Human-Computer Interaction in Mobile Context : A Cognitive Resources Perspective

Human-computer interaction is currently shifting its focus from desktop-based interaction to interaction with "beyond the desktop", which is embedded into everyday activities. In order to support users more elegantly, these mobile, wearable, and ubiquitous computing devices are envisioned to adapt inte lligently to their context. Thus far, however, the mobile use contexts per se have received attention, as most research has been technology-driven. Drawing from cognitive psychology, user modeling in human-computer interaction, and ethnomethodology, a framework is put forward here to analyse mobile use situations from the point of view of resource competition. The framework assumes that mobility is inherently multitasking and easily leads to competition for cognitive and other human resources. This "cognitive resource competition" framework is elaborated and associated with the psychological principles of capacity and multitasking. It looks at the typical social, interactional, cognitive, and physical tasks in mobility, relates them to the typical cognitive resources they compete for, and, based on known capacities of cognitive faculties, pinpoints restrictions and resources for action that can emerge in a given mobile situation. It is argued that the approach is useful for identifying the perceptual, attentional, and cognitive capabilities of a user in a mobile situation. The approach has implications for the design and innovation of intelligent, context-sensitive user interfaces and services. Furthermore, a practical method for making human resources visible in a design session is proposed and evaluated

Efficient Search (RES) for One-Hop Destination over Wireless Sensor Networks

The revolution of wireless sensors networks (WSNs) has highly augmented the expectations of people to get the work done efficiently, but there is little bit impediment to deal with deployed nodes in WSNs. The nature of used routing and medium access control (MAC) protocols in WSNs is completely different from wireless adhoc network protocols. Sensor nodes do not have enough capability to synchronize with robust way, in resulting causes of longer delay and waste of energy. In this paper, we deploy efficientenergy consuming sensors and to find one hop robust and efficient destination search in WSNs. We firstly deploy BT (Bluetooth enabled) sensors, which offer passive and active sensing capability to save energy. This work is a continuation of previous published work in. The BT node is supported with efficient search methods. The main objective of this contribution is to control different types of objects from remote places using cellular phone. To validate our proposed methodology, simulation is done with network simulator (ns2) to examine the behavior of WSNs. Based on simulation results, we claim that our approach saves 62% energy spent for finding best one-hop destination as compared with existing techniques

A Design in interfacing the MC68HC11 to the AMD AM29F010 flash memory chips

In many environments, motion, vibration and contamination to the Secondary Storage Devices such as hard drives can cause data to become unreadable or even lost. Elimination of these types of magnetic drives, incorporating its replacement with a Solid State Memory Storage Device would provide an invaluable solution for these type of environments. If a secondary storage system could replace these electro-mechanical disk drive systems incorporating a Solid State Secondary Storage Device such as the Flash Memory Integrated Chips, an increase in the speed of reading from milli-seconds to nano-seconds would transpire as well as providing a robust Secondary Storage Device. In addition to this the rapid increase in the sophistication of software has placed more pressure on the microcontroller to increase its memory capacity, especially that of user RAM. From this need, it is the aim of this thesis to show steps in the designing an interface to the MC68HCII microcontroller that would increase the user RAM. The design incorporates four Am29F010 Flash Memory Chips as the peripheral Secondary Storage Device

New media and education

In the last thirty years we witnessed to a number of relevant innovations and changes. Some of them belong to the information technology domain and parts of them were the reason why the IT domain became the ICT domain. In order to better understand problems and issues related to education and learning it is useful to outline some of the most relevant achievements and milestones in the technological domain. If we focus on the European approach to the spread of information technology termed in the ‘90ies “Information Society” we can find initiatives such as i2015 the EU policy framework for the information society and media for the 1 next decade and, at global level, the WSIS+10 a ten years activity aimed to draw the guidelines for an harmonious and fruitful development of the information society. It promotes the positive contribution that information and communication technologies can make to the economy, society and personal quality of life. Everyone experienced in “ICT based innovation” knows that “It is not only a matter of technology”. Of course technology advances are one of the potential actors as in the case of the diffusion of personal computing or easy access to digital networking. Anyway different parameters are actively influencing e-Services success or failure: cultural aspects, organisational issues, bureaucracy and workflow, infrastructure and technology in general, user’s habits, literacy, capacity, market models, interaction design or merely mind-set! Before looking in detail how all these aspects are impacting on education and learning let’s take into account some additional relevant aspects

