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The following list presents publications regarding the current RST-based approach.

S. Kavaldjian, C. Bogdan, J. Falb, H. Kaindl: Transforming a Discourse Model to an Abstract User Interface Model. Vortrag: Model Driven Development of Advanced User Interfaces 2007 (MDDAUI'07) Workshop of the ACM/IEEE 10th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS'2007), Nashville, USA; 30.09.2007 - 05.10.2007; in: Proceedings of the Model Driven Development of Advanced User Interfaces 2007 (MDDAUI'07) Workshop of the ACM/IEEE 10th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS'2007), (2007), 4 p. User-interface design is still a time consuming and expensive task to do, but recent advances allow generating them from interaction design models. We present a model-driven approach for generating user interfaces out of interaction design models. Our interaction design models are discourse models, more precisely models of classes of dialogues. They are based on theories of human communication and should, therefore, be more understandable to humans than programs implementing user interfaces. Our discourse models also contain enough semantics to transform them automatically into user interfaces for multiple devices and modalities. This paper presents a two-step transformation approach with an intermediate abstract UI model. In this paper we concentrate on the first step, transforming discourse models to abstract user interface models by showing transformation rules.
E. Arnautovic, H. Kaindl, J. Falb, R. Popp and A. Szép: Gradual transition towards autonomic software systems based on high-level communication specification. In: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Special Track on Autonomic Computing, pp. 84-89. Mar. 2007, Seoul, South Korea. While management of today’s software systems is usually performed by humans using some user interface (UI), autonomic systems would be self-managed. They would typically consist of a managed element, which provides actual system functionality, and an autonomic manager performing system management. However, truly self-managed systems are hard to achieve and not (yet) in wide-spread use. During the transition towards autonomic software systems it is more realistic to manage a large and complex software system partly by humans and partly by an autonomic manager. For facilitating this approach, the communication between the managed element and human administrators on the one hand and the communication between the managed element and the autonomic manager on the other, should be unified and specified on the same semantic level. However, there is no scientific basis for such a unified communication approach.

We present a unified specification of this communication in a high-level discourse model based on insights from theories of human communication. This approach would make this communication “natural” for humans to define and to understand. In addition, we propose to use the same specification for the automated generation of user interfaces for management by human administrators. As a consequence, a smooth and gradual transition towards self-managed software systems will be facilitated, where the portion managed by human administrators becomes smaller and smaller.
E. Arnautovic, H. Kaindl, J. Falb: An architecture for gradual transition towards self-managed software systems. In: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, FSE Poster Session, Volume 31, Issue 6, Nov. 2006, pp. 1 - 2. (see ACM digital library) While management of today’s software systems is usually performed by humans using some user interface (UI), autonomic systems would be self-managed.

Our research addresses the research problem of gradual transition towards self-managed software systems and proposes and investigates a particular architecture for its solution. In particular, we propose unified communication between a system to be managed and its (human or autonomic) manager. Such communication is specified using our high-level discourse metamodel based on insights from theories of human communication. This should make such communication easier to design and understand by humans.
J. Falb, H. Kaindl, H. Horacek, C. Bogdan, R. Popp, E. Arnautovic: A discourse model for interaction design based on theories of human communication. In: CHI `06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2006, pp. 754 - 759. (see ACM digital library) Most current models of interaction design build on scenarios and task analysis. We think that interaction design should be more along the lines of communication between humans. With this motivation, our paper presents a new approach to modeling interaction design based on insights from theories of human communication. From such discourse models, we aim for automated generation of user interfaces.
H. Kaindl, J. Falb, E. Arnautovic, R. Popp: High-level Communication in Systems-of-Systems. In: Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference on Systems Engineering Research (CSER-06), p. 10, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2006. Communication between machines resides usually on a low level of abstraction that is hard to understand for most humans. Human factors or communication between humans and machines have not yet received sufficient attention in systems engineering. All this poses serious problems for communication especially in Systems-of-Systems. Therefore, we propose high-level communication based on communicative acts both for machine-machine and for human-machine communication. Such an approach to human-like communication allows us even to unify machine-machine and human-machine interaction. This unification enables scenarios where a machine initiates a communication, without having to know whether the partners are machines or humans.

