Parameterized interfaces for open system verification of product lines

Marangoni flows induced by non-uniform surfactant distributions

We introduce a semantically zoomable interface that displays emails as interactive objects rather than files containing lines of text, as in traditional e-mail interfaces. In this system, e-mails are displayed as node objects called e-mail nodes within a 2.5-dimensional world. The e-mail nodes are semantically zoomable and each may be rearranged to different locations within the plane to organize threads, topics, or projects. The prototype for this system was built using the Piccolo toolkit, the successor of Pad++ and Jazz [2, 3].

While rapidly growing unstructured and semi-structured online digital text archives (e.g., Google Books) potentially offer a wealth of useful and important information to all of us in the information society, limited access mechanisms hinder the effective and efficient extraction of interesting, meaningful, and relevant information from these data archives. Adopting a GIScience perspective in this thesis, we aim to provide interested information seekers with visual and interactive means to access relevant spatial, temporal, and thematic information, and latent structures found in large digital text archives, using a typical digital text archive in the humanities as a case study. Unstructured and semi-structured, now increasingly digitally accessible text archives from the humanities are particularly interesting for geographers, as they contain a wealth of spatial, temporal, and thematic information, largely untapped for spatio-temporal and thematic data analyses in geography to date. We address this research challenge using a three-pronged approach, informed by state-of-the-art GIScience methods and techniques. First, we demonstrate that spatial (i.e., place names), temporal (i.e., dates), and thematic information (i.e., topics in text documents) can be automatically retrieved from the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland (HDS), as one typical, digitally available semi-structured text archive in the humanities. We then show that the retrieved information can be meaningfully transformed and reorganized using a spatialization approach, such that this information can be presented to information seekers in the humanities in two-dimensional spatialized displays for further data exploration. These spatialized displays visually uncover latent spatio-temporal and thematic structures in the HDS text archive. Finally, adopting a user-centered graphical interface design and evaluation approach, we integrate spatialized displays in interactive online web interfaces, to make reorganized spatio-temporal and thematic information from the HDS available to information seekers for further exploration and knowledge discovery. For that we constructed spatialized network maps and a spatialized thematic landscape map display with spatio-temporal and thematic information automatically retrieved from the digital HDS. The spatialized network maps depict relationships between Swiss toponyms in different centuries based on how often toponyms co-occur in the same HDS articles. The spatialized thematic landscape map display, created based on the self-organizing map technique, displays HDS articles as points on a map where thematically similar articles are placed closer to one another in the map than to semantically less similar articles. The maps can be explored interactively. To create useful and usable interactive web interfaces, including the spatialized displays, we involved target users early on in the interface design and development process. Target users provided valuable feedback in the performed utility and usability evaluations. This helped us to iteratively develop perceptually salient and cognitively supportive graphical user interfaces to the HDS text archive. It also facilitated access to and sense-making of the depicted information about the history of Switzerland. This thesis has three major contributions: first, we provide a comprehensive text information retrieval approach going beyond existing approaches to extract information from text documents in the humanities and present a completely automatic approach to retrieve spatio-temporal and thematic information from a semi-structured text archive. Second, we illustrate how spatialization techniques can be used to depict spatio-temporal and thematic relationships and interconnections in the humanities, revealed by transforming and reorganizing the retrieved information. Third, we contribute a systematic user-centered method to incorporate the spatialized displays in interactive web interfaces. This allows interested information seekers in the humanities to explore spatio-temporal and thematic relationships and structures interactively, using advanced geovisual analytics approaches commonly known in GIScience, but still mostly unknown in history and the humanities. The systematic evaluation of the automatically retrieved information from the HDS showed satisfactory quality, which suggests that this approach might be successful for other similar unstructured and semi-structured digital text archives in the humanities that include spatio-temporal and thematic information. Furthermore, the systematic evaluation of the constructed spatialized displays with target users suggests that using spatialized network displays to depict spatio-temporal relationships and interconnections, coupled with a spatialized thematic landscape to depict semantic similarities in text documents, aid target users in the humanities to gain new insights about spatio-temporal and thematic information buried in the HDS. The results of a final combined utility and usability study further reveals that target users are indeed able to interactively and visually explore the HDS text archive, and make sense of the novel spatialized displays. In summary, this thesis highlights how advanced GIScience methods and approaches can be successfully transferred to the humanities to facilitate information access from growing unstructured and semi-structured text archives that also include spatio-temporal and thematic information.

