Thursday, September 8, 2011

A Framework for Robust and Flexible Handling of Inputs with Uncertainty

Reference Information:
A Framework for Robust and Flexible Handling of Inputs with Uncertainty.
Julia Schwarz, Scott E. Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff, Andrew D. Wilson
Presented at UIST'10, October 3-6, 2010, New York, New York, USA



Authors:
Julia Schwarz is a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon's CHI lab.
Scott Hudson is a professor at Carnegie Mellons CHI lab
Jennifer Mankoff is an Associate Professor in Carnegie Mellons CHI lab.
Andrew Wilson is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research.


Summary:
Hypothesis:
Create a process to more effectively handle new input with uncertainty in a easily manipulative fashion.


Methods:
The authors demonstrated their framework through six different studies. The first half of these was designed to test discrepancies in what a user is interacting with via touch. The next two tried to create smarter text entry and the final one, improved UI for the motor impaired.


Results:
The selection of buttons was a success. The users were able to easily adapt to the new interface and any discrepancies in interactions was helped along by the system. The next set of tests showd that very little extra work would be needed to implement something like that text input. The final test showed a great decrease in the number of errors compared to the original.


Contents:
One of the big focuses of this paper is uncertainty, and how current systems do not manage it effectively or correctly. This is proved by the development of a system that seeks to manage these more effectively and several accompanying tests that prove it does. It does this in a way by listing each interaction in a list and then setting up a scoring system in order to determine how to correctly resolve the conflicts of input that arise.


Discussion:
I think this is a great paper. In particular i believe that the test on helping the motor impaired is a great example of the real life applications that this type of system could have. While i do believe that this paper was held back by the fact that it only looked at six different tests, I am convinced that if it were further elaborated and researched that this would be a great piece of technology. It really gave a good insight into how errors in input are handled in touchscreen environments and the problems that exist with those errors. Overall I think that Is would like to read further on the research done on this particular piece of technology.

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