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Multi-touch large display interfaces are becoming increasingly popular in public spaces. These spaces impose specific requirements on the accessibility of the user interfaces: most users are not familiar with the interface and expectations with regard to user experience are very high. Multi-touch interaction beyond the traditional move-rotate-scale interactions is often unknown to the public and can become exceedingly complex. We introduce TouchGhosts: visual guides that are embedded in the multi-touch user interface and that demonstrate the available interactions to the user. TouchGhosts are activated while using an interface, providing guidance on the fly and within the context-of-use. Our approach allows to define reconfigurable strategies to decide how or when a TouchGhost should be activated and which particular visualization will be presented to the user.

Pervasive computing environments are complex to interact with due to the dynamic assembly of interaction resources and the need to adapt to sudden changes in the environment configuration. When the complexity of such an environment is masked by the underlying computing system, end-users are often left with limited or no control over their interactive space. This brings up the need to make users aware of their surroundings and to provide them with runtime control over the environment configuration. We present a semantic meta-layer that encapsulates a model, view and controller to support the design of context-aware pervasive applications that can be controlled and evaluated by the end-users at runtime.

The use of handheld computers as a tool to enrich the museum experience has found its way into many museums, opening up new possibilities to increase the attractiveness of museum visits, especially for youngsters. We developed a mobile guide framework that supports the creation of mobile guides and adheres to social-constructivist principles of learning. The mobile museum game we created with this framework aims at developing the social, cognitive and technical skills of the users. Large scale evaluations show the potential power of our approach to stimulate interaction between youngsters and to create a playful learning experience.

The increasing complexity of pervasive computing environments puts the current software development methods to the test. There is a large variation in different types of hardware that need to be addressed. Besides, there is no guarantee the environment does not evolve, making the software developed for the initial environment deprecated and in need for updates or reconfiguration. Software deployed in such an environment should be sufficiently dynamic to cope with new environment configurations, even while the system is in use. This goes beyond coping with new contexts of use and building context-aware systems: while most approaches are mainly focused on how the software behavior adapts according to the changing context in a fixed environment, our approach, ReWiRe, allows the environment configuration to change over time. (8 pages)

In this paper we introduce MuiCSer, a conceptual process framework for Multi-disciplinary User-centred Software Engineering (UCSE) processes. UCSE processes strive for the combination of basic principles and practices from software engineering and user-centred design approaches in order to increase the overall user experience with the resulting product. The MuiCSer framework aims to provide a common understanding of important components and associated activities of UCSE processes. As such, the conceptual framework acts as a frame of reference for future research regarding various aspects and concepts related to this kind of processes, including models, development artefacts and tools. We present the MuiCSer process framework and illustrate its instantiation in customized processes for the (re)design of a system. The conceptual framework has been helpful to investigate the role of members of a multi-disciplinary team when realizing artefacts in a model-based approach. In particular process coverage of existing artefact transformation tools has been studied.

Currently, it is difficult for a designer to create user interfaces that are of high aesthetic quality for a continuously growing range of devices with varied screen sizes. Most existing approaches use abstractions that only support form-based user interfaces. These user interfaces may be usable but are of low aesthetic quality. In this paper, we present a technique to design adaptive graphical user interfaces by example (i.e., user interfaces that can adapt to the target platform, the user, etc.), which can produce user interfaces of high aesthetic quality while reducing the development cost inherent to manual approaches. Designing adaptive user interfaces by example could lead to a new generation of design tools that put adaptive user interface development within the reach of designers as well as developers.

In recent years HCI researchers have developed a broad range of new interfaces that diverge from the "window, icon, menu, pointing device" (WIMP) paradigm, employing a variety of novel interaction techniques and devices. Developers of these next generation user interfaces face challenges that are currently not addressed by state of the art user interface software tools. As part of the user interface software community's effort to address these challenges, the concept of a User Interface Description Language (UIDL), reemerge as a promising approach. To date, the UIDL research area has demonstrated extensive development, mainly targeting multi-platform and multi-modal user interfaces. However, many open questions remain regarding the usefulness and effectiveness of UIDLs in supporting the development of next generation interfaces. The aim of this workshop is to bring together both developers of next generation user interfaces and UIDL researchers in an effort to identify key challenges facing this community, to jointly develop new approaches aimed at solving these challenges and finally to consider future spaces for UIDL research.

Mobile digital photography has become a ubiquitous service: nearly every mobile phone is equipped with a camera. Huge collections of pictures are created with these phones that are hard to structure in a. usable way. Problems in saving, managing and exchanging digital pictures are becoming typical obstacles that need to be tackled in order to have a usable system. We present PhotoFOAF: a new approach to mobile imaging that exploits the social context of a picture as an important part of the metadata. We present an approach that allows users to insert social metadata in pictures while capturing them. The resulting collections of captured pictures can be managed, searched and exchanged more easily by taking benefit of the personal social relevance of a picture. PhotoFOAF implements an end-to-end process to accomplish this and it exploits, enhances and stimulates social relationships between users during all the different steps.

