Automatically Generating Personalized Adaptive User Interfaces

   Krzysztof Gajos , University of Washington
    kgajoscs.washington.edu

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University May 2, 2008

User Interfaces delivered with today's software are usually created in a one-size-fits-all manner, making implicit assumptions about the needs, abilities, and preferences of the "average user" and the characteristics of the "average device."  I argue that personalized user interfaces, which are adapted to a persons devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities, can improve user satisfaction and performance.  In this talk, I focus on the portion of my research, which demonstrates how this approach benefits people with motor impairments.  I present three concrete systems:

-- SUPPLE, which uses decision-theoretic optimization to automatically generate user interfaces adapted to a persons device;

-- ARNAULD, which allows optimization-based systems to be adapted to users preferences; and

-- SUPPLE++, a system that first performs a one-time assessment of a persons motor capabilities and then automatically generates user interfaces adapted to that user.

My experiments show that these automatically generated, personalized user interfaces significantly improve speed, accuracy, and satisfaction for users with motor impairments compared to manufacturers' default interfaces.

Krzysztof Gajos is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, working with professors Daniel Weld and Jacob Wobbrock. His research interests include human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. He was a recipient of a Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship and he has also been a visiting faculty member at the Ashesi University in Ghana where he designed and taught an introductory course in artificial intelligence. Krzysztof received his B.Sc. and M.Eng. degrees in Computer Science from MIT.  Prior to attending University of  Washington, he was a research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he managed The Intelligent Room Project. .

View this talk on line at CS547 on Stanford OnLine or using this video link.

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