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Computer Science @ Rochester
Friday, October 01, 2010
12:30 PM
CSB 209
Jeff Nichols
IBM Research – Almaden
Re-authoring User Interfaces
TITLE: Re-authoring User Interfaces

ABSTRACT

The variety of interactive devices is growing rapidly, from mobile phones and tablets to tabletops and large wall displays. We could re-program new user interfaces for these devices from the ground up, but this will require substantial engineering effort. I propose an alternate approach, which I call user interface "re-authoring." Instead of creating interfaces for new platforms by modifying the underlying code, new interfaces are created on top of the existing interfaces through transformations that are applied entirely at the interactive level. I will present a few projects that have explored the re-authoring for the web, including: the Highlight project that allows end users to re-author existing web sites into mobile sites, and the CoCo project that makes web-based tasks accessible through a short text-based command line-style interface.

BIO

Jeffrey Nichols is a Research Staff Member at IBM Research – Almaden. His research interests are in the field of human-computer interaction, with a specific focus on mobile computing, end-user programming, and semi-automated design. He received his Ph.D. in December 2006 from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. His thesis described the first system to automatically generate interfaces that are consistent with a user’s previous experience and provided the first evidence from user studies that automatically generated interfaces can be more usable than human-designed interfaces in certain situations. He received a BS degree in computer engineering from the University of Washington in 2000. Contact him at jwnichols@us.ibm.com; http://www.jeffreynichols.com/