3.2Human Centered Computing (Target: .5 pages) (Faculty: Canny, Hearst, Landay, Saxenien)
A major recommendation in the National Research Council report on Reducing Disaster Losses is that the products of a DIN should be based from the outset on users' needs. The end-users of this project can be classified into three major groups:
- The system designers and developers
- The official emergency response staff
- The public at large at the time preceding, during, and following the event.
Designing and building user interfaces to serve the diverse needs of these user groups under extreme conditions is a challenging research problem.
In CITRIS, these issues will be addressed in three major ways. First, as specified in the NRC report, user needs must be assessed. Each of the user groups named above areis expected to require different kinds of information at different times. Various members of the project staff at UC Berkeley have extensive experience in assessing user needs and designing user interfaces to meet those needs [Newman 00, Elliott 00].
Second, information visualization methods will be created to help users make sense of the situation as it unfolds in real time. Converting a massive, linked and distributed multi-sensor environment into human-understandable organizations will require development of fundamentally new human-computer interaction methods. Visualization will be critical both for helping system developers understand the placement and use of real-time sensor data, and for emergency response staff when responding to a disaster situation, but the interfaces for these two groups are likely to differ radically. The UC Davis visualization group has extensive experience in the problems of scalable, hierarchically-organized information visualization, and others at UC Berkeley have been examining how to convert non-spatial information into human-understandable knowledge [Olsen et al. 98, Avnur et al. 98, Hearst 99, Glaser 99, Yee 01] (see and
Third, innovative interfaces will be developed for the emergency response staff in the field and the public at large, both for monitoring the progress of the situation and for understanding what they specifically should do in response to the situation. The information must be accessible from a large number of different devices with different kinds of network connectivity, and it cannot be assumed that devices available to the public will to be of the same quality as those available to the emergency response staff. User interfaces techniques must be designed that are sensitive to the size and the bandwithbandwidth of the access device, and so must work both on theacrosslarge-wall sized displays, the web and on PDAs.
We have had some early experience building wall-sized interfaces to support the management of firefighters on the scene of a fire (see We will continue this work and adapt it to other situations, such as earthquakes. Interfaces must also work seamlessly in different modalities; for example, audio input and output will be necessary for the visually impaired or for those driving emergency vehicles. We are developing a design tool called CrossWeaver to help design and build these types of cross-platform, multimodal user interfaces (see Interfaces should also respond to the context of use -- for example, where the user is located and what level of stress or danger they are under should be determined automatically and used to modify what is displayed on the interface. Researchers at UC Berkeley are developing context-aware interface systems for distributed devices [Hong 01]. We will use CrossWeaver along with this context-aware infrastructure to develop a variety of interfaces for the emergency response staff as well as the public.
For emergency response, its essential for staff to be able to reach key decision-makers and maintain awareness of the organization and activities of other response teams. This requires new techniques for representing user expertise and current activity. We will develop tools that build expertise profiles of decision-makers, track their post-disaster actions, and provide a “knowledge network” so that staff can (i) find an available decision-maker with expertise in an area and who has (ii) reviewed particular information about the situation and (iii) provide a visualization of disaster-response teams, including members, information they are reviewing, and issues that they are dealing with. Such distributed networks can accelerate decision-making in time-critical situations, and are tolerant of communication failures.
[Newman 00] Newman, M.W. and J.A. Landay. Sitemaps, Storyboards, and Specifications: A Sketch of Web Site Design Practice as Manifested Through Artifacts. In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. New York City. pp. 263-274, August 2000.
[Elliott 00] Elliott, A. and Hearst, M. How Large Should a Digital Desk Be? Qualitative Results of a Comparative Study in the Proceedings of CHI'00, Conference Companion, The Hague, Netherlands, 2000.
[Hong 01] Hong, J.I. and J.A. Landay, An Infrastructure Approach to Context-Aware Computing. Human-Computer Interaction, 2001. 16(2).
[Hearst 99] Hearst, M., User Interfaces and Visualization, in Modern Information Retrieval, Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto (Eds), Addison-Wesley Longman, 1999.
[Glaser 99] Glaser, D. and Hearst, M. Space Series: Simultaneous display of spatial and temporal data, IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, October 1999.
[Yee 01] Yee, P., Dhamija, R., Fischer, D., Hearst, M., Animated Exploration of Graphs with Radial Layout, Submitted for publication, 2001.
[Olston 98] Olston, C., Woodruff, A., Aiken, A., Chu, M., Ercegovac, V., Lin, M., Spalding, M., Stonebraker, M. DataSplash, SIGMOD 1998, Seattle, Washington, June 1998.
[Avnur 98] Avnur, R., Hellerstein, J., Lo, B., Olston, C., Raman, B., Raman, V., Roth, T., Wylie, K. CONTROL: Continuous Output and Navigation Technology with Refinement On-Line, SIGMOD 1998, Seattle, Washington, June 1998.