Human-Computer Interaction Books

While Microsoft Bob failed to light up the sales charts, books on the doomed software abound. However, of all the books in print on Microsoft Bob, this book alone captures the flavor of the software. A must have for any software collector or historian.

This is an excellent book collection of articles on CMC. It's especially a great resource for historical research into the early days of the Internet and the web. Although some topics may seem somewhat dated, nevertheless they are still applicable to the present date in terms of the nature of network mediated communications.

The main focus of the book collection is on textual communications. It also expands on CMC's impacts on knowledge creation and sharing. The theoretical works in the last two chapters further expand the discussions on the nature of virtual world and virtual interaction.

The book is an essential resource for people interested in surveying the research in CMC, computer-supported cooperative work, and net-based communications

This book takes a well-disciplined approach to reviewing the information overload our society seems to be in. The problem with the web is it has TOO much information. How do we find what WE want? Google is good at KEYWORD search, but it sometimes returns thousands of records. What about when I have a specific question? About.Com and AskJeeves was a good place to start, but they promote advertisers first.
This book shows how we can relate all of this information on a HUMAN level, the semantic web in human context. It is not technical, and shows great examples in multiple pictures.
If you want to get a handle on your information, both on a personal or business level, this book is THE place to start.

OM&UID is a book about developing new object-oriented methodologies for interactive software. Nine different methods are presented by an international team of software experts like Larry Constantine and Philippe Kruchten.

All the authors are trying to solve constraints or deficiencies in existing methods. Since these are all new or experimental techniques, each author explains exactly what problem s/he is trying to solve, where the new method might be best used, and how it worked in practice. Most of the sections work through a couple of cases, so you can see how the method works.

A couple of the writers have pointed out how difficult current heavy-weight methodologies are to use. The models generated, unless the modeler is extremely experienced, are usually not correct. What's more, as the first chapter notes, the modelers don't realize that their models are bad. A couple of writers have tried to deal with the problem that business customers can't understand UML-style notation, and don't mentally describe their jobs in terms of classes or windows. That cuts customers out of the system design process at exactly the point where they should be most engaged.

The editor repeats what is generally recognized: that very few people use a methodology as such. Most of us use a grab bag of techniques from a mix of methods, heavily customized to our own needs. Mark van Harmelen's book may be best addressed to those who use mixed methods, because it helps us to see how experienced architects decide which techniques to use in different circumstances and how we can determine whether we were successful.

This `handbook' needs both hands to lift it! At 700+ pages and 38 chapters, detailed chapter-by-chapter review is impossible. Let me start with the top-level structure, which divides the book into three parts: Fundamentals; Processes, Methods and Resources; and Applications.

Part one, `Fundamentals', walks through the standard sub-disciplines of computational linguistics with chapter headings: phonology, morphology, lexicography, syntax, semantics, discourse, pragmatics and dialogue, formal grammars and languages, complexity theory. Each chapter is a short introduction and overview to the topic, aimed at the informed newcomer (i.e. it helps if you have a computer science/maths background and know about predicate logic and state machines).

Part two, `Processes, etc', covers a number of problem areas and techniques: text-segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, word-sense disambiguation, anaphora resolution, natural language generation and so on. There is little commonality between the chapters, but they are all informative.

The final part, `Applications' covers areas such as machine translation, information retrieval, text summarisation, second-language computer-assisted learning systems and spoken dialogue systems.

As a comprehensive, and relatively recent review of the whole field the book is excellent. Some points which caught my interest.

1. Speech and written language are hugely different, due to noise, self-repair, speech acts and discourse functions, accents and the strange `grammaticality' of utterances (p. 521).

2. The distinction between simpler finite-state dialogue models (machine-centric) vs. more dynamic planning-based dialogue managers (which can deal with mixed-initiative dialogue) - chapter 7.

3. The controversial role of real-world knowledge. This is different from semantics, which is more about representational and inferential adequacy. Chapter 25 on Ontologies surprising states "it is not clear to what extent NLP technology, in its current form, needs such ontologies and their complex knowledge representation systems". Apparently "large scale vocabularies with very limited reasoning are preferred". Interesting.

Human-to-human conversation seems, in performance, to be a unitary phenomenon. For scientific purposes, however, it has to be analysed into sub-fields, as in the chapter headings of part one. However, there is then both the problem of tunnel vision, and of scope creep: we see, for example, syntactic approaches expanding into the spaces of semantics and pragmatics in, to my mind, an unbalanced way.

I was most interested in Spoken Dialogue Systems, as these attempt to combine the state of the art in the separate disciplines into a unified architecture and implementation to address the original problem: a powerful constraint on one-sided development. The solution architectures seem to show that modular works, with bottom-up statistical techniques performing well at the speech-recognition level, and symbolic processing techniques such as automatic planning to achieve agent goals working at the dialogue level. The latter seems to be the least developed, however, as linguistics merges into a more general social agent theory.

Design of IT is not just about designing interfaces or about designing software code structures. Success of information systems heavily depends on changing organization and the workplace environment. Participatory IT Design nicely bases on a wealth of examples from various projects to show the multiplicity of problems that IT-Designers have to deal with in practice.

