Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2012

La implementación de Rhinoscript en facultades de arquitectura en Latinoamérica se realizó en Santiago de Chile (2006, 2007) y Lima (2008), estableciendo algunos criterios para explorar formas complejas usando la programación, con estudiantes de pregrado bajo estrategias de postgrado. Después de documentar los resultados de las dos primeras experiencias [1], se hallaron métodos que se usaron durante la implementación. El objetivo es evidenciar como las experiencias llevadas a cabo pueden aplicarse a otros contextos regionales, proponiendo tipologías para empezar y recursos disponibles que permitan a los estudiantes desarrollar por si mismos nuevas exploraciones.

Spreadsheets are routinely used in business and scientific contexts, and one of the most vexing challenges data analysts face is performing data cleaning prior to analysis and evaluation. The ad-hoc and arbitrary nature of data cleaning problems, such as typos, inconsistent formatting, missing values, and a lack of standardization, often creates the need for highly specialized pipelines. We ask whether an LLM can find its way around a spreadsheet and how to support end-users in taking their free-form data processing requests to fruition. Just like RAG retrieves context to answer users' queries, we demonstrate how we can retrieve elements from a code library to compose data processing pipelines. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the quality of our system and how it is able to continuously augment its vocabulary by saving new codes and pipelines back to the code library for future retrieval. / Master of Science / Spreadsheets are frequently utilized in both business and scientific settings, and one of the most challenging tasks that must be accomplished before analysis and evaluation can take place is the cleansing of the data. The ad-hoc and arbitrary nature of issues in data quality, such as typos, inconsistent formatting, missing values, and lack of standardization, often creates the need for highly specialized data cleaning pipelines. Within the scope of this thesis, we investigate whether a large language model (LLM) can navigate its way around a spreadsheet, as well as how to assist end-users in bringing their free-form data processing requests to fruition. Just like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) retrieves context to answer user queries, we demonstrate how we can retrieve elements from a Python code reference to compose data processing pipelines. Through comprehensive experiments, we showcase the quality of our system and how it is capable of continuously improving its code-writing ability by saving new codes and pipelines back to the code library for future retrieval.

<p>Most software is now developed by professional programmers, and the millions of users of “shrink-wrapped” applications never meet the developers. The skills of professional programmers are obviously required in many software development projects. However, there are also reasons, ranging from practical and economical to philosophical and educational, why people without this background may want to develop their own applications or tailor applications to their own use.</p><p>The general purpose programming languages and development tools used by professional programmers are not suitable for people outside this profession. Instead, people outside this profession need more high-level tools that allow them to express solutions using domain and task specific terms. Despite the accumulated experience from such environments within the end-user programming community, creating a new application development environment for a domain or task remains a large development task, and can be too time-consuming and costly to be found worthwhile.</p><p>This thesis presents an approach to reducing the effort needed in developing extensible application composition environments for end users. We use the term “end user” in the same way as the end-user programming community, to denote a person who wants to develop an application or tailor an application to a specific use, without needing professional programming skills. The work in the thesis was initiated based on experience from development of proof-of-concept implementations of such environments in two European research projects. With this background, a set of user and developer roles are identified and organised into a value chain for development of such environments. Further, the approach combines the research areas of component-based software engineering and end-user programming to propose an overall architecture, component frameworks and tools suitable to support development of such environments. The validity of the results is established through partial prototyping of the frameworks and tools, combined with qualitative analyses of how these can be fully implemented and of their suitability for their intended purpose.</p><p>The main contributions of this thesis are:</p><p>• a value chain for development of application composition environments, with identification and description of tasks of each of the identified developer roles;</p><p>• an overall architecture for developing extensible application composition environments based on component frameworks;</p><p>• architecture of two component frameworks defining mechanisms and rules of behaviour for components ensuring extensibility at runtime and edit time;</p><p>• definition and description of a set of UML stereotypes for modelling domain frameworks based on the component frameworks, and a mapping to Java/JavaBeans allowing a code generator tool to produce part of the implementation;</p><p>• definition and description of tools which use the model of a domain framework as input and partially transform the work of creating composition environments and editors for domain objects from a programming task to a configuration task.</p>

