Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1987. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis presents Taskmaster.2, a graphical environment for interactive task specification, execution and monitoring. Problem solving in the Taskmaster environment can be accomplished with top-down programming, bottom-up programming, or a mixture of the two. The use of top-down programming permits the user to start with a high level task and refine this task into successively lower level subtasks until, at the lowest level, each subtasks represents a software tool. Bottom-up programming is accomplished by beginning with the lowest level subtasks, software tools, and then combining these tools into successively higher level subtasks until, at the highest level, the high level subtask represents the original problem task. These programming methods provide the user with abstraction capabilities. Another abstraction capability within the Taskmaster.2 environment is the network tools. The user creates network tools by selecting several software tools that, combined, provide a certain functionality. These network tools can then be reused in solving other problem tasks. In fact, these tools appear no different to the user than the low level software tools: they are both single indivisible units. Providing complete abstraction capabilities, i.e., mixing programming styles (top-down and bottom-up) and network tools, maintains the consistency of the Taskmaster.2 environment. This makes the environment an easy one to learn, as well as remember. / Master of Science

This thesis discusses guidelines for developers of Augmented User Interfaces that can be used by illiterate and semi-literate users. To discover how illiterate and semi-literate users intuitively understand interaction with a computer, a series of Wizard of Oz experiments were conducted. In the first Wizard of Oz study, users were presented with a standard desktop computer, fitted with a number of input devices to determine how they assume interaction should occur. This study found that the users preferred the use of speech and gestures which mirrored findings from other researchers. The study also found that users struggled to understand the tab metaphor which is used frequently in applications. From these findings, a localised culturally-relevant tab interface was developed to determine the feasibility of localised Graphical User Interface components. A second study was undertaken to compare the localised tab interface with the traditional tabbed interface. This study collected both quantitative and qualitative data from the participants. It found that users could interact with a localised tabbed interface faster and more accurately than with the traditional counterparts. More importantly, users stated that they intuitively understood the localised interface component, whereas they did not understand the traditional tab metaphor. These user studies have shown that the use of self-explanatory animations, video feedback, localised tabbed interface metaphors and voice output have a positive impact on enabling illiterate and semi-literate users to access information. / TeX / Adobe Acrobat 9.51 Paper Capture Plug-in

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / There are many advantages of mobile agent such as delegation of tasks, asynchronous processing, adaptable service in interfaces, and code shipping. Mobile agents can be utilized in many areas such as electronic commerce, information retrieval, network management, etc. The main problem with mobile agents is security. The three basic security design goals of a system are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The goal of this thesis concerns the property of secure purchasing by mobile agents. First present Jalal's anonymous authentication protocol. Next, we construct our single mobile agent protocol based on Jalal's authentication technique. Also, we add some addition cryptography techniques to make the data more secure during its migration. Lastly, we build a multiple mobile agent protocol based on the single mobile agent protocol. Here, the multiple mobile agents are capable to make the decision and purchase the item for user.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The Pedestrian Automatic Emergency Braking System (PAEB) can utilize on-board sensors to detect pedestrians and take safety related actions. However, PAEB system only benefits the individual vehicle and the pedestrians detected by its PAEB. Additionally, due to the range limitations of PAEB sensors and speed limitations of sensory data processing, PAEB system often cannot detect or do not have sufficient time to respond to a potential crash with pedestrians. For further improving pedestrian safety, we proposed the idea for integrating the complimentary capabilities of V2V and PAEB (V2V-PAEB), which allows the vehicles to share the information of pedestrians detected by PAEB system in the V2V network. So a V2V-PAEB enabled vehicle uses not only its on-board sensors of the PAEB system, but also the received V2V messages from other vehicles to detect potential collisions with pedestrians and make better safety related decisions. In this thesis, we discussed the architecture and the information processing stages of the V2V-PAEB system. In addition, a comprehensive Matlab/Simulink based simulation model of the V2V-PAEB system is also developed in PreScan simulation environment. The simulation result shows that this simulation model works properly and the V2V-PAEB system can improve pedestrian safety significantly.