The Internet of Things Will Thrive by 2025

This report is the latest research report in a sustained effort throughout 2014 by the Pew Research Center Internet Project to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-LeeThis current report is an analysis of opinions about the likely expansion of the Internet of Things (sometimes called the Cloud of Things), a catchall phrase for the array of devices, appliances, vehicles, wearable material, and sensor-laden parts of the environment that connect to each other and feed data back and forth. It covers the over 1,600 responses that were offered specifically about our question about where the Internet of Things would stand by the year 2025. The report is the next in a series of eight Pew Research and Elon University analyses to be issued this year in which experts will share their expectations about the future of such things as privacy, cybersecurity, and net neutrality. It includes some of the best and most provocative of the predictions survey respondents made when specifically asked to share their views about the evolution of embedded and wearable computing and the Internet of Things

Self-tracking modes: reflexive self-monitoring and data practices

The concept of ‘self-tracking’ (also referred to as life-logging, the quantified self, personal analytics and personal informatics) has recently begun to emerge in discussions of ways in which people can voluntarily monitor and record specific features of their lives, often using digital technologies. There is evidence that the personal data that are derived from individuals engaging in such reflexive self-monitoring are now beginning to be used by actors, agencies and organisations beyond the personal and privatised realm. Self-tracking rationales and sites are proliferating as part of a ‘function creep’ of the technology and ethos of self-tracking. The detail offered by these data on individuals and the growing commodification and commercial value of digital data have led government, managerial and commercial enterprises to explore ways of appropriating self-tracking for their own purposes. In some contexts people are encouraged, ‘nudged’, obliged or coerced into using digital devices to produce personal data which are then used by others. This paper examines these issues, outlining five modes of self-tracking that have emerged: private, communal, pushed, imposed and exploited. The analysis draws upon theoretical perspectives on concepts of selfhood, citizenship, biopolitics and data practices and assemblages in discussing the wider sociocultural implications of the emergence and development of these modes of self-tracking

Emotional Biosensing: Exploring Critical Alternatives

Emotional biosensing is rising in daily life: Data and categories claim to know how people feel and suggest what they should do about it, while CSCW explores new biosensing possibilities. Prevalent approaches to emotional biosensing are too limited, focusing on the individual, optimization, and normative categorization. Conceptual shifts can help explore alternatives: toward materiality, from representation toward performativity, inter-action to intra-action, shifting biopolitics, and shifting affect/desire. We contribute (1) synthesizing wide-ranging conceptual lenses, providing analysis connecting them to emotional biosensing design, (2) analyzing selected design exemplars to apply these lenses to design research, and (3) offering our own recommendations for designers and design researchers. In particular we suggest humility in knowledge claims with emotional biosensing, prioritizing care and affirmation over self- improvement, and exploring alternative desires. We call for critically questioning and generatively re- imagining the role of data in configuring sensing, feeling, ‘the good life,’ and everyday experience

Smart objects as building blocks for the internet of things

The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as nearfield communications, real-time localization, and embedded sensors lets us transform everyday objects into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such objects are building blocks for the Internet of Things and enable novel computing applications. As a step toward design and architectural principles for smart objects, the authors introduce a hierarchy of architectures with increasing levels of real-world awareness and interactivity. In particular, they describe activity-, policy-, and process-aware smart objects and demonstrate how the respective architectural abstractions support increasingly complex application

Tensions of Data-Driven Reflection: A Case Study of Real-Time Emotional Biosensing

Biosensing displays, increasingly enrolled in emotional reflection, promise authoritative insight by presenting users’ emotions as discrete categories. Rather than machines interpreting emotions, we sought to explore an alternative with emotional biosensing displays in which users formed their own interpretations and felt comfortable critiquing the display. So, we designed, implemented, and deployed, as a technology probe, an emotional biosensory display: Ripple is a shirt whose pattern changes color responding to the wearer’s skin conductance, which is associated with excitement. 17 participants wore Ripple over 2 days of daily life. While some participants appreciated the ‘physical connection’ Ripple provided between body and emotion, for others Ripple fostered insecurities about ‘how much’ feeling they had. Despite our design intentions, we found participants rarely questioned the display’s relation to their feelings. Using biopolitics to speculate on Ripple’s surprising authority, we highlight ethical stakes of biosensory representations for sense of self and ways of feeling

