Critics: an emerging approach to knowledge-based human-computer interaction
01 Nov 1991-International Journal of Human-computer Studies \/ International Journal of Man-machine Studies (Academic Press)-Vol. 35, Iss: 5, pp 695-721
TL;DR: The critiquing approach to building knowledge-based interactive systems, which discusses critics from the perspective of overcoming the problems of high-functionality computer systems, of providing a new class of systems to support learning, of extending applications-oriented construction kits to design environments, and of providing an alternative to traditional autonomous expert systems are described.
Abstract: We describe the critiquing approach to building knowledge-based interactive systems. Critiquing supports computer users in their problem solving and learning activities. The challenges for the next generation of knowledge-based systems provide a context for the development of this paradigm. We discuss critics from the perspective of overcoming the problems of high-functionality computer systems, of providing a new class of systems to support learning, of extending applications-oriented construction kits to design environments, and of providing an alternative to traditional autonomous expert systems. One of the critiquing systems we have built—JANUS, a critic for architectural design—is used as an example for presenting the key aspects of the critiquing process. We then survey additional critiquing systems developed in our and other research groups. The paper concludes with a discussion of experiences and extensions to the paradigm.
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23 Apr 1995
TL;DR: A novel architectural style directed at supporting larger grain reuse and coherent system composition is presented, which supports design of distributed, concurrent, applications.
Abstract: While a large fraction of application code is devoted to graphical user interface (GUI) functions, support for reuse in this domain has largely been confined to the creation of GUI toolkits ("widgets"). We present a novel architectural style directed at supporting larger grain reuse and flexible system composition. Moreover, the style supports design of distributed, concurrent applications. Asynchronous notification messages and asynchronous request messages are the sole basis for intercomponent communication. A key aspect of the style is that components are not built with any dependencies on what typically would be considered lower-level components, such as user interface toolkits. Indeed, all components are oblivious to the existence of any components to which notification messages are sent. While our focus has been on applications involving graphical user interfaces, the style has the potential for broader applicability. Several trial applications using the style are described.
563 citations
Cites background from "Critics: an emerging approach to kn..."
...Systems developed at the University of Colorado, such as Janus [6] and Framer [16], use critics to give designers domain specific feedback....
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445 citations
27 Mar 1997
TL;DR: This work explores some design principles for autonomous interface agents, and illustrates these principles with a description of Letizia, an autonomous interface agent that makes real-time suggestions for Web pages that a user might be interested in browsing.
Abstract: Two branches of the trend towards “agents” that are gaining currency are inre~ace agents, software that actively assists a user in operating an interactive interface, and autonomous agents, software that takes action without user intervention and operates concurrently, either while the user is idle or taking other actions. These two branches are related, but not identical, and are often lumped together under the single term “agent”. Much agent work can be classified as either being an interface agent, but not autonomous, or as an autonomous agent, but not operating directly in the interface. We show why it is important to have agents that are both interface agents and autonomous agents. We explore some design principles for such agents, and illustrate these principles with a description of Letizia, an autonomous interface agent that makes real-time suggestions for Web pages that a user might be interested in browsing.
440 citations
Book•
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19 Nov 2010
TL;DR: This book is the indispensable source for researchers and professionals looking for an introduction and comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art software evolution research and its relations with other emerging disciplines.
Abstract: This book focuses on novel trends in software evolution research and its relations with other emerging disciplines. Mens and Demeyer, both authorities in the field of software evolution, do not restrict themselves to the evolution of source code but also address the evolution of other, equally important software artifacts. This book is the indispensable source for researchers and professionals looking for an introduction and comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art.
264 citations
TL;DR: Two experimental studies in a creative professional area: non-routine design and analogical reasoning are conducted to show that the emergence of new ideas takes place in a "constrained cognitive environment", and suggest ways to facilitate creative acts from designers.
Abstract: In order to show that the emergence of new ideas takes place in a "constrained cognitive environment", we conducted two experimental studies in a creative professional area: non-routine design. The first study is focused on the role of analogical reasoning in creativity and, especially, on the nature of potential "sources" of inspiration, which facilitate the evocation process. The second study aims at understanding on which ground designers of different levels of expertise construct their own constrained cognitive environment. Based on the obtained results, we suggest ways to facilitate creative acts from designers.
201 citations
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22,082 citations
01 Apr 1985
TL;DR: In this article, the reflective practitioner how professionals think in action arena, searching the book that you love to read first or find an interesting book that will make you want to read.
Abstract: What do you do to start reading the reflective practitioner how professionals think in action arena ? Searching the book that you love to read first or find an interesting book that will make you want to read? Everybody has difference with their reason of reading a book. Actuary, reading habit must be from earlier. Many people may be love to read, but not a book. It's not fault. Someone will be bored to open the thick book with small words to read. In more, this is the real condition. So do happen probably with this the reflective practitioner how professionals think in action arena .
10,073 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1980
TL;DR: The gears of my childhood as discussed by the authors were a source of inspiration for many of the ideas we use in our own work, such as the notion of assimilation of knowledge into a new model.
Abstract: The Gears of My Childhood
Before I was two years old I had developed an intense involvement with automobiles. The names of car parts made up a very substantial portion of my vocabulary: I was particularly proud of knowing about the parts of the transmission system, the gearbox, and most especially the differential. It was, of course, many years later before I understood how gears work; but once I did, playing with gears became a favorite pastime. I loved rotating circular objects against one another in gearlike motions and, naturally, my first "erector set" project was a crude gear system.
