AIC Seminar Series

The promise of adaptive user interfaces is that they will provide a flexible mechanism for systems to adapt to the needs of different users for a variety of tasks. As we consider such systems a basic trade-off arises between the responsibilities of the system and the user. In this talk I will describe our initial work exploring a continuum that expresses potential balances of proactivity between the user and the system: what combinations of actions by those two could be responsible for accomplishing a particular task. In addition to describing the continuum, I will describe how a set of example applications fit into it and discuss its implications. In particular, our continuum provides a framework and vocabulary for discussing and comparing adaptive interfaces. The continuum also provides directions for future work by suggesting potential interfaces and identifying new research directions, such as designing interfaces to maximize effective feedback.

Jeff Pierce is a research staff member in IBM Research at the Almaden Research Center in the User-Focused Systems (USER) group. Previously he was an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he led the Personal Information Environments research group and co-directed the Adaptive Personalized Information Environments lab with Charles Isbell. Among his other stellar accomplishments, he was selected as Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2006.