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Designing and deploying groupware is difficult. Groupware evaluation and design are often approached from a single perspective, with a technologically-, individually-, or socially-centered focus. A study of Groupware Calendar Systems (GCSs) highlights the need for a synthesis of these multiple perspectives to fully understand the adoption challenges these systems face. First, GCSs often replace existing calendar artifacts, which can impact users' calendaring habits and in turn influence technology adoption decisions. Second, electronic calendars have the potential to easily share contextualized information publicly over the computer network, creating opportunities for peer judgment about time allocation and raising concerns about privacy regulation. However, this situation may also support coordination by allowing others to make useful inferences about one's schedule. Third, the technology and the social environment are in a reciprocal, co-evolutionary relationship: the use context is affected by the constraints andaffordances of the technology, and the technology also co-adapts to the environment in important ways. Finally, GCSs, despite being below the horizon of everyday notice, can affect the nature of temporal coordination beyond the expected meeting scheduling practice.

Complex design problems require more knowledge than any single person possesses because the knowledge relevant to a problem is usually distributed among stakeholders. Bringing different and often controversial points of view together to create a shared understanding among these stakeholders can lead to new insights, new ideas, and new artifacts. New media that allow owners of problems to contribute to framing and resolving complex design problems can extend the power of the individual human mind. Based on our past work and study of other approaches, systems, and collaborative and participatory processes, this article identifies challenges we see as the limiting factors for future collaborative human-computer systems. The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC) is introduced as an integrated physical and computational environment addressing some of these challenges. The vision behind the EDC shifts future development away from the computer as the focal point, toward an emphasis that tries to improve our understanding of the human, social, and cultural system that creates the context for use. This work is based on new conceptual principles that include creating shared understanding among various stakeholders, contextualizing information to the task at hand, and creating objects to think with in collaborative design activities.

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is the study of how people design, implement, and use interactive computer systems and how computers affect individuals, organizations, and society. This encompasses not only ease of use but also new interaction techniques for supporting user tasks, providing better access to information, and creating more powerful forms of communication. It involves input and output devices and the interaction techniques that use them; how information is presented and requested; how the computer’s actions are controlled and monitored; all forms of help, documentation, and training; the tools used to design, build, test, and evaluate user interfaces; and the processes that developers follow when creating interfaces. This report describes the historical and intellectual foundations of HCI and then summarizes selected strategic directions in human-computer interaction research. Previous important reports on HCI directions include the results of the

Recent advances in various display and virtual technologies coupled with an explosion in available computing power have given rise to a numberofnovel human-computer interaction (HCI) modalities -- speech, vision-based gesture recognition, eye tracking, EEG, etc. However, despite the abundance of novel interaction devices, the naturalness and efficiency of HCI has remained low. This is due in particular to the lack of robust sensory data interpretation techniques. To deal with the task of interpreting single and multiple interaction modalities this dissertation establishes a novel probabilistic approach based on dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs). As a generalization of the successful hidden Markov models, DBNs are a natural basis for the general temporal action interpretation task. The problem of interpretation of single or multiple interacting modalities can then be viewed as a Bayesian inference task. In this work three complex DBN models are introduced: mixtures of DBNs, mixed-state DBNs, and coupled HMMs. In-depth study of these models yields efficient approximate inference and parameter learning techniques applicable to a wide variety of problems. Experimental validation of the proposed approaches in the domains of gesture and speech recognition con rms the model's applicability to both unimodal and multimodal interpretation tasks.

Twenty years after the general adoption of overlapping windows and the desktop metaphor, modern window systems differ mainly in minor details such as window decorations or mouse and keyboard bindings. While a number of innovative window management techniques have been proposed, few of them have been evaluated and fewer have made their way into real systems. We believe that one reason for this is that most of the proposed techniques have been designed using a low fidelity approach and were never made properly available. In this paper, we present Metisse, a fully functional window system specifically created to facilitate the design, the implementation and the evaluation of innovative window management techniques. We describe the architecture of the system, some of its implementation details and present several examples that illustrate its potential.

We present a nonintrusive system based on computer vision for human-computer interaction in three--dimensional (3-D) environments controlled by hand pointing gestures. Users are allowed to walk around in a room and manipulate information displayed on its walls by using their own hands as pointing devices. Once captured and tracked in real-time using stereo vision, hand pointing gestures are remapped onto the current point of interest, thus reproducing in an advanced interaction scenario the "drag and click" behavior of traditional mice. The system, called PointAt (patent pending), enjoys a careful modeling of both user and optical subsystem, and visual algorithms for self-calibration and adaptation to both user peculiarities and environmental changes. The concluding sections provide an insight into system characteristics, performance, and relevance for real applications.

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In this paper, we will present an approach to design a more natural user interface without taking resort to special haptic input/output devices. Tactile sensations like stickiness, touch, or mass can be evoked by applying tiny displacements upon cursor movements. Our active cursor method exploits the domination of the visual over the haptic domain. We will show that interactive animations can be used to simulate the functioning of force-feedback devices. A demo is online at

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