Designing Interactive Applications for the Web
James Rice & Adam Farquhar, Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory; Thomas Gruber, Colloquy Systems; Philippe Piernot, Interval Research

At the Stanford Knowledge Systems Lab, we build large, complex systems to do our research. For years, we delivered results as computer scientists generally do: with papers, talks, and demonstrations to small groups of people huddled around the screens of expensive workstations. Since the Web hit in 1993, we have been delivering interactive systems that run 24 hours a day, and are used by hundreds of people around the world on whatever machines they happen to own. Not only can they replicate the results in the papers (from within the papers!), but many use the software to create artifacts for their own work. Furthermore, users now play a significant role in the design of our software, which evolves rapidly with continuous feedback.

It is the Web, of course, that makes possible such a dramatic change in work practice. However, using the Web this way presents some challenges for design: the current Web standards (HTML and HTTP) were not designed for delivering interactive, multiuser applications with persistent side-effects.

In this talk we would like to share our experience in delivering such applications using off-the-shelf Web browsers as the interaction medium. We will identify the constraints on user interface design imposed by HTML, HTTP, and browsers of varying compliance to standards. We will discuss some of the tradeoffs in this design space, and offer examples of important design choices. We will also demonstrate some of the deployed systems, Internet permitting.

For a test ride of the latest interactive services, dial: http://www-ksl-svc.stanford.edu:5915

ADAM FARQUHAR is a research scientist at the Knowledge Systems Laboratory in the Stanford University Computer Science Department. He has published in the areas of qualitative modeling and simulation, model based diagnosis, focused reason maintenance systems, and exemplar-based reasoning. His recent research has focused on the use, reuse, and sharing of knowledge. This includes developing: tools that allow distributed groups to collaboratively specify shared conceptualizations, languages and tools that enable groups to share models of physical systems, and information brokering techniques that allow clients to find, query, and understand information provided over the Internet.
TOM GRUBERis an innovator in intelligent systems, knowledge sharing, and collaboration technologies. At the Stanford University Knowledge Systems Laboratory, he led projects and created technology to enable the sharing and reuse of knowledge among multi-disciplinary engineering teams; the integration of intelligent, distributed engineering software across platform and organizational boundaries; machine generation of interactive documentation of engineered systems; the capture and reuse of design rationale; and the sharing and reuse of knowledge by intelligent agents.
Gruber was an early advocate in the use of the World Wide Web for widespread knowledge sharing and collaboration. In 1992, he created the ARPA Knowledge Sharing Library, a WWW-based digital library and public repository of papers, software, and shared ontologies. In 1993, he led the Stanford group that invented and deployed the first virtual document applications on the WWW that generate natural language explanations in response to questions. He designed and developed the widely used Hypermail program, which turns ordinary electronic mail into a group memory on the WWW. He is now Chief Technical Officer for Colloquy Systems, a startup providing collaborative knowledge management solutions on the Notes and Web infrastructures.
PHILIPPE PIERNOT recently joined Interval Research as a member of the research staff, and currently designs children's and Internet applications embedding innovative interaction techniques. Previously, he was a visiting scholar at the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory where he designed interactive applications for the Internet and developed end-user programming systems. Piernot holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris, France).
JAMES RICE is on the staff at the Knowledge Systems Laboratory in the Stanford University Computer Science Department, where he has been the senior programmer since 1985. Rice is currently working with Adam Farquhar on the How Things Work and Knowledge Sharing Technology projects. These projects focus on the encoding, sharing and reuse of knowledge and device models, using the web as a delivery medium. Prior to this, Rice developed parallel problem-solving architectures at the KSL and worked for SPL int., a software house in the UK. He received a BSc in Cybernetics from Reading University, UK in 1981.

A Conversation with Terry Winograd
(interviewer: Richard Anderson)

TERRY WINOGRAD is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He began his career in computing in the field of Artificial Intelligence, specializing in natural language understanding. After rethinking the problems and potentials of computational intelligence (see Winograd and Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition, Addison-Wesley, 1987), he left AI research, and for the last decade has worked in the area of human-computer interaction. He initiated the Project on People, Computers and Design and the program in Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford. His previous books include Usability, Turning Technology Into Tools (edited with Paul Adler, Oxford, 1992), and he is the editor of a forthcoming book, Bringing Design to Software, Addison-Wesley, 1996.

Winograd was a founder and past-president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and is on the USACM public policy committee, and the advisory boards of the Association for Software Design and the Universal Access Project of the World Institute on Disability. He was a founder of Action Technologies and consults at Interval Research.