David Redmiles - US grants

IRI-9311839 Fischer, Gerhard University of Colorado-Boulder $70,000 - 12 mos. Human-Centered, Intelligent Agents Supporting Communication and Collaboration in Domain-Oriented Design Environments This is the third year funding of a three-year continuing award. There is a growing awareness among researchers and users of computer systems that systems based on a "tool" metaphor do not scale up to the information-rich, high-functionality systems of the future. The goals of this project are (1) the extension of theoretical and conceptual frameworks and (2) the design, implementation, and evaluation of prototype systems in order to accommodate the need for and to evaluate the contribution of intelligent agents for supporting communication and collaboration within domain-oriented design environments. The proposed research will explore the embedding of intelligent agents into domain-oriented design environments with the goals of reducing the cognitive load on designers through active behavior, and improving the quality of the designed artifact. Agents could, for instance, help designers avoid overlooking important possibilities and settling on suboptimal plateaus. Incorporating intelligent agents into design raises numerous conceptual, technical, and social issues. Technical problems will include user manipulation of agents through and agent editor, activation of agents in a shared context, presentation of agents, and creation of shared context through specification, construction, task representations, and interaction histories. Social issues will include the new role distributions between humans and computational agents, namely, the embedding of agents in human- centered cooperative problem solving systems supporting communication, coordination, and collaboration. These issues will be addressed by providing extended task representations and accountability through explanation.

PROPOSAL NUMBER: CCR-0083099
INSTITUTION: Univ of Ca - Irvine
PI: Debra Richardson and David Redmiles
TITLE: ITR: Quality Software by Design

ABSTRACT
Quality has always been a concern with respect to software. Yet now, with such great reliance on software in every aspect of our lives, there is even greater need to address quality in software development. High quality software means software whose specifications meet customers' requirements and whose implementations meet specifications. The focus of this proposal is helping software developers design quality into their systems, which is far more cost-effective than relying solely on post-implementation quality evaluation and corrective maintenance. In particular, the proposed research encompasses a plan for combining for the first time (1) formal architecture and component design models, (2) analysis and testing techniques based on these formalisms, together with (3) cognitive-based, design environments for critiquing software design. The proposed research explores innovative user interface approaches to delivering critical design-related quality assessment information to software developers as they interactively develop designs. The information to be delivered is based on design heuristics, formal analysis and testing, and usage data and feedback. Information is to be delivered in a manner consistent with research in human cognition. Finally, to ensure that this research has the potential to impact real work, the formal architecture and component design models leverage and extend industry standards.

The project is developing an infrastructure for visualizing the real-time state of software system security. Information visualization exploits aspects of the human perceptual system to recognize salient facts, correlations, and features of a complex information space. By presenting visualizations in real time, allows users to relate system security to their own actions, and thereby gain a deeper understanding of how security can be enhanced-or compromised-as a part of their experience of using computer systems. Visualization offers a means by which one can incorporate information about system security into all aspects of computer system use. This is critically important since the security of information in a networked computer system depends on the interrelationships between many different systems, components, and applications; there is no one point of control. Any successful approach must be comprehensive.
A concern with security is not with mathematical abstraction but with practical reality. There is a disparity between theoretical security and effective security in day-to-day computing. Theoretical security is the level of information security one can achieve in theory, using strong encryption, zero-knowledge systems, and the current state of the art. On the other hand, effective security is the actual level of information security one can achieve in practice. A system can have high theoretical security but low effective security when the security mechanisms are implemented in ways that confuse or confound users.
In his classic article "Why Cryptosystems Fail," Ross Anderson (1993) outlines two paradigms for system security. One is the "automation" paradigm, in which the work of managing information security is automated and embedded in the machinery of the system. The other is the "facilitation" paradigm, in which humans can monitor and managing the security process, adapting it to changing needs and circumstances. He argues that many security failures have their roots in the inherent brittleness of the dominant automation paradigm. However, for regular users, the design of conventional applications and interfaces systematically undermines the facilitation approach. The proposed research addresses this problem with an approach to visualizing system security. This work is not simply applying usability principles to security applications; rather, it is about making security a part of the regular user experience.
This work builds on the investigators' existing explorations in system architecture, software system visualization, and end-user understandings of security. The combination of these, however, yields an infrastructure that is not only technological novel but also holds significant promise for making the growing cyber-infrastructure accessible and secure for everyday use. On a scientific level, this research makes novel contributions in four areas: the mental models of Internet users, the use of visualization technologies for software system monitoring, the use of event architectures for interactive systems, and the relationship between user models and system architecture. In addition the project will develop an experimental infrastructure that the research community can exploit for research into interactive visualization and security. At a broader level, this research offers significant benefits to society at large. The impact of the Internet as a cultural and economic phenomenon is hard to overstate, and yet the current mechanisms that support users' secure exchange of information are brittle. A resolution to this problem is pressing, and is the goal of this research.

