Advance Program

The Final Program is now available.

Day-by-day session information is available in our convenient, two-page advance program.  

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Opening Keynote

Closing Keynote

Invited Surveys

Papers and Technotes

Ben Shneiderman will give the opening keynote address, titled:  Creativity Support Tools: A Grand Challenge for Interface Designers.  

The challenge of supporting creative work is pushing user interface designers and human-computer interaction researchers to develop improved models of creative processes. This talk begins with a comparison of creativity models and focuses on Czikszentmihalyi’s domain, field, and individual, as a basis for software requirements.  These requirements lead to eight creative activities that could be facilitated by improved interfaces:

  • searching and browsing digital libraries,

  • visualizing data and processes,

  • consulting with peers and mentors,

  • thinking by free associations,

  • exploring solutions, what-if tools,

  • composing artifacts and performances,

  • reviewing and replaying session histories, and

  • disseminating results.

These activities can be supported in existing software applications, built into web services, or inspire novel tools.  However, rapid performance, minimal interface distraction, and scalable solutions are necessary for success. Smoother coordination across multiple windows and better integration of tools is vital.  A second facilitating goal is compatible actions with consistent terminology, such as the widely used cut-copy-paste or open-save-close.  Higher levels of actions that are closer to the task domain are candidates, such as annotate-consult-revise, initiate-compose-evaluate, or collect-explore-visualize.  Adding to the challenge of doing research in this area is the difficulty of doing evaluation.  Benchmark tasks can hardly reveal the efficacy for creative work and discovery.  While case studies or ethnographic observations are useful as formative design studies, they are weak in their capacity to provide rigorous validation. 

BEN SHNEIDERMAN is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/), and Member of the Institutes for Advanced Computer Studies & for Systems Research, all at the University of Maryland at College Park.  He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM ) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001.  He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

Ben is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (1980) and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (4th ed. 2004) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/ . He pioneered the highlighted textual link in 1983, and it became part of Hyperties, a precursor to the web.  His move into information visualization helped spawn the successful company Spotfire http://www.spotfire.com/ . He is a technical advisor for the HiveGroup, ILOG, and Clockwise3D.  With S Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored "Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think" (1999).  Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press) appeared in October 2002, and his newest book with B. Bederson, The Craft of Information Visualization (Morgan Kaufmann) was published in April 2003.

Sandra Marshall will give the closing keynote address, which is help jointly with ICMI-PUI's opening, titled:  New Techniques for Evaluating Innovative Interfaces with Eye Tracking 

Computer interfaces are changing rapidly, as are the cognitive demands on the operators using them.  Innovative applications of new technologies such as multimodal and multimedia displays, haptic and pen-based interfaces, and natural language exchanges bring exciting changes to conventional interface usage.  At the same time, their complexity may place overwhelming cognitive demands on the user. As novel interfaces and software applications are introduced into operational settings, it is imperative to evaluate them from a number of different perspectives.  One important perspective examines the extent to which a new interface changes the cognitive requirements for the operator. 

The presentation describes a new approach to measuring cognitive effort using metrics based on eye movements and pupil dilation.  It is well known that effortful cognitive processing is accompanied by increases in pupil dilation, but measurement techniques were not previously available that could supply results in real time or deal with data collected in long-lasting interactions. We now have a metric—the Index of Cognitive Activity—that is computed in real time as the operator interacts with the interface.  The Index can be used to examine extended periods of usage or to assess critical events on an individual-by-individual basis.

While dilation reveals when cognitive effort is highest, eye movements provide evidence of why.  Especially during critical events, one wants to know whether the operator is confused by the presentation or location of specific information, whether he is attending to key information when necessary, or whether he is distracted by irrelevant features of the display.  Important details of confusion, attention, and distraction are revealed by traces of his eye movements and statistical analyses of time spent looking at various features during critical events.

