Agnes Lisowska

Agnes Lisowska I have been working at ISSCO/TIM at the University of Geneva since January 2003. During my time here I've been involved in several scientific research projects, completed a PhD thesis on the use and usefulness of multimodal input in a GUI-based natural language enabled interface for searching and browsing multimedia meeting data, and also worked as a teaching assistant.

Home - Projects - Publications - Abbreviated CV

Research interests

I'm interested in human-computer interaction in general, and more specifically in how novel technologies can best be leveraged to help people use technology in a way that is not only efficient, but also natural. In the past, I have been involved in the design and evaluation of multimodal interfaces for PCs, and in particular interfaces incorporating the use of voice and/or a stylus into the more traditional mouse and keyboard environment. I recently started to move into the area of design for mobile devices and have become increasing interested in pervasive computing.

Design Philosophy

Effective software UI design evolves from finding the right balance between matching user needs and applying the appropriate technologies to meet those needs.

The roles of requirements gathering/analysis, UI design, experience design, development, and evaluation are all interconnected and non-linear, constantly feeding into one another and informing application design throughout the development lifecycle. Clear and timely communication between all those involved in these roles is essential to creating a successful product.

Areas of Experience

In recent years I've had the opportunity to work on several different stages of the application design lifecycle, during which I developed experience in the following areas:

Requirements gathering: questionnaires, observation, interviews, data analysis/synthesis

Design specification: sketching, storyboards, low-fidelity prototypes

Implementation: Java

Evaluation: evaluation planning, scenario and protocol development, running experiments, questionnaires, observation, interviews, data analysis and interpretation

Please contact me directly if you are interested in seeing my design portfolio.

Projects

Brief descriptions of some of the projects that I've worked on:

Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2)

The Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2) project is a Swiss National Science Foundation project in the field of Human-computer Interaction. I was part of a small group that designed, implemented and evaluated a multimodal dialogue-driven system for multimedia meeting data browsing and retrieval called Archivus. (more...)

Parmenides

The Parmenides project was a European Union project concerning 'Ontology driven temporal text mining on organizational data for extracting temporal valid knowledge'. Our role in this project was user-oriented system evaluation, which involved determining an evaluation plan and appropriate evaluation metrics for the system under development. Our group's work resulted in the conception, design and initial implementation of two software tools. (more...)

MedSLT

The MedSLT system is a speech-to-speech translation system for the medical domain. It was initially developed for use on a desktop or laptop computer, but work has recently begun to move the system onto smaller mobile devices such as PDAs. I have been working with the project team to design the interface and interactions for the mobile version of the system.

Regulus

Regulus is an open-source Prolog-based toolkit for building spoken dialogue systems. Recent developments include the addition of a graphical user interface for the Regulus environment, which had previously been command-line based. I have been performing heuristic evaluations of early versions of the Regulus GUI.

Selected Publications

Minimizing Modality Bias When Exploring Input Preference for Multimodal Systems in New Domains: the Archivus Case Study. Lisowska, A., Betrancourt, M., Armstrong, S. and M. Rajman. In the proceedings of CHI'07. San José, California, April 28th-May 3rd, 2007.
Multimodal Input for Meeting Browsing and Retrieval Interfaces: Preliminary Findings. Lisowska, A. and S. Armstrong. In the 3rd International Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction (MLMI'06). Bethesda, MD, USA, May 1st-4th, 2006. Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 4299, 2006. Renals, S., Bengio, S. and J. Fiskus. (eds)
ARCHIVUS: A System for Accessing the Content of Recorded Multimodal Meetings. Lisowska, A., Rajman, M., and T.H. Bui. In the First International Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction (MLMI’04). Martigny, Switzerland, June 21st-23rd, 2004. Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 3361, 2005. Bengio, S. and H. Bourlard (eds.)
User Query Analysis for the Specification and Evaluation of a Dialogue Processing and Retrieval System. Lisowska, A., Armstrong, S. and A. Popescu-Belis. In the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004). Lisbon, Portugal, May 26th-28th, 2004.

A complete list of publications can be found here.

Academic Background

In 2007, I completed a PhD thesis about Multimodal Interface Design for Multimodal Meeting Content Retrieval at ISSCO/TIM/ETI at the University of Geneva. Here is the abstract (pdf) in English and in French.
In 2002, I completed an MSc in Artificial Intelligence, specialising in Natural Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh.
In 2001, I earned an Honours BSc in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, with an additional major in Linguistics, at the University of Toronto.

Teaching

I also work as a teaching assistant at the School of Translation and Interpretation (ETI) at the University of Geneva and have been involved in the following courses:

Environnement informatique du traducteur (The Translator's Computing Environment) - Spring 2006 and 2007
Technologie de l'information et de la communication (Information and Communication Technologies) - Winter 2007 and 2008

In addition to working in academia, I've also worked in industry - Abbreviated CV.

When I'm not working...

I'm usually taking photographs (some of my photos are below), traveling, writing, cooking and weather permitting, alpine skiing, rollerblading or hiking, among other things.

Contact Information

E-mail: Agnes(dot)Lisowska(at)unige(dot)ch