Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Computer software should conform to its users and not the other way around.  Although this phrase is often repeated, it seems to carry little weight today: users are regularly told of the need to use standard processes and software.  My research explores an alternative view: let software deal with each user on their own terms and then let it manage the translation of each user's work into the terms of the others with whom he or she needs to collaborate.  Democratization  means that any user will be able to have satisfying and meaningful interactions and explorations of their chosen problem domains.  Personalization  means that each user is able to interact with the tool in a way that mirrors his or her own concept of the problem.  Knowledge acquisition techniques will be used to discover each user's concept of a problem without requiring its explicit naming with a possibly unfamiliar vocabulary.  User experiences will be more satisfying, hence more helpful to democratization, if the personalization phase can be as short as possible.  I have developed applications in the areas of information visualization, recipe browsing, environmental decision support systems, eyewitness identification, and multimedia composition.  I am seeking techniques to understand, as directly and as efficiently as possible, how any given individual conceives of a problem.  I plan to take this understanding or knowledge and make it available for manipulation by that individual through my software, called cogito.  This interface is intended to allow and support a user's exploration of that information, enabling him or her to manage and even transform the space (by changing the order in which decisions are made, for example) until the desired results are obtained.  People will bring their diverse applications or problems to the cogito system and they will have satisfying experiences exploring them.  Technology can, I believe, be more powerfully used when it augments individuals seeking personally-creative solutions and helps those individuals to communicate those ideas to others.