Quality of experience in affective pervasive environments

The confluence of miniaturised powerful devices, widespread communication networks and mass remote storage has caused a fundamental shift in the user interaction design paradigm. The distinction between system and user in pervasive environments is evolving into an increasingly integrated loop of interaction, raising a number of opportunities to provide enhanced and personalised experiences. We propose a platform, based on a smart architecture, to address the identified opportunities in pervasive computing. Smart systems aim at acting upon an environment for improving quality of experience: a subjective measure that has been defined as an emotional reaction to products or services. The inclusion of an emotional dimension allows us to measure individual user responses and deliver personalised services with the potential to influence experiences positively. The platform, Cloud2Bubble, leverages pervasive systems to aggregate user and environment data with the goal of addressing personal preferences and supra-functional requirements. This, combined with its societal implications, results in a set of design principles as a concrete fruition of design contractualism. In particular, this thesis describes: - a review of intelligent ubiquitous environments and relevant technologies, including a definition of user experience as a dynamic affective construct; - a specification of main components for personal data aggregation and service personalisation, without compromising privacy, security or usability; - the implementation of a software platform and a methodological procedure for its instantiation; - an evaluation of the developed platform and its benefits for urban mobility and public transport information systems; - a set of design principles for the design of ubiquitous systems, with an impact on individual experience and collective awareness. Cloud2Bubble contributes towards the development of affective intelligent ubiquitous systems with the potential to enhance user experience in pervasive environments. In addition, the platform aims at minimising the risk of user digital exposure while supporting collective action.Open Acces

Towards Smart and Sustainable Multimodal Public Transports Based on a Participatory Ecosystem

International audienceLeveraging on the recent availability of open data about public transports, the last generation of smartphone applications provide highly personalised guidance to passengers during their trips. This smart assistance definitely improves the passenger comfort and streamlines their trips, especially in case of infrastructure incidents and/or multimodal trips. However, there are important limitations stemming from the unidirectional flow of information going from transport operators to passengers: (1) waste of computing resources, partially defeating the purpose of sustainability, and (2) missed opportunities of optimisations by the transport operators, which do not exploit detailed real-time passengers information. This paper presents ongoing work towards smarter and more sustainable multimodal transports based on a full-duplex ecosystem in which passengers and transport operators actively exchange information and react correspondingly. As first steps in this direction, we show how this integration can lead to greener computing applications by varying the balance between the smartphone and the cloud, and present a few concrete optimisations enabled in this model, during the trip itself or on a longer term by improving the transport infrastructure. We illustrate this ecosystem with a smartphone/cloud application prototype, and elaborate the remaining challenges for fully implementing this vision, including issues like interoperability, scalability, and acceptability

The role of information in decision making for transport

Commissioned science review for the DTI Foresight Initiativ

e-Sanctuary: open multi-physics framework for modelling wildfire urban evacuation

The number of evacuees worldwide during wildfire keep rising, year after year. Fire evacuations at the wildland-urban interfaces (WUI) pose a serious challenge to fire and emergency services and are a global issue affecting thousands of communities around the world. But to date, there is a lack of comprehensive tools able to inform, train or aid the evacuation response and the decision making in case of wildfire. The present work describes a novel framework for modelling wildfire urban evacuations. The framework is based on multi-physics simulations that can quantify the evacuation performance. The work argues that an integrated approached requires considering and integrating all three important components of WUI evacuation, namely: fire spread, pedestrian movement, and traffic movement. The report includes a systematic review of each model component, and the key features needed for the integration into a comprehensive toolkit

Investigating the Impact of Public Transport Service Disruptions upon Passenger Travel Behaviour—Results from Krakow City

Public transport (PT) service disruptions are common and unexpected events which often result in major impediment to passengers’ typical travel routines. However, attitudes and behavioural responses to unexpected PT disruptions are still not fully understood in state-of-the-art research. The objective of this study is to examine how PT users adapt their travel choices and what travel information sources they utilize once they encounter sudden PT service disruptions. To this end, we conduct a passenger survey among PT users in the city of Kraków (Poland), consisting of a series of stated- and revealed-preference questions. Results show that passengers’ reported choices during past PT disruptions mostly involve adjusting the current PT travel routine, exposing a certain bias with their stated choices (which tend to overestimate the probability of modal shifts). Factors influencing travel behaviour shifts include frequency and recency of PT disruption experience, as well as propensity to arrive on-time. With regards to travel information sources, staff announcement and personal experience play an important role in recognizing the emerging disruption, but real-time information (RTI) sources are the most useful in planning the onward journey afterwards. Based on these, we highlight the implications for future RTI policy during PT service disruptions; in particular, the provision of a reliable time estimate until normal service conditions are resumed. Such RTI content could foster passengers’ tendency to use PT services in uncertain conditions, especially as their stated wait time tolerance often matches the actual duration of PT disruptions