Public Thesis defense - ICTEAM

SST

05 juin 2020

10h

Louvain-la-Neuve

will take place in the form of a video conference Teams

A model-based approach for synchronizing multi-target user interfaces by polymorphism by Georgios VELLIS

Pour l’obtention du grade de Docteur en sciences de l’ingénieur et technologie

In our increasingly ubiquitous context of work, we are more frequently confronted with computing platforms and devices benefits from a wider variety of interaction capabilities and interaction modalities. This poses the challenge of developing user interfaces capable of supporting increasingly complex collaborative work, spanning across diverse application domains (e.g., multi-user games, distant learning) based upon the sharing and manipulation of novel and possibly domain-specific digital artefacts (e.g., non-visual soccer artifacts etc.).

Existing development methods and software tools, however, fail to provide any support for unified development and runtime execution, each for different reasons. Groupware toolkits, which comprise the prevalent strand for synchronous distributed groupware creation, emerged to alleviate the increasing complexity of its development by providing relatively low-level abstractions and APIs that hide the intrinsic complexity of low-level tasks (e.g., session management, sharing, distributed communications). They fall short of supporting flexible instantiation schemes across heterogeneous platforms and devices due to specific assumptions made regarding object classes and dialogue modes.

Model-based User Interface Engineering (MBUIE) approaches provide a rigorous framework for addressing this problem: abstract notations and markup languages facilitate specifying abstract components and their mapping to platform-specific vocabularies. Such mappings entail transformation schemes that result in delegating the display to a platform-specific renderer. Nonetheless, in order for the portability of the supported specifications to be secured, the underlying interaction vocabulary supported is assumed to be fixed and limited to relatively simple and form-based interaction elements.

This work aimed at marrying advantages offered by groupware toolkits (e.g., their robustness and expressive capacity) and benefits suggested by MBUIE (e.g., portability of the supported specification across heterogeneous contexts of use and the inherent support for a unified development methodology). For this purpose, it defines a model-based approach for developing graphical user interfaces synchronized among many users distributed across multiple, possibly heterogeneous, contexts of use by

• Consolidating shortcomings and impediments to generating user interfaces for ubiquitous, synchronous and collaborative applications

• Devising a new technique for integrating concepts relevant to collaborative UIs by introducing suitable extensions to model-based UI engineering methods.

• Elaborating the approach in terms of appropriate instruments that allow concurrently active views (of the same model), interaction objects’ replication across distributed clients, abstract interaction object synchronization schemes (beyond state sharing), which are necessary for the development of collaborative user interfaces.

• Deploying the software architecture tools and models needed for implementing the above by extending UsiXML, an existing user interface description language.

• Integrating the aforementioned artefacts the context of a unified development methodology.

Jury members :

  • Prof. Jean Vanderdonckt (UCLouvain), supervisor
  • Prof. Peter Van Roy (UCLouvain), chairperson
  • Prof. Suzanne Kieffer (UCLouvain), secretary
  • Prof. Gaëlle Calvary (Univ. Grenoble Alpes, France)
  • Prof. Demosthenes Akoumianakis (Tech. Institute of Crete, Greece)
  • Prof. Bruno Dumas (Université de Namur, Belgium)
  • Prof. Donatien Grolaux (ICHEC & UCLouvain (LouRIM))

Pay attention :

The public defense of Georgios Vellis scheduled for Friday 05 June at 10:00 a.m will indeed take place in the form of a video conference Teams.

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