Mechatronics & the cloud

Conventionally, the engineering design process has assumed that the design team is able to exercise control over all elements of the design, either directly or indirectly in the case of sub-systems through their specifications. The introduction of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) means that a design team’s ability to have control over all elements of a system is no longer the case, particularly as the actual system configuration may well be being dynamically reconfigured in real-time according to user (and vendor) context and need. Additionally, the integration of the Internet of Things with elements of Big Data means that information becomes a commodity to be autonomously traded by and between systems, again according to context and need, all of which has implications for the privacy of system users. The paper therefore considers the relationship between mechatronics and cloud-basedtechnologies in relation to issues such as the distribution of functionality and user privacy

Animal-Computer Interaction: the emergence of a discipline

In this editorial to the IJHCS Special Issue on Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI), we provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in this emerging field, outlining the main scientific interests of its developing community, in a broader cultural context of evolving human-animal relations. We summarise the core aims proposed for the development of ACI as a discipline, discussing the challenges these pose and how ACI researchers are trying to address them. We then introduce the contributions to the Special Issue, showing how they illustrate some of the key issues that characterise the current state-of-the-art in ACI, and finally reflect on how the journey ahead towards developing an ACI discipline could be undertaken

Ubiquitous Emotion Analytics and How We Feel Today

Emotions are complicated. Humans feel deeply, and it can be hard to bring clarity to those depths, to communicate about feelings, or to understand others’ emotional states. Indeed, this emotional confusion is one of the biggest challenges of deciphering our humanity. However, a kind of hope might be on the horizon, in the form of emotion analytics: computerized tools for recognizing and responding to emotion. This analysis explores how emotion analytics may reflect the current status of humans’ regard for emotion. Emotion need no longer be a human sense of vague, indefinable feelings; instead, emotion is in the process of becoming a legible, standardized commodity that can be sold, managed, and altered to suit the needs of those in power. Emotional autonomy and authority can be surrendered to those technologies in exchange for perceived self-determination. Emotion analytics promises a new orderliness to the messiness of human emotions, suggesting that our current state of emotional uncertainty is inadequate and intolerable

New Technologies and the Impact on Personality Rights in Brazil

As technology continues to evolve at an exponentially increasing pace, it transforms our lives and societies, thus shaping our perceptions of reality with high speed and impacting the relationship between the individual and the society, including businesses and, as a result, the legal system. The young area of law is trying to explore the effects of new technologies in our relationships with it, as well as identify the best use of new technologies to reduce the gap among new technology, new societal behaviors and various legal systems. The purpose of this paper is to examine the current uses of wearable technologies in Brazil and the legal issues emerging from the various uses of these technologies and their impact on personality rights. So, to what extent do the Brazilian users of emerging technologies appreciate the terms and conditions agreed by themselves and their impact on personality rights? The authors used empirical quantitative data from a cross-section of Brazilian users to explore the level of awareness in regards to the terms and conditions associated with the use of emerging technologies and the impact on their personality rights. The authors found that the large majority of these users of technology are unaware of the adverse impact of the agreed terms and conditions on their personality rights. Furthermore, they are also unaware of the basics of how the technology operates and therefore are unable to enforce their rights. The research is based on data collected by using only one survey with a sample of 500 students from three universities in three Brazilian States with an age range between 18 and 40 years old. This paper extends the previous research on the impact of emerging technologies on personality rights and demonstrates with empirical data that there is a serious risk of erosion of such rights. Furthermore, this research provides a unique insight into the users of emerging technologies in the emerging Brazilian market and the impact on the Brazilian legal system