Advanced Visual Interfaces AVI'96

This is the third International Workshop on Advanced Visual Interfaces and, as we had expected, the area has extended touching on many human issues as visual perception, cognition and mental system modelling. We are overwhelmed by images (from newspapers to movies to television) and yet have little time for correctly using all this huge information in our everyday tasks; even less in our job accomplishments. The ever increasing popularity of the World Wide Web with all its sites, full of promises (not always kept) has also called for new and better ways to find, present and use displayed information (including text and all forms of graphical representations). The extension of the range of computer users of complex software applications has also requested new easy-to-learn & use interfaces which could quickly be tailored to different networks, computing platforms and application programs, thus avoiding the need of thick handbooks, instruction courses, etc. For all these reasons, old and new visual interfaces play an important role in the communication between general purpose computer users and programs, with the latters either running on one's own machine or on a network. In the two previous editions of AVI we gathered members from industry and academia hoping to establish a link between these two working environments. As it can be seen by the contributions of this edition, such link is furthered not only by the invited speakers but also through demos of prototypes and existing systems which all contain innovative aspects of interfaces. AVI'96 hosts three guest speakers, Stuart Card from Xerox Palo Alto, Alberto Mendelzon from the University of Toronto and Alan Dix from the University of Huddersfield, as well as a fourth speaker, Ben Shneiderman from the University of Maryland, who has been invited to draw the conclusions. A panel on Multimedia User Interfaces, chaired by Isabel Cruz from Tufts University, is also given. It analyzes the challenges in the area, also in relation with the explosion of the communication networks, which must be faced, and possibly solved. We are happy to mention that we did receive a large number of manuscripts and system descriptions from several countries worldwide, out of which only 22 full papers and 10 demos where selected. Their topics range from new features incorporated in prototype interfaces to virtual environments, showing a number of present and foreseen applications. A significant part of them deals with the changes in the way the users interact with the information which have been caused by the growth of the Internet. Let us quickly scan the program. The vast amount of information available either through the Web or within different databases must be filtered in some way enabling users to navigate, explore, select and retrieve what is convenient at a given time. This topic opens the Workshop with the invited speech from Xerox PARC. Several papers deal with analogous themes, and other authors talk about new ways to display, locally and on the Web, information related to communication, and information about processes, as well as algorithm animation. Still related with the global information infrastructure is the invited talk from the University of Toronto, which discusses the problem of querying and visualising data through the Internet, also from a database-oriented point of view. Actually, databases continue to be one of the main applications of computer technology, and the possibility of smoothly interacting with them through suitable interfaces is explored in different papers. In particular, there is a group of contributions in the area of pictorial database interfaces, where images must be retrieved, browsed and used during querying. Other papers present a number of tools, both theoretical, as computational models, and experimental, as particular programming methodologies, on which the interfaces are built. Finally, the invited talk from the University of Huddersfield deals with action, perception and information, which are analyzed within a formal framework describing the human-computer interaction activity. The program also includes a number of system demos: on enabling hypermedia presentations, on visualising and querying databases, on building user interfaces for pen-based systems, and an interesting simulation of face-to-face interaction. Interfaces play a fundamental role in every computer application. They may appear as either well hinged doors that naturally open the way to programs, or locked gates which need special keys to be unfolded. Presently we are in an intermediate situation in which some of us have a restricted number of keys, but sometimes lack just the one which is required... The content of this volume is organized in 9 Chapters. The first chapter includes the contributions of the invited speakers and a brief description of the panel content. Chapters 2 to 8 contain the papers presented at the corresponding technical sessions of the workshop. Finally, Chapter 9 includes the descriptions of the systems which have been demonstrated.