Together, the Index of Cognitive Activity and the various analyses of eye movements provide essential information about how users interact with new interface technologies.  Their use can aid designers of innovative hardware and software products by highlighting those features that increase rather than decrease users’ cognitive effort.

In the presentation, the underlying mathematical basis of the Index of Cognitive Activity will be described together with validating research results from a number of experiments.  Eye movement analyses from the same studies give clues to the sources of increases in cognitive workload.  To illustrate interface evaluation with the ICA and eye movement analysis, several extended examples will be presented using commercial and military displays.

SANDRA MARSHALL is President & CEO of EyeTracking, Inc. and Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University.  Her research in cognition and assessment has received federal funding for the past twenty years and has had important theoretical and practical impact.  Early research on problem solving culminated in the book “Schemas in Problem Solving.” Her recent work has focused on the use of eye tracking to understand cognitive activity in training and performance on military simulations. In research sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Dr. Marshall developed new methods for assessing cognitive strategies and cognitive workload based on eye measures.  The techniques are now being used to evaluate interfaces for military and non-military applications.

UIST is pleased to have two exciting surveys.  They will be held in parallel sessions on Tuesday morning.

Computer Audition: A Survey of Techniques, Standards, and Applications

Michael Casey, Department of Computing, City University of London, UK

Computer Audition is concerned with capturing, processing, and interpreting arbitrary sound; such as music, sports events, industrial machine noises and environmental audio.  Such technology is now being used as an alternate or additional input modality in many applications. In this survey I will summarize the key technologies behind computer audition, discuss their inclusion in standards such as MPEG 7, and describe several practical applications of this technology.

MICHAEL CASEY'S research includes general sound recognition, auditory scene analysis, blind signal separation, acoustic fault diagnosis and multimedia information systems. He is a member of the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) committee of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and an editor for the MPEG-7 International Standard for Multimedia Content Description, for which he has contributed several of the standardized audio descriptors and description schemes.

Chemical Sensors: Linking Interactive Systems with the Real World

Dermot Diamond, National Centre for Sensor Research

Dublin City University, Ireland

Leveraging recent advances in analytical chemistry, materials science, and electronics, cost-effective chemical sensing is now becoming available for a bewildering array of applications. These devices are typically built on transducer platforms, with the key issue being how to couple the variation of a chemically (or biologically) important parameter with the signal-generation capability of the transducer. This is often achieved by depositing a chemically sensitive film directly on the device, or by using the transducer to indirectly probe the chemically sensitive film. The variety of transducer platforms, and the increasing range of materials for generating the chemically sensitive films have generated a wide range of routes to accessing signals containing chemical and/or biological information.

The merging of chemical and biological sensing with digital communications technologies is one of the most exciting opportunities for the global research community today. In this survey I will summarize recent technical trends, discuss several sample applications, and provide pointers for UI researchers who would like to incorporate chemical sensors in their interactive systems.  

DERMOT DIAMOND received his Ph.D. from Queen’s University Belfast (Chemical Sensors, 1987), and is currently Vice president for Research at Dublin City University, Ireland. He has published over 100 peer reviewed papers in international science journals, and is co-author and editor of two books, ‘Spreadsheet Applications in Chemistry using Microsoft Excel’ (1997) and ‘Principles of Chemical and Biological Sensors’, (1998) both published by Wiley.

Session: Collaborative Software

Extensible Interface Widgets for Augmented Collaboration in SCAPE
Leonard D. Brown (Beckman Institute, University of Illinois), Hong Hua (University of Hawaii at Manoa), Chunyu Gao (Beckman Institute, University of Illinois)

Rhythm Modeling, Visualizations and Applications
James “Bo” Begole, John C. Tang (Sun Microsystems Laboratories), Rosco Hill (University of Waterloo)

Classroom BRIDGE: using collaborative public and desktop timelines to support activity awareness
Craig H. Ganoe, Jacob P. Somervell, Dennis C. Neale, Philip L. Isenhour, John M. Carroll, Mary Beth Rosson, D. Scott McCrickard (Virginia Polytechnic Institute)

