The Internet of Things: Reflections on the Past, Present and Future from a User Centered and Smart Environment Perspective

This paper introduces the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and describes its evolution from a concept proposed by Kevin Ashton in 1999 through its public emergence in 2005 in a United Nations ITU report entitled “The Internet of Things”, to the present day where IoT devices are available as off-the-shelf products from major manufacturers. Using a systematic study of public literature, the paper presents a five-phase categorisation of the development of the Internet-of-Things from its beginnings to the present day. Four mini case studies are included to illustrate some of the issues involved. Finally, the paper discusses some of the big issues facing future developers and marketers of Internet-of-Things based products ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) through to customer privacy and acceptance finishing with an optimistic assessment of the future of the Internet-of-Things

Personalizing the web: A tool for empowering end-users to customize the web through browser-side modification

167 p.Web applications delegate to the browser the final rendering of their pages. Thispermits browser-based transcoding (a.k.a. Web Augmentation) that can be ultimately singularized for eachbrowser installation. This creates an opportunity for Web consumers to customize their Web experiences.This vision requires provisioning adequate tooling that makes Web Augmentation affordable to laymen.We consider this a special class of End-User Development, integrating Web Augmentation paradigms.The dominant paradigm in End-User Development is scripting languages through visual languages.This thesis advocates for a Google Chrome browser extension for Web Augmentation. This is carried outthrough WebMakeup, a visual DSL programming tool for end-users to customize their own websites.WebMakeup removes, moves and adds web nodes from different web pages in order to avoid tabswitching, scrolling, the number of clicks and cutting and pasting. Moreover, Web Augmentationextensions has difficulties in finding web elements after a website updating. As a consequence, browserextensions give up working and users might stop using these extensions. This is why two differentlocators have been implemented with the aim of improving web locator robustness