I became adept at turning wheels in my head and at making chains of cause and effect: "This one turns this way so that must turn that way so . . . " I found particular pleasure in such systems as the differential gear, which does not follow a simple linear chain of causality since the motion in the transmission shaft can be distributed in many different ways to the two wheels depending on what resistance they encounter. I remember quite vividly my excitement at discovering that a system could be lawful and completely comprehensible without being rigidly deterministic.
I believe that working with differentials did more for my mathematical development than anything I was taught in elementary school. Gears, serving as models, carried many otherwise abstract ideas into my head. I clearly remember two examples from school math. I saw multiplication tables as gears, and my first brush with equations in two variables (e.g., 3x + 4y = 10) immediately evoked the differential. By the time I had made a mental gear model of the relation between x and y, figuring how many teeth each gear needed, the equation had become a comfortable friend.
Many years later when I read Piaget this incident served me as a model for his notion of assimilation, except I was immediately struck by the fact that his discussion does not do full justice to his own idea. He talks almost entirely about cognitive aspects of assimilation. But there is also an affective component. Assimilating equations to gears certainly is a powerful way to bring old knowledge to bear on a new object. But it does more as well. I am sure that such assimilations helped to endow mathematics, for me, with a positive affective tone that can be traced back to my infantile experiences with cars. I believe Piaget really agrees. As I came to know him personally I understood that his neglect of the affective comes more from a modest sense that little is known about it than from an arrogant sense of its irrelevance. But let me return to my childhood.
One day I was surprised to discover that some adults---even most adults---did not understand or even care about the magic of the gears. I no longer think much about gears, but I have never turned away from the questions that started with that discovery: How could what was so simple for me be incomprehensible to other people? My proud father suggested "being clever" as an explanation. But I was painfully aware that some people who could not understand the differential could easily do things I found much more difficult. Slowly I began to formulate what I still consider the fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be painfully difficult. Here too I was developing a way of thinking that would be resonant with Piaget's. The understanding of learning must be genetic. It must refer to the genesis of knowledge. What an individual can learn, and how he learns it, depends on what models he has available. This raises, recursively, the question of how he learned these models. Thus the "laws of learning" must be about how intellectual structures grow out of one another and about how, in the process, they acquire both logical and emotional form.
This book is an exercise in an applied genetic epistemology expanded beyond Piaget's cognitive emphasis to include a concern with the affective. It develops a new perspective for education research focused on creating the conditions under which intellectual models will take root. For the last two decades this is what I have been trying to do. And in doing so I find myself frequently reminded of several aspects of my encounter with the differential gear. First, I remember that no one told me to learn about differential gears. Second, I remember that there was feeling, love, as well as understanding in my relationship with gears. Third, I remember that my first encounter with them was in my second year. If any "scientific" educational psychologist had tried to "measure" the effects of this encounter, he would probably have failed. It had profound consequences but, I conjecture, only very many years later. A "pre- and post-" test at age two would have missed them.
Piaget's work gave me a new framework for looking at the gears of my childhood. The gear can be used to illustrate many powerful "advanced" mathematical ideas, such as groups or relative motion. But it does more than this. As well as connecting with the formal knowledge of mathematics, it also connects with the "body knowledge," the sensorimotor schemata of a child. You can be the gear, you can understand how it turns by projecting yourself into its place and turning with it. It is this double relationship---both abstract and sensory---that gives the gear the power to carry powerful mathematics into the mind. In a terminology I shall develop in later chapters, the gear acts here as a transitional object.
A modern-day Montessori might propose, if convinced by my story, to create a gear set for children. Thus every child might have the experience I had. But to hope for this would be to miss the essence of the story. I fell in love with the gears. This is something that cannot be reduced to purely "cognitive" terms. Something very personal happened, and one cannot assume that it would be repeated for other children in exactly the same form.
My thesis could be summarized as: What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate. Because it can take on a thousand forms and can serve a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes. This book is the result of my own attempts over the past decade to turn computers into instruments flexible enough so that many children can each create for themselves something like what the gears were for me.
6,780 citations
02 Jan 2014
TL;DR: This chapter discusses Expertise on the Bench: Modeling Magistrates' Judicial Decision-Making and Expertise in a Complex Skill: Diagnosing X-Ray Pictures, and examines the relationship between Comprehension and Reasoning in Medical Expertise.
Abstract: Contents: M.T.H. Chi, In Memoriam. R. Glaser, M.T.H. Chi, Overview. M.I. Posner, Introduction: What Is It to Be an Expert? Part I:Practical Skills. D.R. Gentner, Expertise in Typewriting. K.A. Ericsson, P.G. Polson, A Cognitive Analysis of Exceptional Memory for Restaurant Orders. J.J. Staszewski, Skilled Memory and Expert Mental Calculation. Part II:Programming Skills. E. Soloway, B. Adelson, K. Ehrlich, Knowledge and Processes in the Comprehension of Computer Programs. J.R. Anderson, P. Pirolli, R. Farrell, Learning to Program Recursive Functions. B. Adelson, E. Soloway, A Model of Software Design. Part IIIIll-Defined Problems. E.J. Johnson, Expertise and Decision Under Uncertainty: Performance and Process. J.A. Lawrence, Expertise on the Bench: Modeling Magistrates' Judicial Decision-Making. J.F. Voss, T.A. Post, On the Solving of Ill-Structured Problems. Part IV:Medical Diagnosis. G.J. Groen, V.L. Patel, The Relationship Between Comprehension and Reasoning in Medical Expertise. A. Lesgold, H. Rubinson, P. Feltovich, R. Glaser, D. Klopfer, Y. Wang, Expertise in a Complex Skill: Diagnosing X-Ray Pictures. W.J. Clancey, Acquiring, Representing, and Evaluating a Competence Model of Diagnostic Strategy.
2,242 citations