程序員常利用現有的應用程序介面建立新程序，但遇到的困難是花很多時間去找尋并學習適當的應用程序介面 [8]。在這篇論文中，我們提出新方向幫助對某應用程序介面比較陌生的程序員：以短語搜尋應用程序介面連通子圖。我們以一大圖表達應用程序介面的調用，當用家提交一組文字短語后，便能從這大圖中找出一個符合需要的最理想連通子圖。 / 這新方向的挑戰是簡單的子圖搜尋需要很大的搜尋空間。我們提出兩組機制改良了一套現有的貪婪子圖搜尋算法，以此找出一個其節點與搜尋短語的文字相近的連通子圖。另外，這套現有的貪婪子圖搜尋算法需要很短的圖節點之間的最短路徑計算時間，我們提出了一套空間效率高的索引，能較快的找出節點間的精確最短路徑。從實驗中，我們通過兩組現實生活中的搜尋數據比較了此新方法與一最新式的程序碼建議方法Portfolio [19]，發現兩組數據的平均F₁-Measure能分別有效地提高了64%與36%。 / Reusing APIs of existing libraries is a common practice during software development, but searching suitable APIs and their usages can be time-consuming [8]. There have been studies to help users nd usages of APIs given names of functions. In this paper, we study a new and more practical approach to help users nd usages of APIs given only simple text phrases expressed in natural language, when users have limited knowledge about an API library. We model API invocations as an API graph and aim to nd an optimum connected subgraph that meets users’ search needs. / The problem is challenging since the search space in an API graph is very huge. We start with a greedy subgraph search algorithm which returns a connected subgraph containing nodes with high textual similarity to the query phrases. Two renement techniques are proposed to improve the quality of the returned subgraph. Furthermore, as the greedy subgraph search algorithm relies on online query of shortest path between two graph nodes, we propose a space-effcient compressed shortest path indexing scheme that can eciently recover the exact shortest path. We conduct extensive experiments to show that the proposed subgraph search approach for API recommendation is very eective in that it boosts the average F₁-measure of the state-of-the-art approach, Portfolio [19], on two groups of real-life queries by 64% and 36% respectively. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Chan, Wing Kwan. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-62). / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.iii / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Motivation & Challenges --- p.2 / Chapter 1.2 --- Contributions --- p.4 / Chapter 1.3 --- Organization of Thesis --- p.5 / Chapter 2 --- Related Works --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1 --- Keyword Search in Graphs --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2 --- Team Formation in Expert Network --- p.8 / Chapter 2.3 --- API/Code Recommendation --- p.10 / Chapter 3 --- Problem Statement & Proposed Approach --- p.12 / Chapter 3.1 --- Problem Statement --- p.12 / Chapter 3.2 --- API Subgraph Search --- p.15 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- A Greedy Subgraph Search Algorithm --- p.16 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Selecting Node with High Textual Similarity --- p.19 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Handling Multiple Shortest Paths Problem --- p.21 / Chapter 3.2.4 --- Time Complexity --- p.24 / Chapter 3.2.5 --- Approximation Ratio --- p.25 / Chapter 3.3 --- Class-Only Path Indexing --- p.25 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Three Indexing Structures --- p.27 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Exact Path Recovery --- p.28 / Chapter 3.3.3 --- Space Complexity --- p.30 / Chapter 3.4 --- Alternative Approaches --- p.31 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Enhanced Steiner Tree --- p.31 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Finding R-clique --- p.32 / Chapter 4 --- Experiments --- p.35 / Chapter 4.1 --- Effectiveness - Among Subgraph Searching Algorithms --- p.35 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- Dataset --- p.35 / Chapter 4.1.2 --- Results --- p.36 / Chapter 4.2 --- Effectiveness - Between Two API Recommendations --- p.38 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Query Formulation --- p.39 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Results --- p.41 / Chapter 4.3 --- Effciency - Runtime --- p.44 / Chapter 4.4 --- Indexing Comparison Class Graph Vs. Full Graph --- p.46 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Runtime & Memory --- p.46 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- Gain Score --- p.48 / Chapter 4.5 --- A Comparison with Finding R-Clique --- p.49 / Chapter 4.6 --- Threats to Validity --- p.50 / Chapter 5 --- Conclusion & Future Works --- p.55 / Chapter 5.1 --- Conclusion --- p.55 / Chapter 5.2 --- Future Works --- p.56 / Bibliography --- p.59

