Daniel Costa

I am Daniel Costa and I finished my Master's Degree on Self-Adaptation of Multimodal Systems on November, 2011. I am a member of the HCIM research group since August 2010.

My MSc Thesis was made in scope of GUIDE and it describes, amongst other contributions to this project, a design for implementation of the Dialogue Manager. The Dialogue Manager is the central component of the framework and its main goals are to coordinate the other components as well as to maintain a representation of the ongoing dialogue between the user and the system. Also interesting is the User Interface Representation Extraction Component (UIREC) which is a tool developed in order to infer the abstract user interface (in this case described in UIML) from TV based applications (HTML and CSS).
Recently, I was involved in the implementation of a framework for Accessibility evaluation of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) including TV based applications. Specifically, I helped on the enhancement of the QualWeb Evaluation framework, giving it the ability to navigate through the interactive elements of the application simulating the user interaction for automated evaluation. Thus, we have a more complete evaluation, as it is performed over all the possible states of the application.

Currently, I am conducting my PhD on Accessibility of connected TVs. My aim is to characterize the current situation in terms of accessibility for persons with visual impairments and try to find a solution by combining adaptation and multimodal features and the integration of mobile devices with the TV platforms.