Engineering environment-mediated coordination via nature-inspired laws

SAPERE is a general multiagent framework to support the development of self-organizing pervasive computing services. One of the key aspects of the SAPERE approach is to have all interactions between agents take place in an indirect way, via a shared spatial environment. In such environment, a set of nature-inspired coordination laws have been defined to rule the coordination activities of the application agents and promote the provisioning of adaptive and self-organizing services

Proxemic interactions with multi-artifact systems

Abstract — The artifact ecologies emerging from an increasing number of interactive digital artifacts, capable of communicating with each other wirelessly, have created an interaction space where software applications are no longer limited by the physical boundaries of a single device. With the new opportunities follows an added complexity that interaction designers need to address. Previous work have shown the potential of proxemic interactions as one way of dealing with design challenges of ubicomp systems. However, the work focused on interactions involving multiple digital artifacts is limited. In this paper, we analyze two multi-artifact systems from our prior work within the domain of music consumption and identify four concepts of multi-artifact interactions: Plasticity, migration, complementarity, and multi-user. These concepts forms the basis for a discussion on the potential use of proxemic interactions in the design of multi-artifact systems. Keywords- artifact ecology, multi-artifact systems, proxemic interactions, music systems. I

Social Feedback in Display Ecosystems

Public display technology (like digital signage) and private one (like smartphones) has advanced significantly in capacity, capability and spread over the past years. For the provision of information services in display technology rich settings we draw the analogy to biological ecosystems as a community of living organisms together with nonliving components of the environment, linked together through information flows, and by that acting as a global system. We identify individuals in the information society with their situational information demands and their implicit and explicit interaction styles as the living, and the plethora of display devices as the non-living part of an information ecosystem. A local interactions oriented service architecture is developed, the SAPERE pervasive service substrate. A situation aware social feedback mechanism is proposed and implemented in the SAPERE architecture, demonstrating how incentivizing local interactions can stand as a principle to attain desirable global information balance