This book gathers the latest experience of experts, research teams and leading organizations involved in computer-aided design of user interfaces of interactive applications. This area investigates how it is desirable and possible to support, to facilitate and to speed up the development life cycle of any interactive system: requirements engineering, early-stage design, detailed design, development, deployment, evaluation and maintenance. In particular, it stresses how the design activity could be better understood for different types of advanced interactive systems such as context-aware systems, multimodal applications, multi-platform systems, pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing and multi-device environments.

This book gathers the latest experience of experts, research teams and leading organizations involved in computer-aided design of user interfaces of interactive applications. This area investigates how it is desirable and possible to support, to facilitate and to speed up the development life cycle of any interactive system. In particular, it stresses how the design activity could be better understood for different types of advanced interactive systems.

The research domains information retrieval and information visualization have always been independent from each other. However, they have the potential to be mutually beneficial. With this in mind, a writer school was organized in Zinal, Switzerland, in January 2012, within the context of the EU-funded research project PROMISE (Participative Research Laboratory for Multimedia and Multilingual Information Systems Evaluation). PROMISE aims at advancing the experimental evaluation of complex multimedia and multilingual information systems in order to support individuals, commercial entities, and communities who design, develop, employ, and improve such complex systems. The overall goal of PROMISE is to deliver a unified environment collecting data, knowledge, tools, and methodologies, and to help the user community involved in experimental evaluation.

This book constitutes the outcome of the PROMISE Winter School 2012 and contains 11 invited lectures from the research domains information retrieval and information visualization. A large variety of subjects are covered, including hot topics such as crowdsourcing and social media.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference of the CLEF Initiative, CLEF 2012, held in Rome, Italy, in September 2012. The 14 papers and 3 poster abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. Furthermore, the books contains 2 keynote papers. The papers are organized in topical sections named: benchmarking and evaluation initiatives; information access; and evaluation methodologies and infrastructure.

This lecture covers several core issues in user-centered data management, including how to design usable interfaces that suitably support database tasks, and relevant approaches to visual querying, information visualization, and visual data mining. Novel interaction paradigms, e.g., mobile and interfaces that go beyond the visual dimension, are also discussed. Table of Contents: Why User-Centered / The Early Days: Visual Query Systems / Beyond Querying / More Advanced Applications / Non-Visual Interfaces / Conclusions