we collect quantitative data, our most important results are qualitative. We uncover and address several intrinsic challenges in comparing software agents with humans, including the greater semantic understanding of humans, the eidetic memory of e-students, and the importance of various study parameters (including timing issues and lesson complexity) to human performance. Conclusions: Important future work will be controlled experiments based on the experience of these case studies. These will provide benchmark human performance results for specific problem domains for comparison to e-student results. I.

No abstract available.

This paper describes a long-term project exploring advanced visual interfaces for antenna design. MERL developed three successive prototypes that embodied an evolution towards larger scales and more concrete semantics for visualization of large sets of candidate designs and then winnowing them down. We experimented with multidimensional scaling and then collective line graphs before settling on linked scatterplots to visualize performance in a design space of up to 10 million antennas at a time. In the end, the scatterplot solution was most successful at balancing intelligibility with visualization of the space as a whole. The design allows for adding more 1D or 2D linked feature visualizations if needed, and it smoothly transitions to other "details on demand" views for final tweaking.

Although computer mice have evolved physically (i.e., new form factors, multiple buttons, scroll-wheels), their basic metaphor remains the same: a single-point of interaction, with modifiers used to control the interaction. Many of today's novel input devices, however, do not directly (or easily) map to mouse interactions. For example, when using one's finger(s) or hand directly on a touchable display surface, a simple touch movement could be interpreted as either a mouse-over or a drag, depending on whether the left mouse button is intended to be depressed at the time. But how does one convey the state of the left mouse button with a single touch? And how does one fluidly switch between states? The problem is confounded by the lack of precision input when using a single finger as the mouse cursor, since a finger has a much larger footprint than a single pixel cursor hotspot. In this paper we introduce our solution, Fluid DTMouse, which has been used to improve the usability of touch tables with legacy (mouse-based) applications. Our technique is applicable to any direct-touch input device that can detect multiple points of contact. Our solution solves problems of smoothly specifying and switching between modes, addressing issues with the stability of the cursor, and facilitating precision input.

In this paper, we discuss our adaptation of a single-display, single-user commercial application for use in a multi-device, multi-user environment. We wrap Google Earth, a popular geospatial application, in a manner that allows for synchronized coordinated views among multiple instances running on different machines in the same co-located environment. The environment includes a touch-sensitive tabletop display, three vertical wall displays, and a TabletPC. A set of interaction techniques that allow a group to manage and exploit this collection of devices is presented.

In this paper, we show how traditional physical interface components such as switches, levers, knobs and touch screens can be easily modified to identify who is activating each control. This allows us to change the function per-formed by the control, and the sensory feedback provided by the control itself, dependent upon the user. An auditing function is also available that logs each user's actions. We describe a number of example usage scenarios for our tech-nique, and present two sample implementations.

The status quo for co-located groupware is to assume that "social protocols" (standards of polite behavior) are sufficient to coordinate the actions of a group of users; however, prior studies of groupware use as well as our own observations of groups using a shared tabletop display suggest potential for improving groupware interfaces by incorporating coordination policies - direct manipulation mechanisms for avoiding and resolving conflicts. We discuss our observations of group tabletop usage and present our coordination framework. We conclude with example usage scenarios and discuss future research suggested by this framework.

Interactive tabletops have been previously proposed and studied in the domain of co-located group applications. However, little fundamental research has been done to explore the issue of size. In this paper we identify a number of size considerations for tabletop design, and present an experiment to explore some of these issues, in particular the effects of group size and table size on the speed at which the task was performed, the distribution of work among group members, issues of shared resources, and user preference for table size. Our findings shed light on (1) how work strategies are affected by group size, (2) how social interaction varies with respect to table size, and (3) how the speed of task performance is influenced by group size but not by table size. In addition, our experiments revealed that for larger groups, designers might need to add additional vertical displays for shared information. This finding opens the door for extending singledisplay groupware to shared-display groupware settings that involve multiple, shared displays.

Task models are used in many areas of computer science including planning, intelligent tutoring, plan recognition, interface design, and decision theory. However, developing task models is a significant practical challenge. We present a task model development environment centered around a machine learning engine that infers task models from examples. A novel aspect of the environment is support for a domain expert to refine past examples as he or she develops a clearer understanding of how to model the domain. Collectively, these examples constitute a "test suite" that the development environment manages in order to verify that changes to the evolving task model do not have unintended consequences.

Construction toys are a superb medium for geometric models. We argue that such toys, suitably instrumented or sensed, could be the inspiration for a new generation of easy-to-use, tangible modeling systems—especially if the tangible modeling is combined with graphical-interpretation techniques for enhancing nascent models automatically. The three key technologies needed to realize this idea are embedded computation, vision-based acquisition, and graphical interpretation. We sample these technologies in the context of two novel modeling systems: physical building blocks that self-describe, interpret, and decorate the structures into which they are assembled; and a system for scanning, interpreting, and animating clay figures.

We describe a tangible interface for building virtual structures using physical building blocks. We demonstrate two applications of our system. In one version, the blocks are used to construct geometric models of objects and structures for a popular game, Quake II™. In another version, buildings created with our blocks are rendered in different styles, using intelligent decoration of the building model.

Current navigation mechanisms for the World Wide Web promote a depth-first search for information on pages in hyperspace.This search strategy frequently results in the unintentional and often undesirable behavior of "web surfing"a user starts off in search of some information, but is sidetracked by tangential links.We propose a set of mechanisms based on breadth-first traversal that are better suited for directed searching.We have implemented our ideas as a scratchpad by augmenting an existing browser.Such a system makes web navigation both faster and easier.

Article Design galleries: a general approach to setting parameters for computer graphics and animation Share on Authors: J. Marks MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MAView Profile , B. Andalman Harvard Univ. Harvard Univ.View Profile , P. A. Beardsley MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MAView Profile , W. Freeman MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MAView Profile , S. Gibson MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MAView Profile , J. Hodgins Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech.View Profile , T. Kang CMU CMUView Profile , B. Mirtich MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MAView Profile , H. Pfister MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MAView Profile , W. Ruml MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA MERL - A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MAView Profile , K. Ryall Harvard Univ. Harvard Univ.View Profile , J. Seims Univ. of Washington Univ. of WashingtonView Profile , S. Shieber Harvard Univ. Harvard Univ.View Profile Authors Info & Claims SIGGRAPH '97: Proceedings of the 24th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniquesAugust 1997 Pages 389–400https://doi.org/10.1145/258734.258887Online:03 August 1997Publication History 346citation2,992DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations346Total Downloads2,992Last 12 Months156Last 6 weeks16 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

The GLIDE system is an interactive constraint-based editor for drawing small-and medium-sized graphs (50 nodes or fewer) that organizes the interaction in a more collaborative manner than in previous systems.Its distinguishing features are a vocabulary of specialized constraints for graph drawing, and a simple constraintsatisfaction mechanism that allows the user to manipulate the drawing while the constraints are active.These features result in a graph-drawing editor that is superior in many ways to those based on more general and powerful constraint-satisfaction methods.

We propose a technique that uses a proximity metric for delineating partially or fully bounded regions of a scanned bitmap that depicts a building floor plan. A proximity field is defined over the bitmap, which is used both to identify the centers of subjective regions in the image and to assign pixels to regions by proximity. The region boundaries generated by the method tend to match well the subjective boundaries of regions in the image. We discuss incorporation of the technique in a semi-automated interactive system for region identification in floor plans. In contrast to area-filling techniques for delineating areal regions of images, our approach works robustly for partially bounded regions. Furthermore, the frailties of the method that do remain, unlike those of alternative techniques, are well-moderated by simple human intervention.