Seminar in Summer Term 2010

Seminar Advanced User Interface Engineering:
Model and Pattern based Approaches

Jun.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Raimund Dachselt

Tuesday, 9:00 - 11:00
Room

Seminar room G29-K058
Credits

2 SWS, ECTS-Credits: 3/4
Sprache

Communication Language: German or English

Goals

Participants of the seminar will learn how to work scientifically and how to publish their own scientific paper on a recent research topic. The goal is to write an overview paper using several publications, to peer-review it using an online conference system and to finally present and discuss the work at a simulated conference. The result will be printed and online proceedings will be published similar to a real conference. Through this seminar, students shall be acquainted with and be better prepared for their own scientific working.

Research Topics

The development of a user interface is affected by formal rules, recurring patterns and procedures. This is similar to the development of software-code, where design patterns are long known. The reuse of interface elements is important to keep interfaces consistent and to minimize effort. This problem becomes obvious in the user interface of a mobile phone for example, which is part of a manufacturer's product line. Following this example, the functionality of a device may differ, but the 'look&feel' in the interface should be preserved. As an enhancement to design patterns, model based approaches have gain in importance. In some cases the interface for a product-line is automatically generated based on a single descriptive model.
Rules and patterns are in most cases implicitly and theoretically applied within the development process of a user interface. In comparison to the field of software engineering model based approaches are quite young for user interface development. These models can include generalized tasks and elements in the interface for example, which are known as so-called task, dialog and presentation models. Design patterns contain descriptions of knowledge or 'best practice'-recommendations for example, which can be applied to new projects.
These pattern-driven and model-based approaches for user interfaces are discussed in the seminar using recent publications. Topics for investigation and discussion include the theory, description languages and applications. This way we would like to get an overview as well as a deeper understanding of this emerging field of user interface research.

The following research topics are addressed to a certain extent:

Model Based User Interfaces (MDD of UIs)
Interface Patterns
Usability Patterns
Contextual Interfaces

Prerequisites

You can attend this seminar as a diploma or master student. See the UnivIS system for further details. All students are welcome, who are enthusiastic about this topic and eager to learn how to work and publish in science. English is a must, since most of the publications are written in this language. Part of your work will be to look for scientific papers, read them and write about them. However, creativity and your own ideas are most welcome for our seminar work. Since the resulting papers are published online and printed, make sure you adhere to copyright regulations (details to follow). Expected number of participants: 20. Depending on the final number, 1-2 students are expected to work together on a topic. Depending on the participants, this seminar will be taught in English or German.

Please register for this seminar with your name, course, year and e-mail address using the institute's office (G29-R218) or via e-mail.

Procedure

Start with an introduction to the topics and an overview of the field.
Inroduction to scientific work, writing papers, reviewing them etc.
Students work together in groups of two, look for relevant papers and write their own summary paper.
An intermediary presentation (5 minutes talk plus 5 minutes discussion) of each group introduces the summarized topics.
Written papers are peer-reviewed using an online conference system.
Last three sessions simulate a conference, where each group gives a 20 minutes presentation with additional 10 minutes of discussion.

Schedule

Date	Topic	Lecturer
06.04.2010	Introduction	J. Heydekorn, R. Dachselt
13.04.2010	No Event - independent investigation - preparation of short presentation
20.04.2010	Scientific Work And Publishing	Raimund Dachselt
27.04.2010	Short Presentations	all seminar attendees
04.05.2010	Consultation and preparation of paper submission
11.05.2010	Consultation and preparation of paper submission
18.05.2010	Consultation and preparation of paper submission
25.05.2010	Submission of articles. Start of review process.
01.06.2010	No Event. review process - preparation of presentation
08.06.2010	Review due. Consultation - Feedback of peer review - Discussion of suggested changes	all seminar attendees
15.06.2010	Consultation - Revising article - Preparation of presentation
22.06.2010	Submission of final articles - Consultation - Preparation of presentation	all seminar attendees
29.06.2010	Final Presentations	all seminar attendees

Documents and Links

Seminar proceedings

The proceeding contains all contributed papers of this seminar.