In Traction

Our hard work before the holidays has paid off We just heard that our full paper submission for AVI 2008 has been accepted.

Jan Meskens, Jo Vermeulen, Kris Luyten and Karin Coninx. Gummy for Multi-Platform User Interface Designs: Shape me, Multiply me, Fix me, Use me. To appear in Proceedings of AVI ’08, the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, Napoli, Italy, May 28-30, 2008.

In this paper we introduce a multi-platform user interface design approach, and Gummy, a design tool to support that approach. This work originated out of Jan Meskens’ Master’s thesis, in which he created a UIML GUI builder. While there are several tools for developing multi-platform user interfaces, these have a number of problems: (1) the resulting user interfaces often lack the aesthetic quality of manually designed interfaces; (2) the tools are not intuitive since designers have to deal with abstractions and do not directly manipulate the user interface design; and (3) designers can not accurately predict what the resulting user interface will look like. Our goal was to allow designers to reuse their skills of existing user interface design tools (such as GUI builders) as much as possible and try to maintain a high level of fidelity (unlike sketch-based design tools).

We also had a short paper/poster about Gummy accepted to CHI 2008 Work-in-Progress. In this paper we explain how the tool can be used to involve domain experts in the user interface design process.

Kris Luyten, Jan Meskens, Jo Vermeulen and Karin Coninx. Meta-GUI-Builders: Generating Domain-specific Interface Builders for Multi-Device User Interface Creation. To appear in CHI ’08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, Florence, Italy, April 5-10, 2008.

We received lots of input on the prototypes and early drafts of the papers, so thanks to everyone at our lab who contributed in one way or another Additional thanks go to Karel Robert for creating the Gummy logo (have a look at his portfolio).

More information about the papers can be found at my publications page.

Lode recently blogged about a seminar by Microsoft Research on how to give a great research talk, starring John Krumm, Patrick Baudisch, Rick Szeliski and Mary Czerwinski.

Some other resources I recommend are “How to give a good research talk” by Simon Peyton Jones, and the Presentation Zen blog. These should already provide you with the basics for giving a good (research) talk. Here is what I personally found useful in the Microsoft Research session:

• Use animations sparingly: animations are only useful to illustrate a process in your system, or make something more clear to the audience. Don’t overdo it. In my opinion, I offended against this rule with my EIS 2007 presentation. Some animations were useful, but a lot of them were unnecessary. When I gave part of this presentation to a few other researchers some time after the conference, one of them commented that I should contact George Lucas about the effects and transitions
• Use pictures for related work: Patrick argued that a lot of people remember pictures from papers they read, so using a visual representation of the related work is more useful than a list of references.
• Try to demo the current status of your future work: Rick showed the future work demo of their photo tourism paper he gave during his talk at SIGGRAPH. This way you give the audience evidence that you’re actively improving upon your work.
• Tactics to handle rude questions: Mary gave a few tips for dealing with rude questions such as repeating the question that was posed. This is always useful to indicate how you have understood it. Furthermore, it gives people in the audience a second chance if they did not understand the person who posed the question.

All in all an interesting seminar, might be useful to organize something similar at our institute in the future. Thanks to Lode for sharing the link on his blog.

On Wednesday I went to one of our university’s anniversary lectures (celebrating its 35-year existence) by Professor Gerard ‘t Hooft. Professor ‘t Hooft is a theoretical physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics for “elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics”.

The lecture was very entertaining and interesting. He started with the physics of very small, elementary particles (and how much smaller we can go) which he later linked to the physics underlying very large objects and the universe. He used fractals (more specifically the Mandelbrot set) as an analogy for this idea (self-similarity under magnification).

There was a brief discussion of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, a particle accelerator that will likely result in the discovery of the Higgs boson. Here is an annotated picture of the LHC’s underground tunnel (with a perimeter of 26 km):

‘t Hooft also discussed string theory, which says that the building blocks of our universe are one-dimensional extended objects called strings, rather than zero-dimensional point particles. Here is String Ducky, a prize winning video explaining string theory in two minutes:

Finally, he discussed the uncertainties physicists are currently dealing with, including the fact that there might be many dimensions in our universe (as string theory indicates). A good explanation of this is given in this video (just ignore the spiritual ponderings in the subtitles):

Having recently read the book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, I recognized a few of the characters who featured in Feynman’s stories during Professor ‘t Hooft’s talk. One of them was Murray Gell-Man of whom I found an interesting talk on beauty and truth in physics at TED last year:

Since I have always been interested in physics, I really enjoyed this talk. It also made me very humble as I realized that our field of research is of an entirely different nature than theoretical physics

I am looking forward to another interesting anniversary talk by Ingrid Daubechies in May. She is a full professor at Princeton and is mainly known for her work on wavelets in image compression. Apparently, her roots lie in the town where I currently live.