Smartphones and tablets are increasingly ubiquitous, and many users rely on multiple mobile devices to accommodate work, personal, and geographic mobility needs. Pervasive access to always-on mobile computing has created new security and privacy concerns for mobile devices that often force users to carry multiple devices to meet those needs. The volume and popularity of mobile devices has commingled hardware and software design, and created tightly vertically integrated platforms that lock users into a single, vendor controlled ecosystem. My thesis is that lightweight mechanisms can be added to commodity operating systems to enable multiple virtual phones or tablets to run at the same time on a physical smartphone or tablet device, and to enable apps from multiple mobile platforms, such as iOS and Android, to run together on the same physical device, all while maintaining the low-latency and responsiveness expected of modern mobile devices. This dissertation presents two lightweight operating systems mechanisms, virtualization and binary compatibility, that enable multi-persona mobile computing. First, we present Cells, a mobile virtualization architecture enabling multiple virtual phones, or personas, to run simultaneously on the same physical cellphone in a secure and isolated manner. Cells introduces device namespaces that allow apps to run in a virtualized environment while still leveraging native devices such as GPUs to provide accelerated graphics. Second, we present Cycada, an operating system compatibility architecture that runs applications built for different mobile ecosystems, iOS and Android, together on a single Android device. Cycada introduces kernel-level code adaptation and diplomats to simplify binary compatibility support by reusing existing operating system code and unmodified frameworks and libraries. Both Cells and Cycada have been implemented in Android, and can run multiple Android virtual phones, and a mix of iOS and Android apps on the same device with good performance. Because mobile computing has become increasingly important, we also present a new way to teach operating systems in a mobile-centric way that incorporates the concepts of geographic mobility, sensor data acquisition, and resource-constrained design considerations.

A map is a big multi-scale information space. The size of a computer display, however, is limited. Users of digital maps often need to repeatedly resize and reposition the map to seek information. These repeated and excess interactions mar the user experience, and create bottlenecks for efficient information processing. We introduce personalized navigation instruments, a class of navigation instruments that leverage personal important spatial entities (e.g., landmarks and routes) to tackle navigation challenges in map user interfaces. Specifically, we contribute the following three instruments, each of which embodies a novel research idea: 1) Personalized Compass (P-Compass) is a multi-needle compass that extends the concept of a conventional compass to help users establish a reference frame. P-Compass localizes an unknown reference point by visualizing its relationship with respect to landmarks. P-Compass leverages what a user knows to help them figure out what they do not know. 2) SpaceTokens are interactive map widgets that represent locations, and help users see and link locations rapidly. With SpaceTokens, users can use locations directly as controls to manipulate a map, or building blocks to link with other locations. SpaceTokens make locations first-class citizens of map interaction. 3) SpaceBar associates a simple linear scrollbar with a complex nonlinear route, thus facilitates efficient route comprehension and interaction. SpaceBar is akin to a scrollbar for a route. We prototyped these three instruments in a custom smartphone application, used the application regularly in daily life, and validated our design in two formal studies. While maps are the focus in this dissertation, our ideas need not be limited to maps. For example, we have prototyped P-Compass with Google Street View and a 3D virtual earth tour application. We conclude this dissertation with several directions for future work, such as AR/VR and personalized spatial information user interfaces involving sound, gestures, and speech.

