Faculty Advisor
John Stasko

Grant
$9,221 on 7/99

Augmenting Animation with Additional Visual Cues in the Agentk
The contributions of this project will support and enhance Agentk, a toolkit for the development of user interfaces for awareness applications and software agents. This work will enhance the animated widgets in Agentk with visual techniques such as automatic markups, history-based shadowing, and blended fading. Usability tests will examine potential roles of animation in user interfaces to allow us to better support the needs of programmers and users. By providing programmers with the means to include animation in their programs and the means to overcome the limitations typically encountered, we hope that the use of animation in interfaces will move beyond the domain of advertisers and entertainment into the domain of information delivery and awareness.

Current Status as of 10/99
A paper describing the Agentk toolkit was accepted in the USENIX Tcl/Tk Conference for February 2000. The final beta version of the toolkit is available on the project Web site. Development of applications that use Agentk is ongoing, as is performance tuning and usability analysis.

Previous Grant A & B
$5,544.22 on 12/97 and $5,893 on 9/98

Previous Funding A & B
Stipend, tuition and computer usage fee for a graduate research student assistant over a 10-week quarter for development of toolkit for creation of software interfaces.

Funding A

Agentk: An agent interface toolkit Abstract
Agentk (pronounced agent-t-k) is an extensible toolkit for the creation of software agent interfaces. Agentk combines the power of graphics, animation, and sound with the ease of use of the Tcl/Tk programming language to provide a set of widgets that can be used to meet the unique challenges presented by agent interface programming.

Funding B

Supporting Information Awareness using Animation
The goal of this project is to create a framework and toolkit to support the use of animation in graphical user interfaces. Animation can be used to attract the attention of a user, to show a history of changes to information, and to show a larger amount of information than would otherwise fit in an available space. Our Agentk toolkit will include various animated widgets that programmers can incorporate into their interfaces. Our framework will provide a means to use these widgets and to extend the widget set in an efficient and user-friendly manner.

Current Status as of 10/98
Research is ongoing. An initial version of the toolkit as well as several papers describing the work can be obtained from the project Web site.

Web Site
https://www.cc.gatech.edu/grads/m/Scott.McCrickard/agentk/