Composition Through Agent Negotiation: A Step Towards Fluid Interface

One of the next challenges in research on Human Computer Interfaces (HCI) is to give users the means to perceive and manipulate easily huge quantities of information in the minimum amount of time. Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) have been proposed as a means to solve this problem. The intelligence in the interface makes the system more flexible and more adaptable. One subset of IUI is adaptive interfaces. An adaptive interface modifies its behaviour according to some defined constraints (technical, psychosensory and user-defined ones) in order to best satisfy globally all of them. In this paper we introduce the concept of fluid interfaces, a particular kind of adaptive interface on which the flow of information composes itself smoothly without any predefined fixed pattern but according to several parameters. We introduce the problems raised by self-composition in user interface, then describe our proposition of an agent architecture to achieve fluidity. Information is modelled through agents that negotiate according to technical, psycho-sensory and user-defined constraints in order to compose a dynamic display. We detail a prototype that validates the model and introduce a European project which is derived from the model and tackles industrial applications.