Most software is now developed by professional programmers, and the millions of users of “shrink-wrapped” applications never meet the developers. The skills of professional programmers are obviously required in many software development projects. However, there are also reasons, ranging from practical and economical to philosophical and educational, why people without this background may want to develop their own applications or tailor applications to their own use. The general purpose programming languages and development tools used by professional programmers are not suitable for people outside this profession. Instead, people outside this profession need more high-level tools that allow them to express solutions using domain and task specific terms. Despite the accumulated experience from such environments within the end-user programming community, creating a new application development environment for a domain or task remains a large development task, and can be too time-consuming and costly to be found worthwhile. This thesis presents an approach to reducing the effort needed in developing extensible application composition environments for end users. We use the term “end user” in the same way as the end-user programming community, to denote a person who wants to develop an application or tailor an application to a specific use, without needing professional programming skills. The work in the thesis was initiated based on experience from development of proof-of-concept implementations of such environments in two European research projects. With this background, a set of user and developer roles are identified and organised into a value chain for development of such environments. Further, the approach combines the research areas of component-based software engineering and end-user programming to propose an overall architecture, component frameworks and tools suitable to support development of such environments. The validity of the results is established through partial prototyping of the frameworks and tools, combined with qualitative analyses of how these can be fully implemented and of their suitability for their intended purpose. The main contributions of this thesis are: • a value chain for development of application composition environments, with identification and description of tasks of each of the identified developer roles; • an overall architecture for developing extensible application composition environments based on component frameworks; • architecture of two component frameworks defining mechanisms and rules of behaviour for components ensuring extensibility at runtime and edit time; • definition and description of a set of UML stereotypes for modelling domain frameworks based on the component frameworks, and a mapping to Java/JavaBeans allowing a code generator tool to produce part of the implementation; • definition and description of tools which use the model of a domain framework as input and partially transform the work of creating composition environments and editors for domain objects from a programming task to a configuration task.

As technology becomes ever more pervasive, the challenges of home automation are increasingly apparent. Seamless home control, home monitoring and home programming by the end user have yet to enter the mainstream. This could be attributed to the challenge of developing a fully autonomous and extensible home system that can support devices and technologies of differing protocols and functionalities. In order to offer programming facilities to the user, the underlying rule system must be fully independent, allowing support for current and future devices. Additional challenges arise from the need to detect and handle conflicts that may arise among user rules and yield undesirable results. Non-technical individuals typically struggle when faced with a programming task. It is therefore vital to encourage and ease the process of programming the home. This thesis presents Homer, a home system that has been developed to support three key features of a home system: control, monitoring and programming. Homer supports any third-party hardware or software service that can expose its functionality through Java and conform to the Homer interface. Stand-alone end user interfaces can be written by developers to offer any of Homer's functionality. Where policies (i.e. rules) for the home are concerned, Homer offers a fully independent policy system. The thesis presents a custom policy language, Homeric, that has been designed specifically for writing home rules. The Homer policy system detects overlaps and conflicts among rules using constraint satisfaction and the effect on environment variables. The thesis also introduces the notion of perspectives to ease user interactivity. These have been integrated into Homer to accommodate the range of ways in which a user may think about different aspects and features of their home. These perspectives include location, device type, time and people-oriented points of view. Design guidelines are also discussed to aid end user programming of the home. The work presented in this thesis demonstrates a system that supports control, monitoring and programming of the home. Developers can quickly and easily add functionality to the home through components. Conflicts can be detected amongst rules within the home. Finally, design guidelines and a prototype interface have been developed to allow both technically minded and non-technical people to program their home.

As the Internet becomes more pervasive, the content and services are increasing in quantity as well as improving in quality. This trend is fostered by the advancement of technologies, such as RESTful services, Web 2.0, and Mashups. Service composition integrates services to fulfill specific tasks using a set of tools. The existing service composition techniques and tools are mainly designed for the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) professionals. The business processes used in the service composition systems are primarily designed by business analysts who have extensive process knowledge. Due to the lack of process knowledge, novice business analysts and end users face challenge to identify and orchestrate service into a well-defined business process. Even for the experienced users, it is challenging to select appropriate services from a set of functionally similar services as the quality information of services may not be available. In this thesis, we propose a framework that allows a non-technical user to combine web services to achieve a goal. Our approach helps users to find the process knowledge from the web. We index web services based on the semantic concepts available in the service description documents and help users to formulate a web service search query. We use online reviews to choose a web service from a set of functionally similar web services. Our approach automatically finds the data flow between web services and generates a user interface to execute a composite service. The effectiveness of our proposed approaches is demonstrated through a series of case studies. The results of our case studies show that our approaches for process knowledge extraction, service discovery, and service selection make it easier for people with less technical knowledge to compose services. / Thesis (Ph.D, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2014-06-30 15:18:28.155