Session: Audio and Paper

SmartMusicKiosk: Music Listening Station with Chorus-Search Function
Masataka Goto (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology)

TalkBack: a conversational answering machine
Vidya Lakshmipathy, Chris Schmandt, Natalia Marmasse (MIT Media Lab)

Paper Augmented Digital Documents
François Guimbretière (University of Maryland)

Session: Input

EdgeWrite: A Stylus-Based Text Entry Method Designed for High Accuracy and Stability of Motion
Jacob O. Wobbrock, Brad A. Myers, John A. Kembel (Carnegie Mellon University)

Tracking Menus 
George Fitzmaurice, Azam Khan, Robert Pieké, Bill Buxton, Gordon Kurtenbach (Alias|wavefront)

TiltText: Using Tilt for Text Input to Mobile Phones 
Daniel Wigdor, Ravin Balakrishnan (University of Toronto)

Considering the Direction of Cursor Movement for Efficient Traversal of Cascading Menus (TechNote)
Masatomo Kobayashi, Takeo Igarashi (University of Tokyo)

Session: Images and Video

Automatic Thumbnail Cropping and its Effectiveness
Bongwon Suh, Haibin Ling, Benjamin B. Bederson, David W. Jacobs (University of Maryland)

Fluid Interaction Techniques for the Control and Annotation of Digital Video
Gonzalo Ramos, Ravin Balakrishnan (University of Toronto)

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Techniques for Consumer Digital Video Devices
Kent Wittenburg, Clifton Forlines, Tom Lanning, Alan Esenther (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Shigeo Harada, Taizo Miyachi (Mitsubishi Electric Corporation -- Industrial Design Center)

Session: Architectures and Toolkits

GADGET: A Toolkit for Optimization-Based Approaches to Interface and Display Generation
James Fogarty, Scott E. Hudson (Carnegie Mellon University)

A molecular architecture for creating advanced GUIs
Eric Lecolinet (GET / ENST and CNRS LTCI)

User Interface Continuations
Dennis Quan, David Huynh David R. Karger, Robert Miller (MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory)

Session: Public and Multi-Screen Displays

Synchronous Gestures for Multiple Persons and Computers
Ken Hinckley (Microsoft Research)

Dynamo: A public interactive surface supporting the cooperative sharing and exchange of media
Shahram Izadi*, Harry Brignull†, Tom Rodden*, Yvonne Rogers†, Mia Underwood† (*University of Nottingham, †University of Sussex),

A fast, interactive 3D paper-flier metaphor for digital bulletin boards (TechNote)
Laurent Denoue, Les Nelson, Elizabeth Churchill (FX Palo Alto Laboratory)

Session: Joint Session with ICMI-PUI

VisionWand: Interaction Techniques for Large Displays using a Passive Wand Tracked in 3D
Xiang Cao, Ravin Balakrishnan (University of Toronto)

Perceptually-Supported Image Editing of Text and Graphics
Eric Saund, David Fleet, Daniel Larner, James Mahoney (Palo Alto Research Center)

Session: Novel Interaction

Multi-Finger and Whole Hand Gestural Interaction Techniques for Multi-User Tabletop Displays
Mike Wu, Ravin Balakrishnan (University of Toronto)

PreSense: Interaction Techniques for Finger Sensing Input Devices
Jun Rekimoto (Sony Computer Science Laboratories), Takaaki Ishizawa (Keio University), Carsten Schwesig, Haruo Oba (Sony Computer Science Laboratories)

Stylus Input and Editing Without Prior Selection of Mode (TechNote)
Eric Saund (Palo Alto Research Center), Edward Lank (San Francisco State University)

Tactile Interfaces for Small Touch Screens (TechNote)
Ivan Poupyrev (Sony CSL), Shigeaki Maruyama (Micro Device Center, Sony EMCS)