Program & Proceedings

The workshop is organised in the context of the annual meeting of IFIP WG 2.7/13.4 on User Interface Engineering. Post-proceedings (published jointly with the  EISMS workshop) are available as CEUR Workshop Proceedings, volume 2503. 

Session 1 papers:

Smarter Software Engineering Methods for Smart Environments (Judy Bowen and Annika Hinze)

The paper addresses challenges that arise from smart environments (smart-homes, smart-cities etc). It proposes that engineering principles used to design and develop IoT systems and smart environments, as well as the evaluation and testing technique used, must be able to include detailed considerations of the effect on a user’s quality of life (QoL) as well as data sovereignty management (DSM) principles. QoL includes not just the everyday experience of using (or living within) the technologies, but the longer term implications on users’ way of life, DSM affects the complete life-cycle of data from sensing, communication, pattern analysis to long-term storage and access.

Understanding Each-Other: Engineering Challenges and Opportunities for Users and Systems in the Deep Learning Era (Lucio Davide Spano)

This paper discusses the impact of Deep Learning techniques in the present and future of the interactive system engineering. The author identifies different opportunities in the support for more complex vocabularies in the communication between the user and the system. They present a set of challenges and opportunities in the engineering of interactive systems opened by the integration of Deep Learning techniques into different components of the classic interaction framework by Abowd and Beale [2]. The open research directions span from the transparency of the trained models, the support of intermediate feedback during the classification to the generation of explanations about the system in natural language.

Challenges in User-Centered Engineering of AI-based Interactive Systems (Jürgen Ziegler)

Intelligent algorithms have reached a new level of performance in recent years and are increasingly employed in application areas such as speech and image recognition, data analytics, or recommender systems. The proliferation of these techniques poses a range of new challenges for the design and engineering of interactive systems since they tend to act as black boxes and do not have the transparency and control to the user which is considered a prerequisite for user-centered design in the HCI field. In this position paper, the author provides an overview of the broad areas related to intelligent algorithms and HCI that will need further research in the future to make systems useful, usable and trustable.

Towards Interactions with Augmented Reality Systems in Hyper-Connected Cars (Ovidiu-Andrei Schipor and Radu-Daniel Vatavu)

Hyper-connected cars can store, process, and share a large amount and variety of digital content. In this paper, the authors propose to model the smart car as a smart environment, and introduce a five-layer software architecture based on Euphoria, a recent, high-performing event-driven architecture design for supporting effective communications between heterogeneous input/output devices in smart environments.

Session 2 papers:

Challenges in Multi-User Interaction with a Social Humanoid Robot Pepper (Peter Forbrig)

The paper discusses the challenges of engineering applications for humanoid robots like Pepper. The discussion is based on the project E-BRAiN (Evidence-Based Robot-Assistance in Neurorehabilitation), where patients are supported in their training after a stroke. The humanoid plays the role of a trainer. Managing the appropriate interaction technology (voice, gesture, lights, tablet, other devices) is a challenge. Domain-specific languages seem to be one way to specify necessary models. The paper presents research questions which examine how DSL might be used to support engineering of such systems.

End User Development: Verifying home behavior (Alexandre Demeure, Sybille Caffiau, Sophie Dupuy-Chessa, Huong Ta, and Lydie DuBousquet)

End User Programming enables inhabitants to create a smart home according to their lifestyle. In order to help an end-user to program her/his home, several researches aim to propose adapted programming languages or adapted interfaces (with metaphors or specific interaction paradigms). These interfaces defined a smart home program as composed of a set of rules mainly expressed following the Event-Condition-Action paradigm. Considering the home behavior as a concrete system translation of the pro- grammed rules, the authors propose to support the specification and the maintenability activities through the study of the home behavior. The paper presents why and how an inhabitant evaluates the behavior of her/his home in order to program her/his rules.