The use of diagrams is common in various disciplines. Typical examples include maps, line graphs, bar charts, engineering blueprints, architects’ sketches, hand drawn schematics, etc.. In general, diagrams can be created either by using pen and paper, or by using specific computer programs. These programs provide functions to facilitate the creation of the diagram, such as copy-and-paste, but the classic WIMP interfaces they use are unnatural when compared to pen and paper. Indeed, it is not rare that a designer prefers to use pen and paper at the beginning of the design, and then transfer the diagram to the computer later. To avoid this double step, a solution is to allow users to sketch directly on the computer. This requires both specific hardware and sketch recognition based software. As regards hardware, many pen/touch based devices such as tablets, smartphones, interactive boards and tables, etc. are available today, also at reasonable costs. Sketch recognition is needed when the sketch must be processed and not considered as a simple image and it is crucial to the success of this new modality of interaction. It is a difficult problem due to the inherent imprecision and ambiguity of a freehand drawing and to the many domains of applications. The aim of this thesis is to propose new methods and applications regarding the sketch recognition. The presentation of the results is divided into several contributions, facing problems such as corner detection, sketched symbol recognition and autocompletion, graphical context detection, sketched Euler diagram interpretation. The first contribution regards the problem of detecting the corners present in a stroke. Corner detection is often performed during preprocessing to segment a stroke in single simple geometric primitives such as lines or curves.

Millions of people use online journey planning systems. However, most of the currently available systems only support finding optimal journeys for one mode of transportation (i.e. only public transportation, driving by car, etc.). This makes it hard to plan intermodal journeys combining different modes of transportation to reach a destination. In this thesis we present a real-time multi-criteria intermodal travel information system supporting various transportation modes as well as different special use cases such as intermodal routing for people with disabilities and tourist tour planning. Choosing the perfect parking to switch from private transportation (e.g. bicycle or car) to public transport (e.g. buses, trams, trains, etc.) is basically trial and error when using unimodal planning systems. This problem becomes even harder when the user wants to return to the starting point which is a common use case of intermodal travel. The optimal route for the outward trip may yield a suboptimal or even infeasible return trip and vice versa (due to the choice of the parking place). In this work, we present a novel and integrated multi-criteria approach to computing optimal journeys for both trips (outward and return trip) combined. Previous routing approaches only provide very limited functionality for people with disabilities. Many elderly people as well as persons with heavy luggage or a baby buggy would like to avoid obstacles like stairs -- however not at all costs (depending on the detour length). Our new multi-criteria approach computes all optimal trade-offs between the difficulty of the route and other optimization criteria (like travel time and the number of transfers). Additionally, we support restrictions that forbid the usage of certain obstacle types completely (like a person in a wheelchair cannot use stairs at all). The restrictions as well as the difficulty of each obstacle need to be adaptable to the profile of the person using the routing service. Our approach is customizable and computes optimal intermodal journeys in a fully integrated manner. Another use case of intermodal mobility is the planning of a tourist trip in a foreign city. Here, several constraints such as opening hours of attractions need to be considered. If planning a tour for multiple days, we want to avoid redundancy. We present a novel combination of the Time Dependent Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TDTOPTW) with the Orienteering Problem with Variable Profits (OPVP). Additionally, our modeling is the first to support several entries and exits per point of interest (PoI) which is relevant in practice because for large area sites like zoos or boardwalks the public transport stop at each entry/exit may be serviced by different lines. In case of delays, cancellations, reroutings, or track changes, a journey may become infeasible. In this case, information is key to finding a solution to this problem. Informing travelers as soon as possible gives them the most options. We present an efficient approach to monitor millions of journeys in parallel. The selection of change notices to be communicated to a traveler may be flexibly adapted to the travelers individual needs. Additionally, the system is capable of providing intermodal real-time alternatives in case of a broken connection. To make the functionality described above accessible to the end-user, we have built mobile (Android) as well as web-based user interfaces. We describe the distributed modular software architecture which can resemble micro-services as well as a monolithic setup enables us to provide the approaches in a scalable and efficient way.

