Recent-innovation-software-engineering While great strides have been made in Human User Interface development and also in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, the computer science industry has very few examples of the successful use of these two technologies together.Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering: A NASA Journal addresses issues and innovations in Systems Engineering, Systems Integration, Software Engineering, Software Development and other related areas that are specifically of interest to NASA.
While great strides have been made in Human User Interface development and also in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, the computer science industry has very few examples of the successful use of these two technologies together. A notable exception is Apple’s Siri program. Siri is a digital assistant which incorporates years of DARPA funded research on Natural Language Processing (NLP), a big part of AI and Human User Interface research. I would like to address the apparent lack of widespread adaptation of Intelligent User Interfaces. But, what is an Intelligent User Interface? In, Annika Waerndescribes an IntelligentUser Interface as one that is adaptable, does not necessarily mimic human behavior and probably not one that strictly uses a knowledge base to adapt to a user. Indeed, she lists some techniques commonly used in 1997 in IntelligentUser Interfaces which include user adaptability, user modeling and natural language technology. She adds dialogue modeling and explanation generation, but to me those could be loosely coupled in the language technology group. For the purpose of this article I define an Intelligent User Interface as an interface coupled with an artificial intelligence agent able to learn how to best present information and control options to a human to either maximize his or her performance, or make the interaction as easy or pleasant as possible.