Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

--- project_qfwfq_notes [2011-08-25 16:12] – yaxu
+++ project_qfwfq_notes [2011-08-26 11:04] – yaxu
@@ Line 74: / Line 74: @@
 ==Summary==
-By 2020 computer interfaces will have become embedded into the environment, following continued research and development in pervasive, ubiquitous and cyber-physical systems.  To date these interfaces have largely been considered in terms of analog interactions; direct manipulation through tangible, touchscreen and gestural interfaces.  Higher-order interfaces, including programming languages, have been left out of the picture.
-However datasets continue to grow across fields of research and practice, already surpassing the practical limits of end-user programming tools such as Excel in some fields.  Biology is a notable example, which has spawned the new field of bioinformatics to cope with the influx of data.
+By 2020 computer interfaces will have become embedded into the human environment, following continued research and development in pervasive, ubiquitous and cyber-physical systems.  Furthermore datasets will have continued to grow in size and complexity across fields of research and practice, surpassing the practical limits of current end-user programming tools such as tabular spreadsheets. These limits have already been broken in Biology, which has spawned the new field of Bioinformatics in reaction, and other fields are undergoing the same process of change (which ones? Digital Humanities? Computational Musicology? ...).
-As datasets continue to grow in size and complexity across fields, there will be opportunities for developing hybrid systems which take advantage of new modes of embodied HCI, but applied to higher order interactions.  Formal linguistic abstractions which allow users to understand and process large datasets can be integrated with visuospatial manipulations, allowing knowledge and processes to be grounded in bodily interactions.  This enrichment of formal programming languages is analoguous to the integration between prosodic and linguistic aspects of speech.
+Growing datasets allow greater insights, but only where practitioners take a computational approach, dealing with data at a higher level of abstraction than is currently conventional.  In other words, practitioners need to become end-user programmers, working with data by describing higher order operations over them.
-The fundamental scientific problem to solve in order to implement the technology and get the benefits by then is in how to map the abstractions of formal language to embodied interactions.  Steps towards this goal is already well developed in object oriented and visual programming, but needs to be extended and applied using new interfaces embedded into the environment.
+The opportunity lies then in developing novel end-user programming environments which take advantage of new modes of embodied HCI; environments designed for end-users outside of traditional computer science and software engineering contexts.   To date embedded interfaces have largely been considered in terms of analog interactions; direct manipulation through tangible, touchscreen and gestural interfaces.  However the present proposal is that new developments in interaction design may also be applied to higher order interactions, allowing professionals to deal better with upscaling of data complexity.  Approaches to this have already been partially explored in the literature (cite the Self language, visual programming languages/tabletop interfaces), but await interaction technology which is already emerging.
-Our research questions are: How can linguistic interfaces be integrated with emerging, embodied modes of human-computer interaction?  How can we apply these hybrid interfaces to create novel approaches to the design of environments for end user programmers?
+This opportunity centres around the integration of formal programming languages with visuospatial perception, cognition and gesture.  This may seem uncanny but is analogous to human modes of natural communication, for example the integration between prosodic and linguistic aspects of speech. (Cite cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor and dual coding theory)
-The design of these language environments needs to be led by the needs of end user programmers from the start, through brainstorming, workflow analysis, leading to workshops and experiments to explore and evaluate the design prototypes which result.  As part of this process, all assumptions in the design of programming language environments need to be identified and reconsidered in the light of emerging technologies.
+The fundamental scientific problem to solve in order to implement the technology and get the benefits by 2020 lies in the mapping between the abstractions of formal language and the embodied interactions which emerging technologies provide. Some steps towards this goal are already well developed in object oriented and visual programming, but need to be extended and applied in the changing contexts of emerging technologies.
-The challenges we will be facing are that the needs of end user programmers differ strongly from the computer scientists and professional programmers who generally lead the design of programming languages.  By taking a scientifically rigourous and agile approach to the design, with close involvement of prospective end users, we offer an alternative to the lone visionary or massive crawling consensus approach to programming language design.
+Our research questions are: How can linguistic interfaces be integrated with emerging, embodied modes of human-computer interaction? How can we apply these hybrid interfaces to create novel approaches to the design of environments for end user programmers?  How can this benefit the cross-disciplinary requirement to understand and process large datasets?
+The design of new environments for higher order interaction needs to be led by the needs of end user programmers from the start, through brainstorming and workflow analysis, leading to workshops and experiments to explore and evaluate the design prototypes which result. As part of this process, assumptions in the design of programming language environments need to be enumerated and reconsidered in the light of emerging technologies.
+The needs of end user programmers differ strongly from the computer scientists and professional programmers who generally lead the design of programming languages. Escaping from established norms in software development, to establish a novel approach to the very different and changing requirements of end-user programming will therefore be a major challenge. By taking a scientifically rigorous and agile approach to the design, with close involvement of prospective end users, we offer a radical alternative to the lone visionary or massive crawling consensus approach to programming language design, towards radical, high impact ends.
+There are risks in taking a cross-domain approach, as research into Visual Programming and Tangible Interfaces have previously only seen success in particular specialised domains. However the possibilities for finding commonalities in problems surrounding information processing across domains brings promise of huge returns.
-There are risks in taking a cross-domain approach, as research into Visual Programming and Tangible Interfaces have largely only seen success in particular specialised domains.  However the possibilities for finding commonalities in problems surrounding information processing across domains brings the promise of huge returns.
 ==Links==