Multimodal systems can represent and manipulate semantics from different human communication modalities at different levels of abstraction, in which multimodal integration is required to integrate the semantics from two or more modalities and generate an interpretable output for further processing. In this work, we develop a framework pertaining to automatic cross-modality semantic integration of multimodal user interactions using speech and pen gestures. It begins by generating partial interpretations for each input event as a ranked list of hypothesized semantics. We devise a cross-modality semantic integration procedure to align the pair of hypothesis lists between every speech input event and every pen input event in a multimodal expression. This is achieved by the Viterbi alignment that enforces the temporal ordering and semantic compatibility constraints of aligned events. The alignment enables generation of a unimodal paraphrase that is semantically equivalent to the original multimodal expression. Our experiments are based on a multimodal corpus in the navigation domain. Application of the integration procedure to manual transcripts shows that correct unimodal paraphrases are generated for around 96% of the multimodal inquiries in the test set. However, if we replace this with automatic speech and pen recognition transcripts, the performance drops to around 53% of the test set. In order to address this issue, we devised the hypothesis rescoring procedure that evaluates all candidates of cross-modality integration derived from multiple recognition hypotheses from each modality. The rescoring function incorporates the integration score, N-best purity of recognized spoken locative references (SLRs), as well as distances between coordinates of recognized pen gestures and their interpreted icons on the map. Application of cross-modality hypothesis rescoring improved the performance to generate correct unimodal paraphrases for over 72% of the multimodal inquiries of the test set. / We have also performed a latent semantic modeling (LSM) for interpreting multimodal user input consisting of speech and pen gestures. Each modality of a multimodal input carries semantics related to a domain-specific task goal (TG). Each input is annotated manually with a TG based on the semantics. Multimodal input usually has a simpler syntactic structure and different order of semantic constituents from unimodal input. Therefore, we proposed to use LSM to derive the latent semantics from the multimodal inputs. In order to achieve this, we characterized the cross-modal integration pattern as 3-tuple multimodal terms taking into account SLR, pen gesture type and their temporal relation. The correlation term matrix is then decomposed using singular value decomposition (SVD) to derive the latent semantics automatically. TG inference on disjoint test set based on the latent semantics achieves accurate performance for 99% of the multimodal inquiries. / Hui, Pui Yu. / Adviser: Helen Meng. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-02, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 294-306). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

Citizen science is a collaboration between members of the public and scientific experts. Within the environmental realm – where citizen science is particularly well expressed – this collaboration often concerns members of the public involved in scientific data gathering and processing at a large-scale to generate data that can subsequently be used by the scientists to improve scientific knowledge, understanding and theories. As these collaborations are increasingly being mediated via digital technologies, the overall aim of this thesis was to explore the potential of user interface design for citizen science, within the context of environmental sciences while using an established citizen science platform, BeeWatch. Particular attention was paid to the potential of such interface development to foster a move from situations of 'expert-novice' to progressive forms of collaborations and participation in citizen science. The overall conclusion from this thesis is that interactive technologies can lead to the development of expertise for biological recording – and thus, narrowing the gap between expert and novice – as well as progressing the level of participation within and fostering behaviour changes for conservation action.

書名中的[hu], 字形為: '點'在上, '尸'在下. / Shu ming zhong de [hu], zi xing wei: 'dian' zai shang, 'shi' zai xia. / Meng, Qiang. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-99). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.iv / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- User Interaction in Medical Applications --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- UI Technologies and Challenges for Medical Systems --- p.2 / Chapter 1.3 --- Main Contributions of the Thesis --- p.5 / Chapter 1.4 --- Thesis Organization --- p.8 / Chapter 2 --- Interactive Vascular Designing and Modeling --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction and Related Works --- p.10 / Chapter 2.2 --- Vascular Designing and Modeling System Overview --- p.12 / Chapter 2.3 --- Data Structure for Vascular Tree --- p.13 / Chapter 2.4 --- VesselEdit 一 A Freehand Vessel Skeleton Generator --- p.17 / Chapter 2.4.1 --- 2D scribble to create 3D vessel tree --- p.17 / Chapter 2.4.2 --- 3D Skeleton Editing --- p.18 / Chapter 2.5 --- Feature Point Selection and Spline Segment Construction --- p.18 / Chapter 2.5.1 --- Feature Point Update --- p.18 / Chapter 