SUPPLE: Automatic Generation of Personalizable User Interfaces

Last updated: September 25, 2005

September 22, 2005: The SUPPLE toolkit is now available!

September 4, 2005: We are finishing the paperwork that will allow us to release SUPPLE as an open source toolkit. We expect the process to take several more weeks. Meanwhile, you are invited to join the supple-users mailing list. We will post an annoucement on it as soon as the toolkit is ready for download.

July 9, 2005: Look below for two brand new papers: our Ubicomp'05 papers summarizes a pilot user study contrasting two interface adaptation strategies and provides lots of technical information relevant for using Supple. Our UIST'05 paper presents a new system, Arnauld that interactively elicits user preferences for the purpose of automatically learning parameters of optimization-based systems. We have used it to automatically generate the parameters of Supple's cost functions.

The underlying vision of adaptive user interfaces; the paper describes a number of earlier projects that lead to SUPPLE as well as the basic assumptions of the SUPPLE system:

D. Weld, C. Anderson, P. Domingos, O. Etzioni, T. Lau, K. Gajos, and S. Wolfman. Automatically Personalizing User Interfaces In Proceedings of IJCAI-03. 2003.

The "original" SUPPLE paper describing the models, the casting of UI rendering into an optimization problem and the rendering algorithm:

Krzysztof Gajos and Daniel S. Weld. SUPPLE: Automatically Generating User Interfaces. In Proceedings of IUI'04. Funchal, Portugal, 2004

[Slides, Code, BibTeX, EndNote, and more]

An extended abstract from a workshop describing practical issues involved in using SUPPLE to generate user interfaces for ubicomp applications. This paper has been subsumed by our Ubicomp'05 paper.

Krzysztof Gajos and Daniel S. Weld. Automatically Generating User Interfaces For Ubiquitous Applications. In Workshop on Ubiquitous Display Environments, Nottingham, UK, 2004.

An extended abstract outlining recent progress on customization, automatic adaptation and elicitation of the parameters for the cost functions that guide the UI generation process (it has been subsumed by our Ubicomp'05 and UIST'05 papers):

Krzysztof Gajos, Raphael Hoffmann and Daniel S. Weld. Improving User Interface Personalization. In UIST'04. Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2004

Another workshop paper describing our approach to maintaining consistency in how the user interface for an application is rendered on different devices.

Krzysztof Gajos, Anthony Wu and Daniel S. Weld. Cross-Device Consistency in Automatically Generated User Interfaces. In Workshop on Multi-User and Ubiquitous User Interfaces (MU3I'05). San Diego, CA, 2005

This Ubicomp paper elaborates a number of practical issues such as the extensions ot the interface modeling language, an adaptation algorithm with a supporting user study, the customization facitlity and the implementation details including support for distributed operation.

Krzysztof Gajos, David Christianson, Raphael Hoffmann, Tal Shaked, Kiera Henning, Jing Jing Long, and Daniel S. Weld. Fast And Robust Interface Generation for Ubiquitous Applications. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UBICOMP'05). Tokyo, Japan, September, 2005.

This UIST paper presents a new system, Arnauld that interactively elicits user preferences for the purpose of automatically learning parameters of optimization-based systems. We have used it to automatically generate the parameters of SUPPLE's cost functions.

Krzysztof Gajos and Daniel S. Weld. Preference Elicitation for Interface Optimization. In Proceedings of UIST'05, Seattle, WA, USA, 2005.

[Slides, Code, BibTeX, EndNote, and more]

This paper attempts to identify those aspects of adaptive interfaces that make some of them a pleasure to work with while others are annoying hinderances. We designed three different adaptive GUIs and evaluated them in two different experiments. Finally, we synthesized our results with those of past studies and identified someof the design factors that appear to contribute the most to an adaptive interface's success.

Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Mary Czerwinski, Desney S. Tan and Daniel S. Weld. Exploring the Design Space For Adaptive Graphical User Interfaces. In Proceedings of AVI'06, Venice, Italy, 2006.

[Slides, BibTeX, EndNote, and more]

This ASSETS abstract outlines a new project that builds upon Supple and Arnauld. We are creating a system that allows non-experts to easily reparametrize the UI generator for the needs of individual users (potentially with physical or visual impairments), thus making automatic UI generation a scalable solution for providing people with interfaces custom tailored to their individual interaction needs and abilities.

Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Jing Jing Long and Daniel S. Weld Automatically Generating Custom User Interfaces for Users With Physical Disabilities In Proceedings of ASSETS'06, Portland, OR, 2006.

[Citation info, and more]

Examples

Adapting to device charactersistics

Below are examples of different interfaces for a classroom controller that SUPPLE generated for different devices. The classroom has three sets of lights (with variable brightness), an A/C system, and an LCD projector with a corresponding mechanised screen.

The classroom interface rendered for two devices with the same size: (a) a pointer-based device (b) a touch-panel device

The classroom interface rendered on a WAP cell phone simulator (Sony Ericsson T68i); the successive screen shots illustrate the steps necessary to manipulate the brightness level of one of the lights.

The classroom interface rendered in HTML for a browser running on a device with a small screen.