EC Research Training Network (RTN)

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LIIHS-IRIT

About LIIHS-IRIT

Since September 2001, the LIIHS is a research team focused on Human-Computer Interaction at the laboratory IRIT. The main topic of the team is software engineering for interactive systems. Research work at  LIIHS try to find the balance between the internal and external aspects of an interactive systems, trying to put reliability and usability factors on a similar level:

• the system reliability impacts its usability, so the reliability of a system must be studied before any usability interests;
• the system reliability must not be a goal per se, as it would be useless to get a reliable system that is so unusable it would be rejected by users.

These two aspects not only concern the user-system relationship, but are parts of a more global approach which gathers both the notion of context awareness and Computer Mediated Communication (CMC).

Research at LIIHS can be structured into five strongly connected sub-topics:

• Human-Computer Interaction
• Formal Specification of interactive and distributed systems
• Cooperative Systems
• Computer mediated teaching
• Augmented Reality

These research topics require a strong collaboration between researchers from computer science and psychology and cognitive science and information and communication science and organizational sociology.

This group has been among the pioneers in the effective use of Petri nets for the design of Human-Computer dialogues. Petri nets are a mathematically-based formalism especially well suited to the description of reactive and concurrent systems, and the research of the LIIHS has shown that modern user-interfaces can benefit both from the conciseness and preciseness of Petri-net based specifications, and from the potential from mathematical analysis brought by Petri nets theory. This research work has been consolidated by the definition of a specification formalism called Interactive Cooperative Objects (ICO), which is tool-supported and encompasses all the aspects of the description of human-computer dialogues. The ICO formalism has been successfully applied to various application domains, such as business software, groupware systems, direct manipulation highly interactive interfaces, and safety-critical interactive systems such as Air Traffic Control.

Another achievement of this research has been to show that Petri nets are also well suited to the detailed description of user tasks. Using Petri nets both to model both the behaviour of the software system and the behaviour of users that interact with this system makes it possible to reason on the compatibility and the adequacy of the software with respect to the user task. It also enables to make quantitative predictions of the performance of users interacting with the system. This theoretical has received some experimental confirmations in the domain of Air Traffic Control, since empirical studies conducted by independent groups have led to the same findings that were highlighted by the formal analysis.

LIIHS has also investigated the relationship between ICO-based specifications and other formal or semi-formal approaches, such as ConcurTaskTrees, and UAN.

Ongoing works are now to study the use of formal specification techniques for more sophisticated interaction techniques for multimodal or augmented reality interactive systems.

Philippe Palanque is a professor in Computer Science at the University of Paul Sabatier (Toulouse, France) and is the co-responsible of the LIIHS team. He is the French representative of IFIP Technical Committee TC 13 (Human-Computer Interaction). His main research interest is the use of formal methods for safety-critical interactive systems. >From 1995 to 1997 he has been working for two years in the Centre d’Etudes de la Navigation Aérienne to develop new formal specification techniques for the design of safety critical interactive software in the field of Air Traffic Control.

Rémi Bastide is senior lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Toulouse 1. His research interests encompass the domain of Human-Computer Interaction, Formal Methods and Object-Oriented distributed systems. He has investigated the use of Petri nets for the behavioural modelling of object-oriented systems since 1988. This approach has been successfully used in various application domains such as flexible manufacturing systems, workflow, user interfaces, and more recently distributed object systems.

Some publications of interest

Formal Methods in Human-Computer Interaction Philippe Palanque & Fabio Paternò (Eds.) Springer Verlag 1997. ISBN 3-540-76158-6. 376 pages

Rémi Bastide & Philippe Palanque. A Visual and Formal Glue between Application and Interaction. International Journal of Visual Language and Computing, Academic Press Volume 10, Number 4, 1999.

Rémi Bastide, Ousmane Sy & Philippe Palanque Formal Specification and Prototyping of CORBA servers. European Conference on Object Oriented Programming, ECOOP 99, Lisbon (Portugal) Lecture Notes in Computer Science Serie, Springer Verlag.

Navarre David, Palanque Philippe, Bastide Rémi, & Sy Ousmane. Structuring interactive systems specifications for executability and prototypability. 7th Eurographics workshop on Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems, DSV-IS'2000; Limerick, Ireland. Springer Verlag Lecture notes in computer science. n° 1946.

Navarre David, Palanque Philippe, Bastide Rémi, & Sy Ousmane A Model-Based Tool for Interactive Prototyping of Highly Interactive Applications. 12th IEEE, International Workshop on Rapid System Prototyping ; Monterey (USA). IEEE ; 2001.

Bastide Rémi, Navarre David & Palanque Philippe. A Model-Based Tool for Interactive Prototyping of Highly Interactive Applications. Full demonstration, ACM CHI 2002 conference on Human Factors for Computing Systems. Minneapolis, USA, 20-25 April 2002.

Lacaze Xavier, Palanque Philippe, Navarre David & Bastide Rémi. Performance Evaluation as a Tool for Quantitative Assessment of Complexity of Interactive Systems. DSV-IS'02 9th workshop on Design Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems, University of Rostock, 12-14 June 2002.

Navarre David, Palanque Philippe & Bastide Rémi. A Tool-Supported Design Framework for Safety Critical Interactive Systems in Interacting with computers, Elsevier, to appear 2003.

Palanque Philippe & Amélie Schyn. A Tool-Supported Design Framework for Safety Critical Interactive Systems in INTERACT 2003, IFIP TC 13 conference on Human Computer Interaction to appear.

Contact Detail

Philippe Palanque
Professor, Université Paul Sabatier
web: http://lihs.univ-tlse1.fr/palanque
email: palanque@irit.fr
tel: +33 561 55 6965
fax: +33 561 55 6258

Rémi Bastide
Senior Lecturer, Université Toulouse 1
web: http://lihs.univ-tlse1.fr/bastide
email: bastide@irit.fr
tel: +33 561 55 6965 / +33 561 63 3588
fax: +33 561 55 6258 / +33 561 63 3798