2.5.2 --- Feature Point Selection --- p.20 / Chapter 2.5.3 --- Spline Segment Construction --- p.20 / Chapter 2.6 --- Vascular Tree Visualization --- p.22 / Chapter 2.6.1 --- Curve Frame --- p.22 / Chapter 2.6.2 --- Bifurcation Frame --- p.24 / Chapter 2.6.3 --- Frame Junction and Blending --- p.25 / Chapter 2.6.4 --- Transparency Enhancement --- p.27 / Chapter 2.7 --- Modeling Case Study and Results --- p.28 / Chapter 2.7.1 --- Normal cases --- p.28 / Chapter 2.7.2 --- Pathological Cases for Vascular Interventional Simulation --- p.28 / Chapter 2.7.3 --- Timing Experiments --- p.30 / Chapter 3 --- Vascular Intervention Simulator System --- p.32 / Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction to Vascular Intervention Simulator --- p.33 / Chapter 3.2 --- Overview of the endovascSim System --- p.34 / Chapter 3.3 --- Guidewire Sensing Hardware Interface Design --- p.36 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Catheter & Guidewire Motion Sensing Requirements --- p.36 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Motion Sensing with Trackball Mouse --- p.38 / Chapter 3.3.3 --- Multi-Mouse Device for Catheter & Guidewire Motion Sens- ing --- p.39 / Chapter 4 --- User Interaction for Visible Human Slice Navigation --- p.42 / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction and Related Works --- p.43 / Chapter 4.2 --- VH Slice Navigation System Overview --- p.44 / Chapter 4.3 --- VH Data Compression --- p.45 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- VH Data Down Sampling --- p.46 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- Bounding Box Compression --- p.47 / Chapter 4.3.3 --- DXT Compression --- p.51 / Chapter 4.3.4 --- Compressed Visible Human Data Format --- p.53 / Chapter 4.4 --- Slice Pixels Calculation --- p.55 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Pixels Color Computation --- p.55 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- CPU-GPU Cooperative Computation Framework --- p.58 / Chapter 4.4.3 --- CPU-GPU Computation Balancing Method --- p.60 / Chapter 4.5 --- User Interaction Design --- p.63 / Chapter 4.5.1 --- Slice navigation and haptic rendering --- p.64 / Chapter 4.5.2 --- Software UI layout and slice bookmarking --- p.66 / Chapter 4.6 --- System Implementation and Experimental Result --- p.68 / Chapter 5 --- Volume Data Exploration with Tangible Handheld Device --- p.71 / Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction and Related Works --- p.72 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- Introduction to Our Exploration System --- p.72 / Chapter 5.1.2 --- Ralated Works --- p.74 / Chapter 5.2 --- System Overview --- p.75 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- Hardware --- p.76 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- Server Program --- p.77 / Chapter 5.2.3 --- Client Program --- p.78 / Chapter 5.3 --- "Volumetric Data, Exploration and Annotation" --- p.78 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Volume Data Manipulation --- p.79 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- "Volume Data, Slicing" --- p.80 / Chapter 5.3.3 --- "Volume Data, Visual Annotation" --- p.82 / Chapter 5.3.4 --- Volume Data Measurement --- p.84 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusion and Future Directions --- p.86 / Chapter 6.1 --- Conclusion --- p.86 / Chapter 6.2 --- Future Works --- p.88 / Publication List --- p.90 / Bibliography --- p.92

Ko, Hoi Fung. / "November 2011." / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-125). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.iv / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Motivation and Objective --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Contribution --- p.9 / Chapter 1.3 --- Organization of the Thesis --- p.11 / Chapter 2 --- Background Study --- p.12 / Chapter 2.1 --- Review on 3D Tracking Techniques --- p.13 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Mechanical base --- p.13 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Acoustic base --- p.14 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Magnetic base --- p.15 / Chapter 2.1.4 --- Inertial base --- p.17 / Chapter 2.1.5 --- Optical base --- p.18 / Chapter 2.2 --- Summary --- p.19 / Chapter 3 --- Theory and Methodology --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1 --- Design Framework --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Problem Definition --- p.22 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Concept --- p.22 / Chapter 3.2 --- Finding the orientation --- p.23 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Measuring the rotation --- p.23 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Sensor fusion --- p.26 / Chapter 3.3 --- Finding the translational motion --- p.32 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Translational motion --- p.32 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Laser speckle pattern --- p.35 / Chapter 4 --- Implementation --- p.38 / Chapter 4.1 --- Hardware Configuration --- p.38 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- Accelerometer --- p.39 / Chapter 4.1.2 --- Gyroscope --- p.40 / Chapter 4.1.3 --- Digital Compass --- p.41 / Chapter 4.1.4 --- Optical flow chip --- p.42 / Chapter 4.1.5 --- Microcontroller --- p.43 / Chapter 4.2 --- Software Implementation --- p.45 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- On the Microcontroller --- p.45 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- On the PC --- p.47 / Chapter 5 --- Experimental Results --- p.50 / Chapter 5.1 --- Experiments