April 1, 2016
Researchers announced an astonishing breakthrough by creating
Quantum User Interfaces (QUIs) which promise to deliver remarkable increases in
user capabilities. The startling idea is to replace millions of
user actions with a single action that accomplishes a full month or
year of work. A simple metaphor that conveys the power of quantum
user interfaces is the well-established global search and replace
command. Using a traditional Graphical User Interface (GUI), a large
database could be updated by changing thousands of occurrences of “coffee” with
“tea” manually while a single global search and replace command could make the
change much more rapidly. However, even the best modern GUIs have no way to
speed up more complex tasks such as making many versions of a document for
different audiences. With a QUI, a user could specify several kinds of drinks
and entrees simultaneously, and all versions of the document would exist at
once and be available for any purpose. With a QUI, the user can do in one step
what might take hours to otherwise accomplish. Researchers have come
forward with many powerful examples.
QUIs are different than GUIs which are based on discrete
operations. While some GUIs can be automated to speed them up or parallelized
through collaborative computing approaches, QUIs work by user interfaces which
can be in a superpositions of states. That is, some graphical elements can be
in multiple states at the same time – so, for example, a button can be both
pressed and not pressed simultaneously. This enables vast speedups by going
beyond the Model Human Processor and software architectures such as Model-View Controller. However, they do not violate our basic understanding of Human-Computer Interaction and bedrock HCI principles such as Fitts’ law remains intact.
The power of QUIs is measured by counting the number of GUI
commands that are replaced by a single “quantum user interface click”, commonly
called QUICKS. Many of the projects yield 1,000 QUICKS but some show the
possibility of 1,000,000 QUICKS (1 mega-QUICK). Longer-term hopes are to
push toward giga-QUICK and peta-QUICK designs.
Certain problems can be solved much more quickly with QUIs than
with traditional GUIs. Even those GUIs that use the best currently known
approaches such as Direct Manipulation, Gestalt Theory for visual design, and
Collaborative Computing approaches can be dramatically sped up. For example, Doctoral
student Ambrose Light’s work at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer
Interaction Lab conveys the exponential increases in user abilities that
researchers expect QUIs will bring. Ambrose has documented 3 mega-QUICK
speed ups in complex tasks such as replacing the work of teams of citizen
scientists by executing a single command. By configuring the geographical
database to include the possibility of a bird sighting or not of every known
species at every location simultaneously, the mechanical data entry of each
observation is replaced with simple confirmation. This command is called the
“gather” operation since it can bring millions of bird sightings into a nearly
error-free database within 1-2 hours.
Similarly, doctoral student Hadassah Agrawala at the
University of Washington, has demonstrated a QUI with unheard of power to help
job-seekers by listing themselves as both interested and not interested at
every company that has open jobs listed which is expected to dramatically
reduce national unemployment by a full percentage point. This QUI enables
job-seekers to issue a single command that returns a precisely selected set of
job descriptions from dozens of independent databases. Then the QUI
filters them into a single file, organized geographically, and ranked by
similarity to the users’ abilities. Hadassah reports performance in the
50-70 mega-QUICK range. She has launched a startup company, QUICKJOB that
has already drawn $11.7M in funding, and will provide a public service, for a
fee, within three months.
Even as QUIs become commercially available, other
researchers are already racing off to the even more ambitious String User
Interfaces (SUIs) that depend on the vibrational structure of queries as they spread
through exo-scale databases. SUIs would replace hierarchical file structures
with wave-like superposition files, in which even high-dimensional
intersections are resolved in less than a millisecond. By using
relativistic compensations, searches that used to take hours can be performed by
novice users in seconds. While still expected to be 5 years away from
commercialization, SUIs can combine action and reaction in a single operation.
QUICKJOB has already filed a provisional patent application showing how
employers can react by simultaneously offering and not offering jobs to all the
applicants and having the vibrational equilibrium perform the proper matching
so exactly the right applicants end up with job offers. Skeptics are not
yet convinced that these results are guaranteed to perform the right matches, and
are currently modeling whether a combination of money saved through speedups
and legal protections through provisional employment contracts would provide
benefit overall. Clearly this approach is promising enough as there has been a
chain reaction of openly published papers (see arXiv.org) claiming ever greater
abilities for SUIs.
Worldwide attention is gathering for the July
16-18 Symposium on Quantum User Interfaces: New Technologies (SQUINT) to
be held in College Park, MD. Conference Chair Ben Neb hints at further
breakthrough announcements that have enticed participation by large numbers of
journalists, venture capitalists, and government agency funders.