There has been much recent interest in the idea of "intelligent interface agent" software. An intelligent agent is software that can take independent actions in the interface on behalf of a user's goals, without explicit intervention by the user. Examples of such agents include Apple's hypothetical "knowledge navigator" [Apple 89], programming by demonstration systems [Cypher 93], mail and news...

We review software issues that are critical to the successful integration of parallel computers into mainstream scientific computing. Clearly a compiler is the most important software tool available to a user on most systems. We discuss compilers from the point of view of communication compilation their ability to generate efficient communication code automatically. We illustrate with two examp...

A major bottleneck in the development of practical spoken language (SL) applications is the interface between the SL system and back-end application software. In theory, the range of potential back-end software for an SL interface is unlimited, but integration of an SL system with other software requires adapting the SL system to conform to the input formats of the back end. This is typically a...

Most software applications are difficult to use because the development process emphasizes the quality of the architecture and not the usability of the application. Programs can be both well engineered and usable if software engineers work with human interface engineers who not only design the user interface but advocate architectural decisions that help make tasks more natural for users. Our g...

Current industrial models for software components have made component based software engineering a practical reality. However, these models are limited in the sense that their support for the specification of component interfaces primarily deals with syntactic issues. As such, component mismatch remains a critical stumbling block in component based software engineering: components may syntctica...

Model-driven user interface development environments and their associated methodologies have evolved over time to become more explicit, flexible, and reusable but they still lack to reach a level that allows tailoring a method to the reality of software development organizations and their projects. In order to address this shortcoming, method engineering provides strategies to define and tailor...

Protocols are complex, distributed pieces of software. Abstraction and modular design are standard techniques used by software engineers to deal with complexity. By abstraction, we mean that a subset of functions is carefully chosen and setup as a “blackbox” or module (see Figure 1). The module has an interface describing its input/output behavior. The interface outlives the implementation the ...

This paper aims to present an use case driven software reuse approach for interactive systems, integrating – by means of some aspects of use case life cycle (from modeling to implementation) several well-known reuse concepts and techniques like use case patterns, interaction patterns and design patterns. The approach focuses on how to promote user interface reuse integrated to reuse of applicat...

The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model is a robust watershed modeling tool. It typically uses the ArcSWAT interface to create its inputs. ArcSWAT is public domain software which works in the licensed ArcGIS environment. The aim of this paper was to develop an open source user interface for the SWAT model. The interface, QSWAT, is written in the Python programming language and uses vari...

We present an extensible interface between the AMBER molecular dynamics (MD) software package and electronic structure software packages for quantum mechanical (QM) and mixed QM and classical molecular mechanical (MM) MD simulations within both mechanical and electronic embedding schemes. With this interface, ab initio wave function theory and density functional theory methods, as available in ...