on orientation estimation --- p.50 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- Overall Experimental Setup --- p.51 / Chapter 5.1.2 --- Experiment 1: The improvement of static accuracy by utilising two-axis measurement method --- p.52 / Chapter 5.1.3 --- Experiment 2: The improvement of the dynamic response with Kalman filter and gyroscope --- p.55 / Chapter 5.1.4 --- Experiments 3: The static accuracy of the compass module --- p.59 / Chapter 5.1.5 --- Experiment 4: The dynamic accuracy of the compass module with Kalman filter and gyroscope --- p.63 / Chapter 5.1.6 --- Experiment 5: Kalman filter tuning --- p.64 / Chapter 5.2 --- Experiment on Translational accuracy --- p.67 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- Experiment 6: The relation between the output of the chip and the actual displacement --- p.68 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- Experiment 7: Tracking ability with different materials --- p.70 / Chapter 6 --- The Haptic module --- p.73 / Chapter 6.1 --- Introduction --- p.73 / Chapter 6.2 --- Theory of operation --- p.75 / Chapter 6.3 --- Implementation --- p.77 / Chapter 6.4 --- Experiment and evaluation --- p.80 / Chapter 6.4.1 --- Experiment 1: Calibration of the spring . --- p.80 / Chapter 6.4.2 --- Experiment 2: Latency on force output . . --- p.82 / Chapter 6.5 --- Possible applications --- p.85 / Chapter 7 --- 3D input for immersive display --- p.87 / Chapter 7.1 --- Methodology --- p.88 / Chapter 7.1.1 --- Tracking method --- p.89 / Chapter 7.2 --- Implementation --- p.96 / Chapter 7.2.1 --- Hardware setup --- p.96 / Chapter 7.2.2 --- Software implementation --- p.97 / Chapter 7.2.3 --- Setup Calibration --- p.98 / Chapter 7.2.4 --- Laser Spot Detection --- p.99 / Chapter 7.2.5 --- Pose Estimation --- p.100 / Chapter 7.2.6 --- State Tracking --- p.102 / Chapter 7.3 --- Experiment --- p.105 / Chapter 7.3.1 --- Experiment on translational motion --- p.105 / Chapter 7.3.2 --- Experiment on rotational motion --- p.106 / Chapter 7.3.3 --- Experiment on tracking ability --- p.108 / Chapter 7.4 --- Application --- p.109 / Chapter 8 --- Limitations and Discussions --- p.110 / Chapter 8.1 --- The limitation of the orientation tracking module --- p.110 / Chapter 8.2 --- The limitation of the translational motion tracking module --- p.111 / Chapter 8.3 --- The limitation of the haptic module --- p.112 / Chapter 8.4 --- The limitation of the tracking cube setup --- p.113 / Chapter 8.5 --- Comparison of the result of utilizing simple moving average filter and Kalman filter --- p.114 / Chapter 8.6 --- Comparison with other devices on the market --- p.115 / Chapter 8.7 --- Future work --- p.115 / Chapter 9 --- Conclusion --- p.117 / Bibliography --- p.121

Orientador: Edberto Ferneda / Banca: Carlos Cândido de Almeida / Banca: Walter Moreira / Banca: Licínio Gomes Roque / Banca: Luciana Maria Vieira Pöttker / Resumo: As interfaces de busca disponíveis no contexto da Web e dos repositórios digitais, apesar da importância que possuem em função da necessidade cada vez maior de recuperação de informação relevante e útil, tiveram mudanças pouco significativas nos últimos anos em relação à forma de interação com o usuário. Além disso, apresentam inúmeros problemas relacionados principalmente à dependência de conhecimento em relação ao assunto investigado, às dificuldades em expressar uma necessidade de informação por meio de palavras-chave, à ambiguidade da linguagem e à composição inadequada de termos de busca. Com base neste panorama, o estudo desenvolvido nesta tese teve como objetivo agregar os recursos oferecidos pelas ontologias e pela hermenêutica às interfaces de busca, na tentativa de sugerir melhorias que pudessem minimizar os problemas observados. Neste sentido, foi possível propor um modelo de interface de busca e recuperação de informação baseado nos princípios da hermenêutica e na utilização de ontologias, com funcionalidades projetadas para proporcionar uma melhor interação do usuário com o sistema e facilitar a análise da similaridade existente entre os documentos e a interpretação de um corpus documental. A metodologia adotada para alcançar os objetivos propostos contou com pesquisa exploratória e aplicada, que ofereceu o aporte teórico necessário para a fundamentar o estudo e desenvolver o modelo proposto. Os resultados da avaliação de usabilidade realizada por meio dos protót... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Searching interfaces available in the context of the Web and digital repositories, despite their importance due to the increasing need to retrieve relevant and useful information, have had few significant changes in the last years regarding mainly the interaction mode with the user. In addition, they present numerous issues related mainly to the dependence of knowledge on the subject investigated, the difficulties in expressing a need of information through keywords, the language ambiguity and the search terms inappropriate composition. Based on this scenario, the study developed in this thesis aimed to aggregate the resources offered by the ontologies and the hermeneutics to the search interfaces, in an attempt to suggest improvements that could minimize the observed faults. In this regard, it was possible to propose a search and retrieval interface model based on the principles of hermeneutics and use of ontologies, with functionalities designed to provide more excellent user interaction with the system and facilitate the analysis of the similarity between documents and interpretation of a documentary corpus. The methodology adopted to achieve the proposed objectives counted on exploratory and applied research, which offered the theoretical contribution necessary to base the study and develop the proposed model. The usability evaluation results performed using the low fidelity prototypes indicated the viability of its implementation, as well as the projected functionalities... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Doutor