Vitreo-retinal surgery encompasses the surgical procedures performed on the vitreous humor and the retina. A procedure typically consists of the removal of the vitreous humor, the peeling of a membrane and/or the repair of a retinal detachment. Operations are performed with needle shaped instruments which enter the eye through surgeon made scleral openings. An instrument is moved by hand in four degrees of freedom (three rotations and one translation) through this opening. Two rotations (? and ? ) are for a lateral instrument tip movement. The other two DoFs (z and ?) are the translation and rotation along the instrument axis. Actuation of for example a forceps can be considered as a fifth DoF. Characteristically, the manipulation of delicate, micrometer range thick intraocular tissue is required. Today, eye surgery is performed with a maximum of two instruments simultaneously. The surgeon relies on visual feedback only, since instrument forces are below the human detection limit. A microscope provides the visual feedback. It forces the surgeon to work in a static and non ergonomic body posture. Although the surgeon’s proficiency improves throughout his career, hand tremor may become a problem around his mid-fifties. Robotically assisted surgery with a master-slave system enhances dexterity. The slave with instrument manipulators is placed over the eye. The surgeon controls the instrument manipulators via haptic interfaces at the master. The master and slave are connected by electronic hardware and control software. Implementation of tremor filtering in the control software and downscaling of the hand motion allow prolongation of the surgeon’s career. Furthermore, it becomes possible to do tasks like intraocular cannulation which can not be done by manually performed surgery. This thesis focusses on the master console. Eye surgery procedures are observed in the operating room of different hospitals to gain insight in the requirements for the master. The master console as designed has an adjustable frame, a 3D display and two haptic interfaces with a coarse adjustment arm each. The console is mounted at the head of the operating table and is combined with the slave. It is compact, easy to place and allows the surgeon to have a direct view on and a physical contact with the patient. Furthermore, it fits in today’s manual surgery arrangement. Each haptic interface has the same five degrees of freedom as the instrument inside the eye. Through these interfaces, the surgeon can feel the augmented instrument forces. Downscaling of the hand motion results in a more accurate instrument movement compared to manually performed surgery. Together with the visual feedback, it is like the surgeon grasps the instrument near the tip inside the eye. The similarity between hand motion and motion of the instrument tip as seen on the display results in an intuitive manipulation. Pre-adjustment of the interface is done via the coarse adjustment arm. Mode switching enables to control three or more instruments manipulators with only two interfaces. Two one degree of freedom master-slave systems with force feedback are built to derive the requirements for the haptic interface. Hardware in the loop testing provides valuable insights and shows the possibility of force feedback without the use of force sensors. Two five DoF haptic interfaces are realized for bimanual operation. Each DoF has a position encoder and a force feedback motor. A correct representation of the upscaled instrument forces is only possible if the disturbance forces are low. Actuators are therefore mounted to the fixed world or in the neighborhood of the pivoting point for a low contribution to the inertia. The use of direct drive for ' and and low geared, backdriveable transmissions for the other three DoFs gives a minimum of friction. Disturbance forces are further minimized by a proper cable layout and actuator-amplifier combinations without torque ripple. The similarity in DoFs between vitreo-retinal eye surgery and minimally invasive surgery (MIS) enables the system to be used for MIS as well. Experiments in combination with a slave robot for laparoscopic and thoracoscopic surgery show that an instrument can be manipulated in a comfortable and intuitive way. User experience of surgeons and others is utilized to improve the haptic interface further. A parallel instead of a serial actuation concept for the ' and DoFs reduces the inertia, eliminates the flexible cable connection between frame and motor and allows that the heat of the motor is transferred directly to the frame. A newly designed z-?? module combines the actuation and suspension of the hand held part of the interface and has a three times larger z range than in the first design of the haptic interface.