In this paper, a method for inference of high-level semantic information for image annotation and retrieval is proposed. Bayesian theory is used as a tool to model a belief network to configure semantic labels for image regions. These semantic labels for regions are obtained from a multi visual feature-based object detection approach. The aim is to model potential semantic descriptions of basic objects in the images, the dependencies between them, and the conditional probabilities involved in those dependencies. This information is then used to calculate the probabilities of the effects that those objects have on each other in order to obtain more precise and meaningful semantic labels for the whole images. However, the proposed method is not restricted to the specific region-based approach used in this paper. Rather, the proposed method can be applied in any region-based image retrieval systems. Selected experimental results are presented to show the improved retrieval performance of the proposed method.

The diversity of end-user devices in combination with a growing user base poses important challenges for providing easy access to the huge amount of content and services currently available. Each device has its typical set of capabilities and characteristics that must be taken into account to create an appropriate user interface that provides interactive access to multimedia data and services. Furthermore, end-users also have their specific requirements that influence the accessibility of data and services for individual access. The approach we present in this paper is geared towards the idea of universal access to interactive multimedia data and services for everyone, independent of the user characteristics or end-user device capabilities. For this purpose we combine user and device models with high-level user interface description languages in order to decouple the interface presentation from its platform, and to generate the most suitable interface on a per-user, per- device basis making use of the semantics that are provided by user and device profile.

During the past few years, personal portable computer systems such as PDAs or laptops are being used in different contexts such as in meetings, at the office, or at home. In the current era of multimodal interaction, each context may require other interaction strategies or system settings to allow the end-users to reach their envisioned goals. For instance, in a meeting room a user may want to use the projection equipment and disable the audio output for a presentation, while audio input and output may be important while in a teleconference. In present computer systems most changes have to be made manually and require explicit interaction with the system. The number of different devices used in such environments makes that this configuration step results in a high cognitive load and causes interrupts of the tasks being executed by the end-user. In this paper we present how proactive user interfaces may predict the next interface changes invoked by context switches or user actions. In particular, we will focus on two machine learning algorithms, decision trees and Markov models, that may support this proactive behaviour for multimodal user interfaces. Based on some simple but relevant scenarios, we compare the outcome of both implementations in order to decide which algorithm is most applicable in this context.

In this paper we introduce a monitoring system to support the user executing tasks in an ambient intelligence environment. In contrast with traditional environments, the goal of the user can not always be defined beforehand, but is determined while the user interacts with the environment. The monitor observes the user's activities and learns to correlate a set of user actions with a goal. The system maps activities to a task model and reuses these models to take appropriate actions in later similar user actions that are observed.

Semantic service descriptions have paved the way for flexible interaction with services in a mobile computing environment. Services can be automatically discovered, invoked and even composed. On the contrary, the user interfaces for interacting with these services are often still designed by hand. This approach poses a serious threat to the overall flexibility of the system. To make the user interface design process scale, it should be automated as much as possible. We propose to augment service descriptions with high-level user interface models to support automatic user interface adaptation. Our method builds upon OWL-S, an ontology for Semantic Web Services, by connecting a collection of OWL-S services to a hierarchical task structure and selected presentation information. This allows end-users to interact with services on a variety of platforms.

Web services are todays preferred vehicle for creating service-oriented architectures (SOA). Due to the boom of personal networked devices, the Web also found its way to the mobile space. This gives rise to device hosted mobile services that deliver functionality over a wireless network. There is potential to unite these services in a collaborative service space and exploit them as building blocks for distributed applications. This paper concentrates on a light-weight middleware layer to facilitate the integration, accessibility and orchestration of Web-based services in heterogeneous environments. Leveraging Web technology, this layer allows to interconnect serverless, peer-to-peer services deployed across federations of devices. We present its value in a ubiquitous application.

This paper shows a technique that allows adaptive user interfaces, spanning multiple devices, to be rendered from the task specification at runtime taking into account the context of use. The designer can specify a task model using the ConcurTaskTrees Notation and its context-dependent parts, and deploy the user interface immediately from the specification. By defining a set of context-rules in the design stage, the appropriate context-dependent parts of the task specification will be selected before the concrete interfaces will be rendered. The context will be resolved by the runtime environment and does not require any manual intervention. This way the same task specification can be deployed for several different contexts of use. Traditionally, a context-sensitive task specification only took into account a variable single deployment device. This paper extends this approach as it takes into account task specifications that can be executed by multiple co-operating devices.

In this paper we show how an interactive system can be distributed among several peer devices. By taking advantage of the current trend towards ambient intelligent environments, we can make use of a combination of computing resources in the surrounding of the user to function as one logical interactive system; an interaction space. Our approach relies on the fact that nowadays most computing resources are network enabled and publish their device profile using some special purpose protocol. For this reason, federations of devices that support the tasks of the user can be composed automatically according to the requirements of these tasks. This distribution of the user interface over a federation of devices can be local or nonlocal. It raises the opportunity for supporting collaborative tasks with the same user interface with little or no extra effort from the user interface designer. Future tools supporting the design, creation and deployment of distributed interactive systems using device federations should maintain usability and usefulness of a dynamic distributed system. We use two different metrics to cope with these problems: interface completeness and interface continuity.