Test Automation for Gesture-Based Interfaces (Marc Hesenius, Matthias Book, and Volker Gruhn)

With the increasing ubiquity of touch-enabled devices, gestures are quickly becoming a mainstream interaction modality. The implementation of gesture-based user interfaces however requires specialized engineering methods. Testing gestures is particularly crucial to ensure smooth and intuitive interaction, but is often manual work, i.e. cumbersome, time-consuming, and error-prone. In this paper the authors therefore argue that test automation techniques for gesture-based interfaces are urgently needed and require further investigation into suitable methods and tools. They propose a research agenda that focuses on evaluating gestures’ quality (e.g. in terms of ergonomics, ambiguity, cultural connotations etc.), and automatically testing gestures’ functionality (through generation and injection of realistic gesture trajectories into the UI under test).

End User Personalization of Social Humanoid Robots (Fabio Paternò)

This position paper presents some research challenges for end user personalization of social humanoid robots. It introduces the motivations for addressing such challenges and the main features of the type of robots that are considered. Some initial research efforts that have recently been put forward in this area, and the type of solutions that have been proposed in order to facilitate the development activities for people without programming effort, are discussed. It then identifies and discusses some research challenges that can be important to address in the near future in order to better exploit such emerging technologies.

Session 3 papers:

Usable-by-Construction (Steve Reeves)

The paper presents the view that when we claim to be designing a usable system we have to also give assurances about its usability properties. The idea of usable-by-construction is introduced, which adopts and applies the ideas of correct-by-construction to (very abstractly) think about usable systems. A set of construction rules or tactics to develop designs of usable systems is outlined. Some of these are then formalized into a state suitable for, for example, a proof assistant to check claims made for the system as designed.

A Roadmap Towards the Engineering of Interactive Systems Deployable in Safety Critical Contexts (David Navarre and Philippe Palanque)

This position paper presents how the engineering of interactive system may be impacted when these systems are designed to be deployed in safety critical contexts. These domains are specific as they are usually driven by constraining standards defining precisely best practices and mandatory processes to be applied. The authors discuss how it is possible to take into account these constraints in real-life domains where critical and non-critical components may coexist. Engineering approaches in this context must jointly exploit formal description techniques (for the critical parts) and standard software production techniques (for the non-critical part). The paper describes how Engineering Interactive Systems in these domains particularly impact design and development processes, systems architectural aspects and developers’ tasks.

High assurance on Cyber-Physical Interactive Systems (Rui Couto and José Creissac Campos)

Cyber-Physical Systems, as distributed systems of computational elements interacting with the physical world, are highly complex systems. They can, in many instances, be considered safety critical interactive systems, as errors in interaction can have disastrous consequences. High assurance is, then, an underlying requirement, also at their user interface. In this position paper the authors identify five challenges to be solved both in the short and in the long term, regarding the modelling of (1) distributed and (2) heterogeneous interactive systems, (3) the analysis and relation between the different abstraction layers of CPS, (4) the modelling of real time/hybrid systems, and (5) the modelling of the dynamic nature of such systems. Possible directions for each of these challenges are discussed.

Toward usable theories for human-automation systems (Stéphane Chatty)

A number of the engineering challenges raised by interactive software in the last decades have been addressed, so when planning the development of large systems, user interfaces are considered a solved problem and resources go elsewhere. However, it can be argued that some of the new challenges (role of humans in large systems, explainability of AI) are reformulations of problems that are well known to the community of interactive systems engineering. This paper attempts to distinguish which problems have been addressed by empirical methods and which remain to be solved by scientific methods. The author proposes requirements for theoretical models that will allow engineers to go beyond empiricism and increase their control over the systems they design and develop: engineers need models that consistently describe socio-cyber-physical systems, that are usable to address practical design questions, and that allow to automate part of the design and verification processes.

Formal verification of interactive computing systems: opportunities and challenges (José C. Campos and Michael D. Harrison)

In this position paper the authors discuss the opportunities created and the challenges faced by the use of formal verification in the analysis of safety and mission critical interactive computing systems. In the paper they discuss extensions to existing tools for formal modelling and analysis that have the potential to enable their use by current development teams who are not expert in formal methods. In doing this, they discusses requirements for formal toolsets that would aid their acceptability by development teams. The requirements are discussed using the IVY toolset as an example.