Traditionally, interfaces of software entities, modules and components are immutable at runtime and carry no information on the meanings of the underlying implementation. We believe this definition of interface imposes a rigid view or context on the interaction of software entities, which impedes software re-use and the development of open / adaptive systems. We propose a novel analysis and design construct called a dynamic interface. Dynamic interfaces capture the social ability of agents and can be evolved consistently at runtime. Semantic information about the underlying implementation is also built into the dynamic interface, while preserving information hiding. We envisage the new dynamic interface construct to be complementary to traditional immutable interfaces. The two constructs can be used consistently in applications to address different requirements. We describe a prototype implementation of the dynamic interface construct. The implementation leverages the agent concepts of goals, roles, protocols, agents and services from the ROADMAP meta-model. The initial evaluation on its flexibility and performance indicates that dynamic interfaces have potential as an industry strength design and implementation construct.

Robot software systems are (again) reaching levels of size and complexity that makes them difficult to construct, evolve, and maintain. One current issue is that systems are increasingly built to perform many different tasks in parallel, each of which must be coordinated and monitored to achieve a goal. If all components were to require different interfaces, system complexity would rapidly grow. General interfaces partially exist on the conceptual level, but their implementations are typically strongly linked to particular architectural proposals, thus reducing re-use and comparability. This paper presents an architecture-agnostic design pattern for the coordination-related component interaction. It results in a simple and clean component interface to invoke specific functionality, monitor task progress, and update the goals of running tasks. It provides an abstract coordination interface with high observability for the development of coordination and architecture. It thus provides value to all stakeholders in the design and implementation of robot software systems: component developers, coordination developers, and system architects. We trace the convergence of concepts and approaches from early coordination systems and through various abstraction proposals. Recently, two very similar realizations were developed independently by the authors. This paper presents the underlying insights and practical experience as a generic software engineering method which we named the Task-State-Pattern. We describe the functionality it provides to component developers and detail the technical steps necessary to implement it in a distributed event-based toolkit for specific application domains. We provide empirical evidence for the relevance and utility of our approach by presenting case studies and discussing how the proposed pattern leads to a flexible system structure with reduced integration effort.

This paper describes the abstract interface principle and shows how it can be applied in the design of device interface modules. The purpose of this principle is to reduce maintenance costs for embedded real-time software by facilitating the adaptation of the software to altered hardware interfaces. This principle has been applied in the Naval Research Laboratory's redesign of the flight software for the Navy's A-7 aircraft. This paper discusses a design approach based on the abstract interface principle and presents solutions to interesting problems encountered in the A-7 re-design. The specification document for the A-7 device interface modules is available on request; it provides a fully worked out example of the design approach discussed in this paper.

The antitrust laws, in general, do not require firms to share their assets with rivals. When a particular asset is a natural monopoly and used as an input in other markets, however, the essential facilities doctrine requires that its owner share this asset with firms in related markets. In recent decades, the Supreme Court, as well as leading scholars, have criticized the doctrine, claiming it is economically inefficient and strains the institutional resources of the judiciary. The doctrine, nonetheless, has its share of defenders who believe it has a vital role to play in antitrust enforcement. Historically, the courts most often applied the doctrine to tangible natural monopolies like electric transmission grids and bottleneck railroad lines. In recent decades, specialized federal regulators have established open access regimes over these assets to ensure that natural monopolies are not extended into related markets that can be competitive. In this context, application of the doctrine is likely to be either redundant or counterproductive. Regulatory bodies are institutionally superior to the judiciary in fashioning and ensuring compliance with mandated access decrees. Insofar as regulators fail to perform their duties, courts should not act as a “backstop” to agency failure. Instead, Congress should strengthen the agencies’ statutory authority to establish open access regimes. Legal and technological developments over the past thirty years have conferred essential facility characteristics on certain intangible assets. Examples of these intangible essential facilities include patents on upstream research tools in biotechnology and the interfaces on certain high-technology platforms that exhibit significant network externalities and enjoy intellectual property protection. These assets have no feasible substitutes and are necessary inputs in multiple products, and so the associated monopoly power can be extended into adjacent markets that would otherwise be competitive. The essential facilities doctrine can thus be used to ensure that firms seeking to produce goods ranging from cancer therapies to spreadsheets have access to the necessary intellectual property. Because assets like gene patents and the interfaces on Microsoft Windows are often licensed in a market setting and are non-rivalrous goods, courts are institutionally capable of ordering access and setting the terms of sharing for intangible essential facilities. Advocating a break from the traditional applications of the doctrine, this Article argues that the essential facilities doctrine should not be applied to tangible natural monopolies that have been brought under regulatory open access regimes. Instead, it contends that the doctrine should be applied to a small segment of intangible assets that have acquired de facto natural monopoly status. This reorientation of the doctrine can act to promote competition and innovation without unduly burdening the capacity of the federal courts.