The major challenge for multimedia designers is to create user experiences that enrich the reception of content, designer�s traditional reliance on intuition not ensuring audience�s interest or understanding. The developing philosophy of user-centred design argues that designers should begin from an appreciation of their audience. In design there are various positions on how to achieve this, ranging from traditional market research through psychological, ethnographic, anthropological and sociological research to the direct involvement of users in the design process. This study draws on established knowledge about the cognitive processes, psychological motivations and preferences of user groups to advance a model for better-targeted and more effective design. In particular, it uses Howard Gardener�s multiple intelligences theory to extend design thinking. Where a specific audience is apparent multiple intelligences theory implies that (1) the interface should match user�s perceptual tools, cognitive styles and responses and (2) there is far greater scope than presently recognized to vary the design of the graphical user interface. The research explores how interactive multimedia can harness the �language of vision� (Johannes Itten) for certain audiences, in this case Taiwanese drawing students aiming to enter tertiary art and design programs where high academic drawing skills are an important selection criterion. The high �visual intelligence� of the target audience indicates their heightened capacity to process visual concepts and elements. The application of Gardner�s ideas is a speculative one, based on hypothesis and the formulation of an experimental graphical user interface environment built around predominantly visual cues. The designed outcome incorporates knowledge and understanding that is widely applicable to GUI design, challenging designers to develop multimedia products with innovative, imaginative design approaches that cater for the different needs and interests of users where the audience is a specific and identifiable one.

This study was primarily an empirical investigation in the field of Information Systems (IS) and the related fields of occupational psychology and management. It focussed specifically on the concept of user satisfaction, the construct of cognitive style as applied to users and systems analysts, and their interrelationships. Prior studies were found rarely to investigate the changes in user satisfaction during system usage. Further, any reference to cognitive style in the IS literature proved to be sparse, open to question and discouraging in terms of its value. By developing and using a new instrument, the System Satisfaction Schedule, or SSS, the present study was able empirically to demonstrate clear patterns of changing user satisfaction during system usage. These were demonstrated, both as a general trend and in terms of its relationship to the cognitive styles of the key players (analyst and user) involved in system development and maintenance. Cognitive style was measured using Kirton's Adaption-innovation Inventory, or KAI. This study was thus able to suggest new rules for system development based on the assessments of the cognitive styles of both users and systems analysts. These rules focussed primarily on simple team choice: which analyst to put with which user. However, inferences for larger system development teams were drawn and suggestions for further research duly made. The present study thus also contributes to the successful practice of system development. To give effect to the above, this study set out to investigate empirically the way user satisfaction changes over 1½ to 2 years of system usage and, as mentioned above, the way user satisfaction is impacted by the cognitive styles of the user and the systems analyst. Most significantly, relationships were studied between user satisfaction and the difference in cognitive style between the analyst and user. It was found that user satisfaction generally rises linearly with usage, and that while the size of the analyst user cognitive differential does negatively impact user satisfaction over most of the time of system use, this effect is only particularly strong for two short periods; one within the first four months of usage and the other in the last three. From these results the new rules for system development mentioned above, followed. In terms of the decline of users' mean perceived severities of individual problems, the exponential decay and reciprocal models were found to fit the data the best. This study developed a new model for the motivation to use, develop or maintain a system (the Mechanical Model), based on its own results and Herzberg's two-factor theory of motivation. In this, Herzberg's hygiene factors have been replaced with the concept of dissatisfiers. These are measured as expressions of dissatisfaction as and when they occur. Their use removes the researcher's need, when designing user satisfaction instruments, to speculate on complete lists of factors which may satisfy users, and which may date as technology and other contextual factors change.