Interface Management through Automated Generation and Evaluation (IMAGE) Navy SBIR FY2009.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2009.1 Topic No.: N091-061 Topic Title: Interface Management through Automated Generation and Evaluation (IMAGE) Proposal No.: N091-061-1044 Firm: Smart Information Flow Technologies, d/b/a SIFT 211 N 1st St. Suite 300 Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401-1480 Contact: Christopher Miller Phone: (612) 716-4015 Web Site: www.sift.info Abstract: Configuration Management for User Interface (UI) design must go beyond traditional version control and traceability to include enforcement of style rules, assessment of required coverage and evaluation of compatibility and consistency with other systems or prior UI versions for similar tasks. SIFT has more 20 years experience developing and fielding interface evaluation and generation aids. We have developed a core representation and reasoning capability for describing the information needs of tasks, the information provided by displays and for computing the degree of match between the two. Furthermore, we describe methods, some used in prior projects, for performing sophisticated and traceable tradeoff reasoning among competing goals in UI generation. With these methods, UI evaluation and generation are closely related-it requires little additional effort to achieve one mode of interaction vs. the other. We explain these approaches and propose methods for using them, with innovative augmentation and integration into the Navy's SOA environment, to provide IMAGE (Interface Management through Automated Generation and Evaluation) for UI configuration management of the advanced types described above. IMAGE will be developed together with Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems and Sensors for Navy submarine systems-notionally beginning with UIs for the Common Submarine Radio Room. Benefits: IMAGE will enable sophisticated evaluation of candidate UIs along all of the configuration management dimensions described above and will be able to generate UI configurations optimized over the same dimensions. There are many markets for an IMAGE tool. Customers include the commercial manufacturers and operators, as well as government users, of most complex operator-controlled equipment such as commercial and military aviation, power generation, refinery operations, manufacturing operations, and many medical domains. We will seek commercialization opportunities, either through the licensing of IMAGE technology or through providing customized design services using IMAGE ourselves. Once the knowledge to support an IMAGE is captured and represented, comparatively small technical modifications are required to use that knowledge to support a variety of related applications-such as UIs which automatically adapt to context or user, or training support through tracking of novel UI or system capabilities, etc. These represent additional benefits and markets. Thanks to our partnership with Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems, we view naval UIs as our nearest-term commercialization path. We very conservatively estimate an initial market for IMAGE tools and services in the Navy UI community alone at $13.1M over the five year period after Phase 2 of this effort. Return