What Would You Ask to Your Home if It Were Intelligent? Exploring User Expectations about Next-Generation Homes

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research is giving birth to a multitude of futuristic home scenarios and applications; however a clear discrepancy between current installations and research-level designs can be easily noticed. Whether this gap is due to the natural distance between research and engineered applications or to mismatching of needs and solutions remains to be understood. This paper discusses the results of a survey about user expectations with respect to intelligent homes. Starting from a very simple and open question about what users would ask to their intelligent homes, we derived user perceptions about what intelligent homes can do, and we analyzed to what extent current research solutions, as well as commercially available systems, address these emerging needs. Interestingly, most user concerns about smart homes involve comfort and household tasks and most of them can be currently addressed by existing commercial systems, or by suitable combinations of them. A clear trend emerges from the poll findings: the technical gap between user expectations and current solutions is actually narrower and easier to bridge than it may appear, but users perceive this gap as wide and limiting, thus requiring the AmI community to establish a more effective communication with final users, with an increased attention to real-world deploymen

Pictures are necessary but not sufficient: Using a range of visual methods to engage users about school design

It has been argued by both educationalists and social researchers that visual methods are particularly appropriate for the investigation of people's experiences of the school environment. The current and expected building work taking place in British schools provides an opportunity for exploration of methods, as well as a need to establish ways to achieve this involvement of a range of school users, including students. This article describes a consultation that was undertaken in a UK secondary school as part of a participatory design process centred on the rebuilding of the school. A range of visual methods, based on photographs and maps, was used to investigate the views of a diverse sample of school users, including students, teachers, technical and support staff and the wider community. Reported here is the experience of using these tools, considering the success of different visually-based methods in engaging a broad cross section of the school community and revealing useful information. Using a range of visual methods allows a complex, but coherent, understanding of the particular school environment to be constructed and developed. It is further argued that such a range of visual and spatial methods is needed to develop appropriate understanding. The study, therefore, contributes to knowledge about specific visual research methods, appreciation of the relationship between tools, and a general methodological understanding of visual methods' utility for developing understanding of the learning environment

External Program Evaluation: Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Program in Ethiopia

USAID/Ethiopia commissioned this study to evaluate an ongoing Millennium Water Alliance (MWA) program and to generate findings that could assist in developing monitoring and evaluation indicators for future use. As of 2008, MWA was implementing eight WASH projects in 28 districts, with stated goals of improving access to sustainable and adequate water, improving access to sanitation services, increasing community awareness, and promoting safe hygiene practices. The evaluation calls MWA's progress encouraging overall, but notes that the one to two year planning horizons used were not enough to cause internalized behavior change. Furthermore, the authors recommend investing more in research and development; adopting harmonized approaches and best practices as well as innovative methodologies; building capacity of district water, health, and education offices; and linking the MWA program with other government, USAID, WSP and UNICEF programs

A Time Comparison of Computer-Assisted and Manual Bathymetric Processing

We describe an experiment designed to determine the time required to process Multibeam Echosounder (MBES) data using the CUBE (Combined Uncertainty and Bathymetry Estimator) [Calder & Mayer, 2003; Calder, 2003] and Navigation Surface [Smith et al., 2002; Smith, 2003] algorithms. We collected data for a small (22.3xl06 soundings) survey in Valdez Narrows, Alaska, and monitored person-hours expended on processing for a traditional MBES processing stream and the proposed computer-assisted method operating on identical data. The analysis shows that the vast majority of time expended in a traditional processing stream is in subjective hand-editing of data, followed by line planning and quality control, and that the computer-assisted method is significantly faster than the traditional process through its elimination of human interaction time. The potential improvement in editing time is shown to be on the order of 25-37:1 over traditional methods

The Individual Budgets Pilot Projects: Impact and Outcomes for Carers

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A Gender Perspective on Water Resources and Sanitation

In most cultures, women are primarily responsible for the use and management of water resources, sanitation, and health at the household level. Women and girls walk many hours fetching and carrying back water whereas men do not