RUI: IIS: HCC: Small Projects: Enhancing Genomic Exploration through Reality-Based Interaction

在过去的二十年里，人机交互（HCI）研究已经产生了广泛的交互风格，这些风格超越了桌面，进入了新的物理和社会环境。在这方面，创新的关键领域是桌面、有形和具体的用户界面。这些交互风格利用用户现有的知识和技能与真实的非数字世界的互动，因此我们称之为基于现实的接口（RBI）。RBI提供了一种自然、直观且通常是协作的交互形式，可以减少学习和操作计算系统所需的脑力劳动。虽然这些进展在人机交互已被成功地应用到广泛的应用领域，很少有研究一直致力于调查现实为基础的互动的背景下，科学发现。然而，在这种情况下，研究基于现实的交互是特别重要的，因为减少用户的心理负担和支持协作工作可能会导致新的科学发现。本研究的目标是设计，开发和评估桌面现实为基础的界面异质基因组信息的协作探索的好处。调查将集中在桌面基于现实的互动如何支持合作研究和促进新的发现。具体来说，研究人员将解决两个问题：什么是关键的计算功能，使一个桌面现实为基础的界面，基因组研究的有效利用？基于现实的界面能改善用户吗？工作流程和促进新的生物学见解的发展？这项研究计划解决了一些更广泛的影响。首先，该项目的成功结果将促进基因组研究中的合作并改善工作流程，从而可能导致新的科学发现。这项调查将有助于桌面现实为基础的接口，支持协作基因组研究的设计，实施和验证，以及一套设计要求，支持协作科学发现的领域，探索了大量的异构信息。第二，该项目将培训女大学生研究人员，使她们成为研究团队的一个组成部分。最后，该项目将产生重大影响的三个计算和科学课程的一名妇女？s学院。

Over the past two decades, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research has generated a broad range of interaction styles that move beyond the desktop into new physical and social contexts. Key areas of innovation in this respect are tabletop, tangible, and embodied user interfaces. These interaction styles leverage users' existing knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, thus we refer to them as reality-based interfaces (RBI). RBIs offer a natural, intuitive, and often collaborative form of interaction that reduces the mental effort required to learn and operate a computational system. While these advances in HCI have been successfully applied to a broad range of application domains, little research has been devoted to investigating reality-based interaction in the context of scientific discovery. However, it is particularly important to study reality-based interaction in this context where reducing users' mental workload and supporting collaborative work could lead to new scientific discoveries. The goals of this research are to design, develop, and evaluate the benefits of a tabletop reality-based interface for collaborative exploration of heterogeneous genomic information. The investigation will focus on how tabletop reality-based interaction can support collaborative research and facilitate new discoveries. Specifically, the investigator will address two questions: What is the key computational functionality required to enable an effective use of a tabletop reality-based interface for genomic research? And, can reality-based interface improve users? work flow and facilitate the development of new biological insights?This research program addresses a number of broader impacts. First, successful results of this project will foster collaboration and improve work flow in genomic research, thus, may lead to new scientific discoveries. This investigation will contribute a design, implementation and validation of a tabletop reality-based interface that supports collaborative genomic research, and a set of design requirements for supporting collaborative scientific discovery in areas where vast amounts of heterogeneous information is explored. Second, this project will train undergraduate female researchers, making them an integral part of the research team. Finally, the project will have a significant impact on three computing and science courses in a women?s college.