A Component-based User Interface Approach for Smart TV

The fast growth and diversity of technological devices currently being produced is benefiting areas such as “ambient intelligence”. This area attempts to integrate information technology in any personal environment. However, to construct service/application software that adapts to different environments, there must be techniques available that favor this type of development. Component based software Engineering (CBSE) is a discipline of the software engineering that integrates (previously constructed) components to build new software systems. This paper presents a CBSE approach to build Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) at run-time. Both a component-based perspective of the user interface and a set of component relationships are presented in the paper. As a case study, this paper also describes an application built for an emerging computation environment, Smart TV. A running example is also presented through the paper putting some Web-based solutions to build User Interfaces together (e.g., Wookie, W3C Widgets, Node.js)

Pain Points for Novice Programmers of Ambient Intelligence Systems: An Exploratory Study

This paper presents an exploratory study aimed at identifying the pain points that novice programmers experience, from the software engineering perspective, when developing and deploying smart and distributed systems, that may be classified as Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems. The exploratory study was conducted among undergraduate students, that worked in groups for developing AmI projects during a university course. Based on their own experiences, individually and as a group, the pain points were identified and prioritized over a common architecture and a set of software development activities. The quantification of the pain points was based on the difficulty level that the students perceived on the development activities and the time they spent completing them. Results represent a starting point for the design of tools and methodologies targeted at overcoming the complexity that novice programmers face when developing AmI systems

Proximal business intelligence on the semantic web

This is the post-print version of this article. The official version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2010 Springer.Ubiquitous information systems (UBIS) extend current Information System thinking to explicitly differentiate technology between devices and software components with relation to people and process. Adapting business data and management information to support specific user actions in context is an ongoing topic of research. Approaches typically focus on providing mechanisms to improve specific information access and transcoding but not on how the information can be accessed in a mobile, dynamic and ad-hoc manner. Although web ontology has been used to facilitate the loading of data warehouses, less research has been carried out on ontology based mobile reporting. This paper explores how business data can be modeled and accessed using the web ontology language and then re-used to provide the invisibility of pervasive access; uncovering more effective architectural models for adaptive information system strategies of this type. This exploratory work is guided in part by a vision of business intelligence that is highly distributed, mobile and fluid, adapting to sensory understanding of the underlying environment in which it operates. A proof-of concept mobile and ambient data access architecture is developed in order to further test the viability of such an approach. The paper concludes with an ontology engineering framework for systems of this type – named UBIS-ONTO

The Fifth International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE 09): a report

The development of intelligent environments is considered an important step towards the realization of the ambient intelligence vision. Intelligent environments are technologically augmented everyday spaces, which intuitively support human activity. The IE conferences traditionally provide a leading edge forum for researchers and engineers to present their latest research and to discuss future directions in the area of intelligent environments. This article briefly presents the content of the Fifth International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE09), which was held July 20–21 at the Castelldefels campus, of the Technical University of Catalonia, near Barcelona, Spain.Postprint (published version

The Mundane Computer: Non-Technical Design Challenges Facing Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence

Interdisciplinary collaboration, to include those who are not natural scientists, engineers and computer scientists, is inherent in the idea of ubiquitous computing, as formulated by Mark Weiser in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, ubiquitous computing has remained largely a computer science and engineering concept, and its non-technical side remains relatively underdeveloped. The aim of the article is, first, to clarify the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration envisaged by Weiser. Second, the difficulties of understanding the everyday and weaving ubiquitous technologies into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it, as conceived by Weiser, are explored. The contributions of Anne Galloway, Paul Dourish and Philip Agre to creating an understanding of everyday life relevant to the development of ubiquitous computing are discussed, focusing on the notions of performative practice, embodied interaction and contextualisation. Third, it is argued that with the shift to the notion of ambient intelligence, the larger scale socio-economic and socio-political dimensions of context become more explicit, in contrast to the focus on the smaller scale anthropological study of social (mainly workplace) practices inherent in the concept of ubiquitous computing. This can be seen in the adoption of the concept of ambient intelligence within the European Union and in the focus on rebalancing (personal) privacy protection and (state) security in the wake of 11 September 2001. Fourth, the importance of adopting a futures-oriented approach to discussing the issues arising from the notions of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence is stressed, while the difficulty of trying to achieve societal foresight is acknowledged