Overview
- Describes an elegant design supported by the most recent developments
- Appeals to researchers and practitioners
- Multidisciplinary topic related to logic programming, database theory and human-computer interaction
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Cognitive Technologies (COGTECH)
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Deductive Engine
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Front Matter
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User Interface
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book describes recent multidisciplinary research at the confluence of the fields of logic programming, database theory and human-computer interaction. The goal of this effort was to develop the basis of a deductive spreadsheet, a user productivity application that allows users without formal training in computer science to make decisions about generic data in the same simple way they currently use spreadsheets to make decisions about numerical data. The result is an elegant design supported by the most recent developments in the above disciplines.
The first half of the book focuses on the deductive engine that underlies this application, the foundations that users do not see. After giving a mathematical model of traditional spreadsheet applications, we extend them with operators to perform a number of relational tasks, similar to the user view of a database but in a spreadsheet context. Expressing this extension in a logic programming framework is a natural step towards giving it powerful deductive capabilities. The second half of the book deals with the user interface, the part of the application with which the user actually interacts. We review the elements of the graphical user interface of traditional spreadsheet applications and describe practical methodologies for designing user interfaces borrowed from the field of cognitive psychology. We then propose a design that conservatively integrates mechanisms for a user to take advantage of the new deductive capabilities. This is followed by the results of some preliminary usability experiments.
The book will appeal to researchers and practitioners in the various areas underlying this work. Researchers will not only find interesting new developments in their domains, but will also learn how to achieve a multidisciplinary focus. Practitioners will find fully developed solutions to numerous problems that are not easily solvable using traditional spreadsheet applications.Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Iliano Cervesato is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Qatar campus of Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches principles of programming languages, logic and computer security. He has held appointments at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he performed his doctoral work, Stanford University, Princeton University, and Tulane University. He also worked for ITT Industries at the Naval Research Laboratory. Before moving to Qatar, he was the founder and chief research scientist of Deductive Solutions in Annandale, Virginia. His research interests encompass computational logic, programming languages, computer security, and user productivity applications.
He holds a B.Sc. in computer science from the University of Udine in Italy; an M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Houston in the US; and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Torino in Italy.
Dr. Cervesato has over 15 years of experience in computational logic andin various aspects of the design, analysis, and implementation of programming languages. He also has over a decade of research and development experience in computer security, notably cryptographic protocol analysis and the foundations of computer security. His expertise and contributions are internationally recognized. He has published over 100 articles on the above topics. He has been the program chair or general chair of several international scientific conferences.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Deductive Spreadsheet
Authors: Iliano Cervesato
Series Title: Cognitive Technologies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37747-1
Publisher: Springer Berlin, Heidelberg
eBook Packages: Computer Science, Computer Science (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-642-37746-4Published: 18 September 2013
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-662-51245-6Published: 23 August 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-3-642-37747-1Published: 06 September 2013
Series ISSN: 1611-2482
Series E-ISSN: 2197-6635
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXI, 406
Number of Illustrations: 98 b/w illustrations
Topics: Information Systems and Communication Service, Artificial Intelligence, Programming Techniques, IT in Business, Computer Appl. in Administrative Data Processing