The method (MUST) is based on principles which focus attention on several aspects of a project:
A coherent vision for change is needed -- where is this project going regarding technical, organizational and qualificational aspects...
Genuine user participation -- how to learn from and with, who know best what they need...
Firsthand experience -- get in touch with the practice...
Anchoring visions -- the vision needs a broad support from management to practitioners...
Conflicts and dilemmas -- be aware of differing views and conflicting interests - they need to be considered...

These principles, which pervade the whole book, stress personal and project management attitudes rather than classical IT-Design qualities. Like the authors, I believe that these are more important for successful projects. The process of the method is structured into five phases: Initiation, In-Line Analysis, In-Depth Analysis, Innovation. These give a guideline how to proceed during a project. Fulfilling the necessities of the project phases, the book presents a large variety of facilitating methods (techniques) which can be applied in the course of a project. Together both parts (phases and techniques) are a handbook for practitioners, supporting in application of the method.

Readers who expect a oversimplified step-by-step recipe for a project, like other method descriptions, will be disappointed, but readers having some practical experience and therefore a realistic view on how IT projects actually happen will find practical assistance for various situations with this book.

Looking at the price of this book, it is happily ironic that I received it as a gift from my father-in-law, who picked it up for free at a book fair when his public library withdrew it from circulation.

This is not a gee-whiz "marvels of technology" book. Nor is it a theology textbook. It is more of a sociology-psychology-of-perspective book... hard to explain, but one of the best academic works to help a person understand the changes in human thinking over the centuries, and how contemporary Westerners unconsciously perceive space, location, and even identity.

When I say it like that, it makes it sound dry and academic. It is not. Her writing style is engaging and interesting, and the whole thing reads like a novel.

Wertheim begins by focusing mostly on art and its development through ancient cultures and then limits herself mostly to Western culture (otherwise the book would be a thousand pages), because it is through art that you can see how a people understands space, distance, perspective, etc. They paint or sculpt things to appear the way they perceive them in their minds. Absolutely fascinating: that art-history section alone is worth the price of the whole book.

After she gets to the scientific revolution, she focuses more on science and physics than on art, because science took over the shaping of our understanding of space and perspective. Wertheim gives the best layman's description of the major discoveries in physics that I've ever read. I like that sort of thing: Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, even though I'm not a scientist, theories that describe how reality works have always fascinated me. Problem was, I did not really understand them very well. Until now.

I still can't do the math, but I know the story behind each of those discoveries, and I "get it"-- the ideas and concepts behind the scientific notation. When my son gets older, I'm going to read through that latter part of the book with him, so he'll understand why Nicola Tesla is not just important on a test someday, but a fascinating person who discovered fascinating things that changed the way we understand reality... and there are dozens more gripping stories of intrigue, loyalty, betrayal, brilliance, happy accidents... I am so glad I have it.

Of course, she does get to the Cyberspace section eventually, in which she revisits art, combines it with cosmology, religion, design, architecture, pop psych, internet communication and community, and web design, to reveal some unexpected insights into the promise of cyberspace and how THAT is altering our reality in very real ways... and you don't even have to be online to be altered by it. Don't worry, she'll explain it beautifully.

By the way, I have the older edition (1999? 2001?), hardcover, white and greyish sort of cover photo, of buildings stretching toward the sky. It's packed away in a box right now or I'd describe it better. She may have updated the content along with the cover, in which case I'd have to put it on my wish list!

If you can't afford to buy this book, look for it in a local library and check it out. Definitely worth a read, and it will stretch your brain.

On the other hand, your brain is already being stretched without your knowledge, as society evolves... wouldn't you like to know what's happening to you?

This book presents in the space of some 200 pages, split into 9 chapters, a clear and concise introduction to a state-of-the-art approach to requirements engineering (RE). It starts out by introducing a generic RE process, which is then instatiated, later in the book, into concrete processes for generating stakeholder requirements (i.e. user requirements) and system requirements.

The beautiful thing aboout this generic process (and the concrete ones to follow it) is that V&V and change management are intrinsically part of it. The authors are particularly strong in their treatment of traceability. They have gone into an unusual depth. The book has some good advice on writing better requirements . In particular, I find the idea of requirements boilerplates (i.e. templates for each class of requirements) extremely useful. The book concludes with an introduction/demonstration of the DOORS RE tool, from Telelogic (the affiliation of two of the authors).

Overall, this is an excellent book that every requirements engineer, should have on their desk.

The work teaches how to reduce a large body of knowledge to a
precise set of facts and rules. A cognitive psychological
model may be formulated because humans have a highly anticipatory
system of modeling the world to increase the likelihood of
survival.

The author sets forth some fairly sophisticated rule structures
at the meta level. For instance:
o A meta meta system sets forth distinctions that specify
further relations amongst distinctions on lower levels of
the decision-making process
o A set of distinctions sets forth the basis of the comparisons
o Models generate data on comparative relationships between
and amongst individual models
o Distinctions about particular events are analyzed
o Same or similar systems distinctions are made

This book is for the student at the intermediate level of
artificial intelligence sophistication and model-building.

This is must in the library of anyone who studies or practices new media art.