User-interface generation for mobile and desktop computing

这个项目致力于对用户界面抽象的研究，这些抽象在塑造我们使用的用户界面和我们编写的程序的性质方面发挥着基础性的作用。在由联网电器和交互式移动设备组成的智能空间需求的推动下，PI将重新审视用户界面生成的想法。PI将探索多个特定于域的生成器的可能性，而不是针对所有应用程序的单个固定用户界面生成器。他将开发一个通用的用户界面体系结构，允许不同的生成器共享代码，并允许他们的客户逐步定制代码。为了确保架构的一般性，他将考虑移动计算和桌面计算的需求，后者在用户界面生成似乎特别适合的两个领域，即研究应用程序和入门编程教学。PI的体系结构基于用户交互模型，该模型将用户界面视为对象逻辑结构的编辑者。它由几个层组成，包括外部封装的应用程序对象、一组逻辑结构、这些结构的编辑器和一个外部工具包。此外，它还包括自动连接相邻层中的对象的对象。PI的假设是，编程和用户界面约定的出现允许在所考虑的域中的绝大多数应用程序中或多或少地自动进行这些连接。他将开发一种算法，用于从外部应用程序和工具包对象的方法签名中使用的模式自动识别这些对象的行为。与要求应用程序适应工具提供的(编程)接口的传统方法不同，该算法将允许工具适应应用程序提供的接口。PI还将提供一个公理方案，用于正式指定生成器假定的默认模式，可以对其进行定制以指定特定于域的模式和关联的语义。基于这些形式规范，将开发用于创建应用程序对象的文本和图形表示并自动实现编辑这些表示的命令的参数化算法，包括撤消和同步这些对象的命令，这需要理解对象的语义。PI将开发有效的实现技术，以确保在移动设备上生成和使用用户界面的成本较低，包括将为特定设备生成的用户界面重定向到具有相同逻辑结构的新设备的技术。这项工作将通过从考虑中的每个领域确定一组具有代表性的应用程序和设备来进行评估。广泛影响：该项目将改进用户界面生成方面的最新技术，因为不需要为每对移动和家电设备单独实现，而是只需要为每个移动设备实现一个单独的实现。这项研究将使学生专注于编程概念而不是用户界面实现，从而从根本上改变入门编程的教学方式，并通过极大地降低实现演示应用程序用户界面的成本来提高研究项目的生产率。开发的软件将通过互联网分发。

This project addresses research in user-interface abstractions, which play a fundamental role in shaping the nature of the user-interfaces we use and the programs we write. Motivated by the needs of smart spaces consisting of networked appliances and interactive mobile devices, the PI will revisit the idea of user-interface generation. Instead of a single, fixed user-interface generator for all applications, the PI will explore the possibility of multiple domain-specific generators. He will develop a general user-interface architecture that allows different generators to share code and their clients to incrementally customize them. To ensure generality of the architecture, he will consider the needs both of mobile and desktop computing, the latter in two domains for which user-interface generation seems to be particularly well suited, namely research applications and teaching of introductory programming. The PI's architecture is based on a model of user-interaction that treats user-interfaces as editors of logical structures of objects. It consists of several layers including external encapsulated application objects, a set of logical structures, editors of these structures, and an external toolkit. In addition, it includes objects that automatically connect objects in adjacent layers. The PI's hypothesis is that emergence of programming and user-interface conventions allows these connections to be made more or less automatically for the vast majority of applications in the domains under consideration. He will develop an algorithm for automatically identifying the behavior of the external application and toolkit objects from the patterns used in the signatures of the methods of these objects. Unlike the traditional approach of requiring an application to adapt to the (programming) interfaces provided by the tool, this algorithm will allow the tool to adapt to the interfaces provided by the application. The PI will also provide an axiomatic scheme for formally specifying the default patterns assumed by the generator, which can be customized to specify domain-specific patterns and associated semantics. Based on these formal specifications, parameterized algorithms will be developed for creating textual and graphical presentations of application objects, and automatically implementing commands to edit these presentations, including commands to undo and synchronize these objects, which require an understanding of the semantics of objects. The PI will develop efficient implementation techniques to ensure that the cost of generating and using a user-interface on a mobile device is low, including a technique to retarget a user-interface generated for a particular appliance to a new appliance with the same logical structure. The work will be evaluated by identifying a representative set of applications and devices from each of the domains under consideration.Broader Impacts: This project will improve the state of the art in user interface generation, in that instead of requiring a separate implementation for each pair of mobile and appliance devices, just a single implementation will be needed for each mobile device. The research will lead to fundamental changes in the way introductory programming is taught, by allowing students to focus on programming concepts rather than user-interface implementation, and will also increase productivity of research projects by greatly reducing the cost of implementing the user-interfaces of demonstration applications. The software developed will be distributed via the Internet.