The growth of connected, or so called smart home appliances, leads to the search for interaction methods for IoT devices including various forms of smartphone app solutions. Previous research has investigated how complex systems, with multiple options and configurations, can be set up through end-user programming and how app widgets can be an interactive solution. This approach has been adopted by few providers, however, there is little feedback from users on their experiences, in particular on the ease of configuration and customization of app widgets, the ease of use and expectations. To address these questions, I developed a novel app widget as a complement to an existing IoT smartphone app, along with three evaluations: one in-volving 8 experts including designers, developers and product managers; followed by a test session with 10 end users; and finally a field trial in which 3 users lived with the ability to use the widget for two weeks. Feedback and insights about how app widgets affected the user experience were gathered during the process confirming that widgets is a promising solution for controlling smart devices and, depending on the scenario and type of users, there are considerations that could limit or enhance their functionality. / Framväxten av sammankopplade hushållsapparater, eller så kallade ”smart home appliances”,aktualiserar sökandet efter interaktionsmetoder för IoT-produkter, t.ex. smartphone-appar. Tidigare forskning har undersökt hur komplexa system, med flera alternativ och konfigurationer, kan anpassas genom ”end-user-programmering”, och hur app-widgetar kan möjliggöra interaktiva lösningar. Ett fåtal leverantörer har annamat dessa tillvägagångssätt, men det saknas fortfarandefeedback fån användare, särskilt gällande konfigurering och specialanpassning av app-widgetar, lättanvändhet, och förväntningar. För att ta itu med dessa frågor utvecklade jag en ny app-widget som komplement till en etablerad IoT-app för smartphones, samt tre utvärderingar: en med åtta experter, inklusive designers, produktutvecklare, och produktchefer; följt av ett test med tio slutanvändare; och slutligen ett fältförsök där tre anvädare kunda använda app-widgeten i hemmet under två veckor. Under processen samlades feedback och insikter om app-widgetars inverkan på användarupplevelsen, vilka bekräftade att app-widgetar är en lovande metod för att kontrollera ”smart home appliances” och att det, beroende på scenario och användartyp, finns säskilda punkter som kan begränsa eller förhöja deras användbarhet. Framväxten av samman-kopplade hushållsapparater, eller så kallade ”smart home appliances”, aktualiserar sökandet efterinteraktionsmetoder för IoT-produkter, t.ex. smartphone-appar. Tidigare forskning har undersökt hur komplexa system, med flera alternativ och konfigurationer, kan anpassas genom ”end-user-programmering”, och hur app-widgetar kan möjliggöra interaktiva lösningar. Ett fåtal leverantörer har annamat dessa tillvägagångssätt, men det saknas fortfarande feedback från användare, särskilt gällande konfigurering och specialanpassning av app-widgetar, lättanvändhet, och förväntningar. För att ta itu med dessa frågor utvecklade jag en ny app-widget som komplement till en etablerad IoT-app för smartphones, samt tre utvärderingar: en med åtta experter, inklusive designers ,produktutvecklare, och produktchefer; följt av ett test med tio slutanvändare; och slutligen ett fältförsök där tre anvädare kunde använda app-widgeten i hemmet under två veckor. Under processen samlades feedback och insikter om app-widgetars inverkan på användarupplevelsen, vilka bekräftade att app-widgetar är en lovande metod för att kontrollera ”smart home appliances” och att det, beroende på scenario och användartyp, finns säskilda punkter som kan begränsa eller förhöja deras användbarhet.

The main goal of this research is to facilitate end-user and expert developer collaboration in the creation of a web application. This research created a reverse engineering toolset and integrated it with Click (Component-based Lightweight Internet-application Construction Kit), an end-user web development tool. The toolset generates artifacts to facilitate collaboration between end-users and expert web developers when the end-users need to go beyond the limited capabilities of Click. By supporting smooth transition of workflow to expert web developers, we can help them in implementing advanced functionality in end-user developed web applications. The four artifacts generated include a sitemap, text documentation, a task model, and a canonical representation of the user interface. The sitemap is automatically generated to support the workflow of web developers. The text documentation of a web application is generated to document data representation and business logic. A task model, expressed using ConcurTaskTrees notation, covers the whole interaction specified by the end-user. A presentation and dialog model, represented in User Interface Markup Language (UIML), describe the user interface in a declarative language. The task model and UIML representation are created to support development of multi-platform user interfaces from an end-user web application. A formative evaluation of the usability of these models and representations with experienced web developers revealed that these representations were useful and easy to understand. / Master of Science

LibX is a browser extension that provides direct access to library resources. LibX enables users to add additional features to a webpage, such as placing a tutorial video on a digital library homepage. LibX achieves this ability of enhancing web pages through library applications, called LibApps. A LibApp examines a webpage, extracts and processes information of the page, and modifies the web content. It is possible to build an unlimited number of LibApps and enhance web pages in numerous ways. The developers of LibX team cannot build all possible LibApps by themselves. Hence, we decided to create an environment that allows users to create and share LibApps, thereby creating an eco-system of library applications. We developed the LibApp Builder, a cloud-based end-user programming tool that assists users in creating customized library applications with minimal effort. We designed an easy-to-understand meta-design language model with modularized, reusable components. The LibApp language model is designed to hide the complex programming details from the target audiences who are mostly non-technical users, primarily librarians. The LibApp Builder is a web-based editor that allows users to build and test LibApps in an executable environment. A built-in publishing mechanism allows users to group LibApps into packages and publish them in AtomPub format. Any user can directly reuse or adapt published components as required. Two error checking mechanisms have been built into the LibApp Builder viz., type checking and semantic checking to enhance user experience and reduce debugging effort. Additionally, the web interface displays help tooltips to guide users through the process of building a LibApp. We adhered to good software engineering practices such as the agile development model and the model-view-controller design paradigm. The LibApp Builder is built with the ZK AJAX framework and provides a rich interactive user interface. The LibApp Builder is integrated with an optimized full-text, fuzzy search engine and facilitates faceted search by exploiting the BaseX XML database system and XPath/XQuery processor. Users can locate and reuse existing language components through the search interface. To summarize, the LibApp Builder is a community platform for librarians to create, adapt and share LibApps. / Master of Science