X-AiD: a shell for building highly interactive and adaptive user interfaces

  • Authors:
  • Hans-Werner Hein;Gert M. Kellerman;Christoph G. Thomas

  • Affiliations:
  • GMD Schloss Birlinghoven, Sankt Augustin, West Germany;GMD Schloss Birlinghoven, Sankt Augustin, West Germany;GMD Schloss Birlinghoven, Sankt Augustin, West Germany

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'87 Proceedings of the 10th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 1987

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Abstract

X-AiD is an intelligent shell to design and operate user interfaces. Its surface offers an integrated and extendable structure of icons, windows, menus, natural text, universal operations, and special service functions. X-AiD consists of a set of specialized knowledge interpreters, implemented as asynchronous processes exchanging messages. X-AiD operates based on declarative knowledge. It embodies common sense about "working with a computer" in general, expert knowledge about the supported applications behind it, and collected knowledge about each of its users. Knowledge is described using the representation language HAL. HAL enables comfortable declaration of object schemes with multiple inheritances and extensive default-handling. All HAL object schemes may contain specialized rulcsets related to human-computer communication topics (eg. syntax, semantics, display). The system is prepared to work in a "learning by being used"-mode where it memorizes protocols about all occuring actions, including undo/redo operations. Later on it analyses those protocols extracting new object schemes, fluctuation of defaults, new semantics rules, and frequent plans-of-action which the specific user mainly followed. This learned knowledge is applied vice versa to aid this user eg. by preparing for him situation-dependent menus and object instances down the mainstream of his work or explaining to him his dialog state and how he got there.