To explore the merits of continuous coordination, this project will research, develop, and evaluate a collaborative software infrastructure called Neon, that transcends the traditional distinction between formal and informal coordination. Many problems require collaborative efforts by groups of people and it has been a long-term goal of many researchers to provide software systems to support collaboration. In general, these systems take either a formal or informal approach. Formal coordination is achieved by partitioning work into separate, insulated activities that are periodically shared and resynchronized. Informal coordination is supported by a variety of human activities; often they are ad hoc, but from a general perspective, they are intended to raise awareness of concurrent actions. Neither formal nor informal approaches alone are satisfactory. In particular, the strict isolation maintained in formal coordination frequently leads to integration problems at coordination points and informal coordination has difficulty scaling and often leads to problems of visibility and awareness. These problems compound when confronted with the reality of coordination needs in distributed, collaborative settings: e.g., how to account for the fact that different groups and tasks require different levels of coordination that must continuously be adjusted to support the coordination needs of the situation at hand?

This research parts with two fundamental assumptions underlying approaches to date. First, it breaks the long-standing belief that formal and informal coordination must be treated as opposites, or even that one form is subsidiary to another. Second, it parts with the traditional approach of treating coordination as a strategy that is selected at initiation of an activity and then maintained throughout the duration of that activity. Instead, Neon will follow an integrated and dynamic approach to supporting collaborative work that combines formal and informal coordination and supports fluidly changing levels of coordination. The result, continuous coordination, is highly flexible and continuously adapts coordination support to the needs of the task at hand.

Underlying Neon is a coordination protocol that supports applications with three critical design elements: multiple perspectives, translucency, and non-obtrusive integration. Neon raises both technical and social research questions: (1) how to share, condense, and visualize high volumes of information regarding parallel and potentially dynamic activities, (2) what protocols will support workspace-to-workspace communication and collaboration, (3) what levels of information sharing and collaboration will and will not be tolerated by developers, and (4) how, if at all, will users change their work habits?

The research will empirically evaluate Neon in three application domains: configuration management, software design, and face-to-face, ad-hoc collaborative meetings, which represent a broad range of collaborative settings and requirements. Studies will involve laboratory experiments, controlled experiments in classes, and field studies at NASA/Ames and IBM Research.

Continuous coordination is a novel approach to effective collaboration in complex, dynamic, distributed settings. The principle of continuous coordination is general and not limited to the three examples of configuration management, software design, and face-to-face meetings. Results are likely to transfer to many domains of broad societal impact, such as collaborative learning, collaborative research and analysis, and emergency response.

Trust plays a key role in innovation, efficiency and thus effectiveness during collaborations, more so in virtual teams (VT) when members are unlikely to meet face-to-face. Establishing trust in virtual teams can increase effectiveness as team members will be less likely to spend time cross-checking others work. This research has three principle objectives: 1) develop a deeper understanding of trust in VT, 2) establish design rationale for automated monitoring and management of trust in VT, and 3) develop prototypes to monitor and manage trust in VT.

The results of this research will fill a gap in the literature by conducting a field study of trust in distributed software engineering teams. The prototype tool will provide insights into software support for trust in VT. Further, this study fits into a long-term successful program of research in analyzing and developing software support for collaborative software engineering in virtual organizations, giving a unique perspective and the opportunity to integrate findings with larger cross-cutting themes. The broader impacts include increasing the effectiveness of collaborations in teams, both for students enrolled in software engineering courses and ultimately practitioners working distributed software engineering. Moreover, enabling trust can encourage innovation, thus increasing the advantages of diverse teams by increasing confidence in collaboration while reducing transaction costs.

In the face of the vast scale of software-intensive systems needed today, modern development environments fail dramatically, typically leading to information overload, an inability to deal with the highly dynamic nature of both the systems and the organizations that develop them, and failure to support collaboration across organizational boundaries. The overarching aim of this project is to provide a scientific foundation for human-centered environments that make large-scale and distributed project awareness, communication, and coordination as effortless as in a small team. It accomplishes this by (a) performing empirical studies of real-world large-scale high-complexity software projects to understand how task coordination occurs in and contributes to organizational context, (b) developing an underlying theory of coordination in context, which will motivate and guide (c) the design of new coordination technology that explicitly addresses information overload, dynamism, and organizational boundaries.

Intellectual merit: The research will result in four contributions: (a) a sound theoretical basis that captures how task coordination and organizational context interplay at scale; (b) theory-driven empirical studies of in-context coordination; (c) knowledge about how to achieve improvements in productivity, quality, and development speed; and (d) a suite of design principles, tool prototypes, and interaction techniques for collaboration at a very large scale. These outcomes will transform the landscape of coordination technology by squarely addressing the issue of scale, moving from coordination within a team to coordination across many developers, across many teams, and across multiple geographical and organizational boundaries.

Broader Impacts: As society enters the era of "ultra large scale" software-intensive systems, coordination at such scales is a major unsolved problem, persistently hampering development and advances in vital domains such as healthcare, security, defense, eGovernment, and energy. The outcomes of this project will not only provide major economic benefits, but also major societal benefits in the form of the new systems that now can be developed. Through close collaboration with industry partners, the results will quickly find their way into practice. The project will also increase involvement of women in computer science through workshops and mentoring activities.