Krzysztof Gajos

SUPPLE++: Automatically Generating User Interfaces Adapted To Users' Motor And Vision Capabilities

Most of today's GUIs are designed for the typical, able-bodied user; atypical users are, for the most part, left to adapt as best they can, perhaps using specialized assistive technologies as an aid. We have developed an alternative approach: SUPPLE++ automatically generates interfaces which are tailored to an individual's motor capabilities and can be easily adjusted to accommodate varying vision capabilities. SUPPLE++ models users' motor capabilities based on a onetime motor performance test and uses this model in an optimization process, generating a personalized interface.

In a study comparing this approach to baseline interfaces, our results show that users with motor impairments were much faster and strongly preferred SUPPLE++ ability-based interfaces. Specifically, motor-impared participants were 26.4% faster using interfaces generated by SUPPLE++. They made 73% fewer errors, strongly preferred those interfaces to the manufacturers' defaults, and found them more efficient, easier to use, and much less physically tiring. These findings indicate that rather than requiring some users with motor impairments to adapt themselves to software using separate assistive technologies, software can now adapt itself to the capabilities of its users. more >>

Mapping The Design Space Of Adaptive User Interfaces

For decades, researchers have presented different adaptive user interfaces and discussed the pros and cons of adaptation on task performance and satisfaction. Little research, however, has been directed at isolating and understanding those aspects of adaptive interfaces which make some of them successful and others not. We have designed and implemented three adaptive graphical interfaces and evaluated them in two experiments along with a nonadaptive baseline. In this paper we synthesize our results with previous work and discuss how different design choices and interactions affect the success of adaptive graphical user interfaces. more >>

This project is done in collaboration with the VIBE Group at Microsoft Research.

ARNAULD: Preference Elicitation For Interface Optimization

Recent years have revealed a trend towards increasing use of optimization as a method for automatically designing aspects of an interface's interaction with the user. In most cases, this optimization may be thought of as decision-theoretic -- the objective is to minimize the expected cost of a user's interactions or (equivalently) to maximize the user's expected utility. While decision-theoretic optimization provides a powerful, flexible, and principled approach for these systems, the quality of the resulting solution is completely dependent on the accuracy of the underlying utility or cost function. Unfortunately, determining the correct utility function is a complex, time-consuming, and error-prone task. While domainspecific learning techniques have been used occasionally, most practitioners parameterize the utility function and then engage in a laborious and unreliable process of hand-tuning. more >>

SUPPLE: Automatically Generating Adaptive User Interfaces

SUPPLE is an application and device-independent system, currently under development at University of Washington, that automatically generates user interfaces for a wide variety of display devices. SUPPLE uses decision-theoretic optimization to render an interface from an abstract functional specification and an interchangeable device model. SUPPLE can use information from the user model to automatically adapt user interfaces to different tasks and work styles while also prividing extensive customization mechanisms that allow for modifications to the appearance, organization and navigational structure of the user interface. more >>

Alfred: End User Empowerment in Human Centered Pervasive Computing

Alfred is an electronic butler for Intelligent Environments. Alfred allows an end user to "program" the system by telling it the name of a new goal, demonstrating one or more plans for achieving that goal, and finally telling the system the conditions under which it would prefer one plan to another. Similarly, the user can name events that arise in the environment and tell the system what goals should be posted when those events arise. Each of these steps can be done by simple verbal commands or other natural forms of interaction. End users, in effect, record "macros" which, are executed adaptively and reactively. more >>

FIRE: The Friendly Information Retrieval Engine

FIRE is a multimodal interface for information retrieval deployed in the Intelligent Room at the MIT AI Lab. FIRE extracts all the category terms related to the search query and uses entropy to generate questions that would quickly allow the user to disambiguate her query and arrive at a small set of relevant documents. FIRE presents information over several large displays in the Intelligent Room and supports both speech and gesture input for more natural interaction. more >>

Rascal: A High-Level Resource Manager For Smart Environments

Rascal is a high-level resource management system for the Intelligent Room Project, that addresses the problem of the numerous applications competing for limited physical resources. Rascal performs the service mapping and and uses constrained search for arbitration among different requesters. more >>

A comparison of area pointing and goal crossing for people with and without motor impairments

Prior work has highlighted the challenges faced by people with motor impairments when trying to acquire on-screen targets using a mouse or trackball. Two reasons for this are the difficulty of positioning the mouse cursor within a confined area, and the challenge of accurately executing a click. We hypothesize that both of these difficulties with area pointing may be alleviated in a different target acquisition paradigm called "goal crossing." In goal crossing, users do not acquire a confined area, but instead pass over a target line. Although goal crossing has been studied for able-bodied users, its suitability for people with motor impairments is unknown. We conducted a study with 16 people, 8 of whom had motor impairments, using mice and trackballs to do area pointing and goal crossing. Our results indicate that Fitts' law models both techniques for both user groups. Furthermore, although throughput for able-bodied users was higher for area pointing than for goal crossing (4.72 vs. 3.61 bits/s), the opposite was true for users with motor impairments (2.34 vs. 2.88 bits/s), suggesting that goal crossing may be viable for them. However, error rates were higher for goal crossing than for area pointing under a strict definition of crossing errors (6.23% vs. 1.94%). Subjective results indicate a preference for goal crossing among motor-impaired users. This work provides the empirical foundation from which to pursue the design of crossing-based interfaces as accessible alternatives to pointing-based interfaces. more >>

Opportunity Knocks: a System to Provide Cognitive Assistance with Transportation Services

Opportunity Knocks (OK) is an automated transportation routing system, whose goal is to improve the efficiency, safety and independence of individuals with mild cognitive disabilities. OK is implemented on a combination of a Bluetooth sensor beacon that broadcasts GPS data, a GPRS-enabled cell-phone, and remote activity inference software. The system uses a novel inference engine that does not require users to explicitly provide information about the start or ending points of their journeys; instead this information is learned from users' past behavior. more >>

Look-to-Talk: A Gaze-Aware Interface in a Collaborative Environment

"Look-to-talk" is a gaze-aware interface for directing a spoken utterance to a software agent in a multiuser collaborative environment. Through a prototype and a Wizard-of-Oz (WOz) experiment, we showed that "look-totalk" is indeed a natural alternative to speech and other paradigms.