CACR Seminar: Toward the ‘grand unified theory’ of user interface

“Toward the ‘grand unified theory’ of user interface”

Jiao Lin
Computational Scientist, Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR)

Tuesday Sept 20
11AM
100 Powell-Booth

Abstract: Intuitive, responsive, and clean graphical user interface has become more and more important for scientific software applications. Building graphical user interface is tedious, however. Without extreme care, a user interface application can easily become unnecessarily complex and convoluted, and as a result, unmaintainable. Building web-based graphical user interface is harder due to inconsistent implementations of languages among browsers and multiple languages/standards/platforms that could be involved, and that renders management of a web UI project expensive, and sometimes chaotic. With the emergence of cloud computing, we will see many scientific computing packages turning to cloud and demand web or mobile-device user interfaces, while the traditional desktop user interface still has its large user base. A much simplified route of developing desktop/web/mobile-device user interface is needed. This work looks for the most compact set of abstract concepts and principles enough for constructing sophisticated UI. In practical, it intends to reduce the chaos and agony in building user interface applications, to dramatically lower the barrier of creating good user interfaces, and to make it much easier to maintain and evolve them.