Increasingly in science inspiration is drawn from Nature that provides many outstanding examples of adhesive strategies. One of them is the adhesion of marine organisms, which present strong binding to virtually all inorganic and organic surfaces in aqueous environments in which most synthetic adhesives function poorly. The attachment occurs by secreting adhesive proteins that harden and cross-link in situ. Previous studies of these functionally unique proteins have revealed the presence of an unusual amino acid, 3,4-dihydroxy-L-phenylalanine (DOPA), which is responsible for the cohesive and adhesive strength of this natural glue and gives to marine organisms the ability to bond with numerous substrates including glass, Teflon, wood, concrete, plastics, metals, biological cell lines, bone, teeth, and others. Although the precise mechanism for assembly of the proteins is not understood, the obtained knowledge broadens biomimetic strategies for synthesizing new practical adhesives. In this PhD thesis our efforts to understand the adherence behavior of dopamine-based promoters on metals are described. Firstly a simple DOPA protein mimics – dopamine was used to coat metal substrates and the properties of dopamine and polydopamine coatings on metals were studied in detail. Dip coating from aqueous dopamine hydrochloride solutions at pH 4 and pH 8 was performed on gold (having nor or hardly any native oxide) and aluminium (having a native aluminium oxide layer). The formed coatings were analyzed with surface sensitive techniques dealing with coating composition and the oxidation state, as well as with mechanical measurements characterising the adhesion of coatings. The outcomes of these studies emphasized a need to design a better defined system. As a result two model molecules, N-stearoyldopamine and 4-stearylcatechol, were synthesized. These molecules contain a catechol residue that is capable of binding to metals and metal oxides and a hydrophobic alkyl-chain that gives an ability to coordinate molecules on surfaces using the Langmuir-Blodgett preparation technique. By using these catechol-containing molecules the role of amide functionality on packing, orientation and interaction with the metal surface could be compared. Attention was devoted in studying the adsorption behavior onto gold and aluminum oxide in terms of monolayer characteristics. The organization of Langmuir-Blodgett monolayers on a molecular scale was examined by several surface sensitive techniques. The experimental work was supported with molecular dynamic simulations on gold in order to get a more complete understanding of the monolayer configuration near the interface. Our study shows that within the monolayer the catechols functions as a surface anchor on gold and the alkyl-chains appear to be tilted within the monolayer. Moreover, the irregularity of the 4-stearylcatechol film on gold leads to micelle type structures that are caused by the absence of the amide functionality. On the contrary, from the molecular simulations it appeared that for both types of molecules parallel orientations of the catechols with the gold are also present. However, hydrogen bonds formed between the amide functionality and the catechol hydroxyl groups have a profound influence on the structure and regularity on the adsorbed layer. Attempts were made to quantify the adhesion strength of the anchoring catechols on metal oxide. A covalently bound top-coating was used to determine the adhesion of an Nlinoleoyldopamine primer on an aluminum alloy. Several application conditions were tested for the top-coating and the primer. The resulting tensile strength values of the topcoating having an N-linoleoyldopamine monolayer primer formed by the Langmuir-Blodgett technique showed an obvious improvement in adhesion whereas a negative impact on adhesion occurred when the primer was not applied in a uniform and controlled manner. According to the results of this work and the literature data, synthetic adhesives inspired by mussel adhesive proteins can be used successfully to improve the adhesive properties between polymers and metals. Consequently, the outcomes of the research will give an input in the development of useful synthetic polymer adhesives that exhibit similar wet adhesive capabilities as mussel foot proteins.

