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Tech Report kmi-96-16 Abstract


The Cognitive Ergonomics of Knowledge-Based Design Support Systems
Techreport ID: kmi-96-16
Date: 1996
Author(s): Tamara Sumner, Nathalie Bonnardel and Benedikte Harstad
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Critiquing systems are a type of active, knowledge-based design support system. They propose to positively influence designers' cognitive processes by pointing out potential problems and contentious issues while designers work. To investigate the effects such systems have on the activities of professional designers, a design environment containing a critiquing system was designed, built, and evaluated for a specific area: phone-based interface design. Four professional designers were observed using the environment to solve realistic design tasks. Our protocol analyses indicate that such systems do influence the behavior of designers, but often indirectly. Designers were observed anticipating the activity of the system and taking preventative steps to avoid it. Differential effects depending on the designers' level of domain experience were also observed. Overall, the system was better suited to the needs of highly experienced designers.

Publication(s):

In the Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI '97), Atlanta (March 22-27), 1997, pp. 83-90.
 
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Multimedia and Information Systems is...


Multimedia and Information Systems
Our research is centred around the theme of Multimedia Information Retrieval, ie, Video Search Engines, Image Databases, Spoken Document Retrieval, Music Retrieval, Query Languages and Query Mediation.

We focus on content-based information retrieval over a wide range of data spanning form unstructured text and unlabelled images over spoken documents and music to videos. This encompasses the modelling of human perception of relevance and similarity, the learning from user actions and the up-to-date presentation of information. Currently we are building a research version of an integrated multimedia information retrieval system MIR to be used as a research prototype. We aim for a system that understands the user's information need and successfully links it to the appropriate information sources, be it a report or a TV news clip. This work is guided by the vision that an automated knowledge extraction system ultimately empowers people making efficient use of information sources without the burden of filing data into specialised databases.

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