A framework for the design, prototyping and evaluation of mobile interfaces for domestic environments

The idea of the smart home has been discussed for over three decades, but it has yet to achieve mass-market adoption. This thesis asks the question Why is my home not smart? It highlights four main areas that are barriers to adoption, and concentrates on a single one of these issues: usability. It presents an investigation that focuses on design, prototyping and evaluation of mobile interfaces for domestic environments resulting in the development of a novel framework. A smart home is the physical realisation of a ubiquitous computing system for domestic living. The research area offers numerous benefits to end-users such as convenience, assistive living, energy saving and improved security and safety. However, these benefits have yet to become accessible due to a lack of usable smart home control interfaces. This issue is considered a key reason for lack of adoption and is the focus for this thesis. Within this thesis, a framework is introduced as a novel approach for the design, prototyping and evaluation of mobile interfaces for domestic environments. Included within this framework are three components. Firstly, the Reconfigurable Multimedia Environment (RME), a physical evaluation and observation space for conducting user centred research. Secondly, Simulated Interactive Devices (SID), a video-based development and control tool for simulating interactive devices commonly found within a smart home. Thirdly, iProto, a tool that facilitates the production and rapid deployment of high fidelity prototypes for mobile touch screen devices. This framework is evaluated as a round-tripping toolchain for prototyping smart home control and found to be an efficient process for facilitating the design and evaluation of such interfaces

Diverse perceptions of smart spaces

This is the era of smart technology and of ‘smart’ as a meme, so we have run three workshops to examine the ‘smart’ meme and the exploitation of smart environments. The literature relating to smart spaces focuses primarily on technologies and their capabilities. Our three workshops demonstrated that we require a stronger user focus if we are advantageously to exploit spaces ascribed as smart: we examined the concept of smartness from a variety of perspectives, in collaboration with a broad range of contributors. We have prepared this monograph mainly to report on the third workshop, held at Bournemouth University in April 2012, but do also consider the lessons learned from all three. We conclude with a roadmap for a fourth (and final) workshop, which is intended to emphasise the overarching importance of the humans using the spac

M2: An architectural system for computer design

The number of embedded computer systems has been growing rapidly as system costs have declined and capabilities have increased. The rationale behind design decisions for embedded systems is often informal and based on estimates of key values rather than actual measurements. Because of the small number of programs typically executed by an embedded processor, significant opportunities for optimization exist;M2 is an architectural system for computer design. It consists of language tools, architectural tools, and implementation tools. The language tools gather information about programs at compile time and at execution time. This information is used by the implementation tools to generate candidate processor implementations which are evaluated with the architectural tools. The evaluation involves comparing the size, speed, power, cost, and reliability of candidates to constraints set by the M2 user;An M2 design is based on actual program measurements and is documented so its derivation can be publicly considered. It is generated in less time and with fewer errors than manual methods;The M2 project is an extension of work being performed at Stanford University on a workbench for computer architects and of work being performed at the University of Southwestern Louisiana on plausibility-driven design

A portable real-time operating system for embedded platforms

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Computer Engineering, Izmir, 2004Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 55)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishix, 74 leavesIn today's world, from TV sets to washing machines or cars, almost every electronic device is controlled by an embedded system. These systems are handling many tasks simultaneously. By using an operating system, handling of different tasks simultaneously is done in a more standardized fashion. The purpose of this thesis is to design and write a portable real-time operating system for embedded systems, which can be compiled with any application by using an ANSI C compiler. The main target is to design it as small as possible to fit the smallest microcontrollers. Other targets are high flexibility, optimal modularity, high readability and maintainability of the source code

DPA, Bitslicing and Masking at 1 GHz

We present DPA attacks on an ARM Cortex-A8 processor running at 1 GHz. This high-end processor is typically found in portable devices such as phones and tablets. In our case, the processor sits in a single board computer and runs a full-fledged Linux operating system. The targeted AES implementation is bitsliced and runs in constant time and constant flow. We show that, despite the complex hardware and software, high clock frequencies and practical measurement issues, the implementation can be broken with DPA starting from a few thousand measurements of the electromagnetic emanation of a decoupling capacitor near the processor. To harden the bitsliced implementation against DPA attacks, we mask it using principles of hardware gate-level masking. We evaluate the security of our masked implementation against first-order and second-order attacks. Our experiments show that successful attacks require roughly two orders of magnitude more measurements