Extending Programming by Demonstration with Hierarchical Event Histories

Abstract

Programming by Demonstration, or PBD, is an exciting and developing branch of HCI research. With PBD techniques, end-users can add functionality to their environments without programming in the conventional sense. Virtually all research into PBD, however, presumes that the event history is a linear sequence of user actions. This paper challenges that notion by introducing Hierarchical Event Histories, a new approach which represents some of the end-user's task structure directly in the event history. PBD systems can then take advantage of this structure to operate more correctly and in more situations. To assist programmers in generating structured histories, we also present Hieractors, a new model that provides a simple and clear syntax for describing arbitrary, high-level application behaviors.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 1994
Accession Number
ADA281186

Entities

People

  • Brad A. Myers
  • David S. Kosbie

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Computer Programming
  • Computers
  • Context Free Grammars
  • Demonstrations
  • Feedback
  • Hierarchies
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Sequences
  • Task Performance And Analysis
  • Transitions
  • User Interface
  • Word Processors

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Educational Psychology
  • Graph Algorithms and Convex Optimization.
  • Software Engineering.