The navigation, interaction with and exploration of digital content requires some form of interface. It is, in the simplest terms, the element connecting the human to the digital, an extension of the hand, eye, and ear. However, within digital poetry and writing, the interface is more than just a vehicle for content delivery. Instead, the interface is a critical literary component, as important to the creation and reading experience of a digital poem as the texts of words, images, sounds, animation, and code. Depending on the interface developed and how it is utilized, the digital poem changes shape, reconfigures meaning and becomes an interactive and responsive poetic/fictional creature. Since my first digital poem over a decade ago, interface has often functioned as the starting point, the generator of inspiration and driver of the creative process. This essay explores the role of interface in a number of my digital poems and fictions, explaining the origin and literary nature of particular interfaces. Additionally, it reflects on the methodologies for creating and mining code and software, as well as on the techniques needed to give birth to highly interactive and non-linear interfaces, such as game engines, infinite mo­saic generators, and other organic digitally created applications.

In this paper we describe the use of a high-level augmented reality (AR) interface for the construction of collaborative educational applications that can be used in practice to enhance current teaching methods. A combination of multimedia information including spatial three-dimensional models, images, textual information, video, animations and sound, can be superimposed in a student-friendly manner into the learning environment. In several case studies different learning scenarios have been carefully designed based on human-computer interaction principles so that meaningful virtual information is presented in an interactive and compelling way. Collaboration between the participants is achieved through use of a tangible AR interface that uses marker cards as well as an immersive AR environment which is based on software user interfaces (UIs) and hardware devices. The interactive AR interface has been piloted in the classroom at two UK universities in departments of Informatics and Information Science.

An Active Events Model for Systems Monitoring

Group recommender systems suggest items of interest to a group of people. Traditionally, group recommenders provide recommendations by aggregation the group members’ preferences. Nowadays, there is a trend of decentralized group recommendation process that leverages the group dynamics and reaches the recommendation goal by allowing group members to influence and persuade each other. So far, the research on group recommender systems mainly focuses on the how to optimize the preference aggregation and enhance the accuracy of recommendations. There is a lack of emphasis on the users’ social experience, such as interpersonal relationship, emotion exchange, group dynamics, etc. We define the space where user-user interaction occurs in social software as social interfaces. In this thesis, we aim to design and evaluate social interfaces and interactions for group recommender systems. We start with surveying the state-of-the-art of user issues in group recommender systems and interface and interaction design in the broad sense of social applications. We present ten applications and their evaluation via user studies, which lead to a preliminary set of social interface and interaction design guidelines. Based on these guidelines, we develop group recommender systems to investigate the design issues. We then study social interfaces for group recommender systems. We present the design and development ofan experimental platformcalled GroupFun that recommends music to a group of users. We then study the impact of emotion awareness in group recommender systems. More concretely, we design and implement two different methods for emotion awareness: CoFeel and ACTI that visualize emotions using color wheels, and empatheticons that present emotions using dynamic animations of users’ profile pictures. Our user studies show that emotion awareness tools can help users familiarize with other members’ preferences, enhance their interpersonal relationships, increase the sense of connectedness in distributed social interactions, and result in higher consensus and satisfaction in group recommendations. We also examine social interactions for persuasive technologies. We design and develop a mobile social game called HealthyTogether that enables dyads to exercise together. With this platform, we study how different social interaction mechanisms, such as social accountability, competition, cooperation, and team spirits, can help usersmotivate and influence each other in physical exercises. We conducted three user studies lasting for up to ten weeks with a total of 80 users. Being accountable for each other’s performance enhances interpersonal relationships. Supporting users to cooperate on health goals significantly improve their number of steps. When designing competition in the applications, it is crucial to help users to choose comparable buddies. Finally, teamwork in exercises not only helps users to increase their steps, but also help them sustain in exercise. Furthermore, we present an evaluation framework for social persuasive applications. The framework aims at modeling how social strategies and social influence affect user attitudes and behavioral intentions towards the system. Finally, we derive a set of guidelines for social interface and interaction design for group recommender systems. The guidelines can help researchers and practitioners effectively design social experiences for not only group recommenders but also other social software [...]