Specification and Design Aspects of the Academic Researcher's Assistant (ARA) Software for Mobile Devices MUHANNA MUHANNA1 SERGIU DASCALU1 FREDERICK C. HARRIS1 SHERIF ELFASS1 MARCEL KARAM2 1University of Nevada 2American University in Beirut Reno, Nevada, USA Beirut, Lebanon {muhanna, dascalus, fredh}@cse.unr.edu
[email protected] Abstract— Mobile devices are being widely and increasingly used devices, however, presents several important human-computer in many areas of human activity. Designing applications for interaction (HCI) challenges. Some of these challenges are mobile devices has introduced several new challenges that are hardware-related whereas other are software-related. Human currently being addressed by interested researchers and computer interaction is the study of the communication developers. This paper explores different human-computer between people and computers, which is particularly visible at interaction challenges in designing an Academic Researcher's the user interfaces level in software and hardware [8]. Assistant (ARA) software application for mobile devices. ARA is a tool for mobile devices designed to provide academic The paper, in its remaining part, is organized as follows. researchers with a practical portable assistant that helps them Section 2 presents an introductory background about mobile organize their daily research-related activities. The paper devices, including about their uses, types, and operating provides details of ARA's organizing principles, software systems. Section 3 provides details of ARA’s requirements specification, design, and prototype implementation. Several specification and use case modeling. Section 4 presents several directions of future work are also presented. of the more important aspects of ARA’s design. Section 5 describes ARA’s prototype.