The following list presents publications regarding the prior speech-act-based approach.

J. Falb, R. Popp, T. Röck, H. Jelinek, E. Arnautovic, H. Kaindl: UI prototyping for multiple devices through specifying interaction design. In: Human-Computer Interaction - INTERACT 2007, Proceedings of the 11th IFIP TC 13 International Conference, Part I, LNCS 4662, Springer, 2007, S. 136 - 149. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sep. 2007. While user interface (UI) prototyping is generally considered useful, it may often be too expensive and time-consuming. This problem becomes even more severe through the ubiquitous use of a variety of devices such as PCs, mobile phones and PDAs, since each of these devices has its own specifics that require a special user interface.

Instead of developing UI prototypes directly, we propose specifying one interaction design from which UIs can be automatically generated for multiple devices. Our implemented approach uses communicative acts, which derive from speech act theory and carry desired intentions in interactions. Models of communicative acts, UI domain ob jects and interaction sequences comprise interaction design specifications in our approach and are based on a metamodel that we have defined. We support the development of such models through an IDE, which is coupled with the UI generator. This allows a new form of UI prototyping, where the effects of each model change can be seen immediately in the automatically generated UIs for every device at once.
J. Falb, R. Popp, T. Röck, H. Jelinek, E. Arnautovic, H. Kaindl: Fully-automatic generation of user interfaces for multiple devices from a high-level model based on communicative acts. In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pp 26 - 36. Waikoloa, HI, USA, Jan. 2007. (see IEEE Xplore) The problems involved in the development of user interfaces become even more severe through the ubiquitous use of a variety of devices such as PCs, mobile phones and PDAs. Each of these devices has its own specifics that require a special user interface.

Therefore, we developed and implemented an approach to generate user interfaces for multiple devices fully automatically from a high-level model. In contrast to previous approaches focusing on abstracting the user interface per se, we make use of speech act theory from the philosophy of language for the specification of desired intentions in interactions. Our new approach of using communicative acts in high-level models of user interfaces allows their creation with less technical knowledge, since such models are easier to provide than user-interface code in a usual programming language. From one such high-level model, multiple user interfaces for diverse devices are rendered fully automatically using a number of heuristics. A generated user interface for a PDA is already in real-world use and its usability was informally evaluated as good.
J. Falb, R. Popp, T. Röck, H. Jelinek, E. Arnautovic, H. Kaindl: Using communicative acts in interaction design specifications for automated synthesis of user interfaces. In: Proceedings of the 21th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pp 261 - 264. Tokyo, Japan, Sept. 2006. (see IEEE Xplore) Instead of developing user interfaces (UIs) directly, we argue for specifying an interaction design from which UIs can be automatically synthesized. We present an approach to using communicative acts in high-level specification of interaction design, which is implemented and allows automated synthesis of interfaces for multiple devices. Communicative acts derive from speech act theory and carry desired intentions in interactions. Models of communicative acts, UI domain objects and interaction sequences comprise interaction design specifications in our approach and are based on a metamodel that we have defined. As a result, the usability of a synthesized user interface of a real-world application turned out to be good.
J. Falb, R. Popp, T. Röck, H. Jelinek, E. Arnautovic, H. Kaindl: Using Communicative Acts in High-Level Specifications of User Interfaces for Their Automatic Synthesis. In: Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pp. 429 - 430, Long Beach, CA, USA, Nov. 2005. (see ACM digital library) User interfaces are very important for the success of many computerbased applications these days. However, their development takes time, requires experts for user-interface design as well as experienced programmers and is very expensive. This problem becomes even more severe through the ubiquitous use of a variety of devices such as PCs, mobile phones, PDAs etc., since each of these devices has its own specifics that require a special user interface.

Therefore, we developed a tool-supported approach to automatically synthesize multi-device user interfaces from high-level specifications in the form of models. In contrast to previous approaches focusing on abstracting the user interface per se, we make use of communicative acts derived from speech act theory for the specification of desired user intentions in interactions. In this way, we approach a solution to the given problem, since user interfaces can be efficiently provided without experience in implementing them.

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