In this paper we report on our work to enable "laid-back" social interactions using television as a primary interaction medium and mobile devices that participate as a secondary medium. By integrating semantic web techniques with interactive television we were able to create smart applications that can run as extensions of television shows and stimulate groups of users to communicate. Participants are teamed up to play along with a television show. Teams are composed based on common ground, which can be shared interests as well as shared characteristics that can be found between the users. Participating is possible using a set-top box or a mobile device; this allows people that are co-located and share a television set to participate individually. The usage of a mobile device to participate does not require a television set however: users on the move can also play along in a team. Our system does not require a new television format, but is also able to reuse existing television shows and socialize them in order to be re-broadcasted with support for distributed teams that play along with the show.

In this paper we report on our work to enable "laid-back" social interactions using television as a primary interaction medium. By integrating semantic web techniques with interactive television we were able to create smart applications that can run as extensions of television shows and stimulate groups of users to communicate. Groups are based on the shared characteristics that can be found for subsets of spectators. Communication between spectators is brought about at two levels: direct communication like instant messaging and indirect communication like cooperating in a team to win a quiz. Our system does not necessarily require a new television format, but is able to reuse existing television shows and to "socialize" them so they can be re-broadcasted with support for group interaction.

The wide diversity of consumer devices has led to new methodologies and techniques to make digital content available over a broad range of devices with minimal effort. In particular the design of the interactive parts of a system has been the subject of a lot of research efforts because these parts are the most visible and are critical for the usability (and thus use) of a system. One thing that is missing in many current approaches is the ability to combine these new methodologies and techniques with a user-centric approach to ensure preferences from and requirements for a specific user are taken into account besides the device adaptations. In this paper we analysed the applicability of MPEG-21, part 7: Digital Item Adaptation, for the adaptation of a user interface to user characteristics. We show how the high-level XML-based user interface description language UIML in combination with an MPEG-21-based user profile enables designers to create accessible and personalised multi-device user interfaces. Using this combination results in user interfaces that can be deployed on a broad range of devices while taking into account user preferences with minimal effort. This approach enhances accessibility to digital items on various platforms, since all interactions with digital items should be supported by an appropriate user interface.

The design of interactive systems for an ambient intelligent environment poses many challenges because of the great diversity in devices the user has control of and the user's situation imposed by the environment. Although task-centered interface design is an established approach for traditional form-based and even for multi-device user interfaces, this design approach is, in its current form, not ready for the design of user interfaces for ambient intelligent environments. In this paper we propose a task-centered approach to design interaction mechanisms for ambient intelligent environments by means of visualization and simulation. We focus on three different concepts that are important to support this approach: situated task allocations, user interface distributions and visualization of context influences. Because the execution of a task depends strongly on the situation or context of use, the consequences of a context change on the execution of a task specification should be communicated with the task designer during the design process. The designer should be able to define the possibilities to execute a task while taking into account constraints imposed by the environment of the user. A tool to support this approach using visualization of the environment and simulation of the interface configurations is introduced.

As the diversity of available computing devices increases it becomes more difficult to adapt User Interface development to support the full range of available devices. One of the difficulties are the different GUI libraries: to use an alternative library or device one is forced to redevelop the interface completely for the alternative GUI library. To overcome these problems the User Interface Mark-up Language (UIML) specification has been proposed, as a way of glueing the interface design to different GUI libraries in different environments without further efforts. In contrast with other approaches UIML has matured and has some implementations proving its usefulness. We introduce the first UIML renderer for the .Net framework, a framework that can be accessed by different kinds of programming languages and can use different kinds of widget sets. We show that its properties, among them its reflection mechanism, are suitable for the development of a reusable and portable UIML renderer. The suitability for multi-device rendering is discussed in comparison with our own multi-device UI framework Dygimes. The focus is on how layout management can be generalised in the specification to allow the GUI to adapt to different screen sizes.

New applications and services aim to adapt themselves to the user's context and thus require platforms that can collect, distribute, and exchange contextual information. The Context-Aware Service Platform (CASP) can help, as exemplified here in three different use cases. Institute for the Promotion of Innovation through Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT)

During a museum visit, social interaction can improve intellectual, social, personal and cultural development. With the advances in technology, the use of personal mobile handheld devices – such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) – that replace the traditional paper guidebooks is becoming a common sight at various heritage sites all over the world. This technology often leads to problems such as isolating visitors from their companions and distracting visitors away from their surroundings. We believe careful design of mobile applications and taking advantage of low-cost networking infrastructure can avoid such isolation of the visitor from his or her surroundings and encourage interaction with both surroundings and companions. In this paper, we describe our approach to create a mobile handheld guide that supports the learning process by exploiting social interaction between visitors and subtly matching the content and concepts shown on the hand- held guide with what can be found in the museum.