Meetings and Meeting Modeling in Smart Environments

In this paper we survey our research on smart meeting rooms and its relevance for augmented reality meeting support and virtual reality generation of meetings in real time or off-line. The research reported here forms part of the European 5th and 6th framework programme projects multi-modal meeting manager (M4) and augmented multi-party interaction (AMI). Both projects aim at building a smart meeting environment that is able to collect multimodal captures of the activities and discussions in a meeting room, with the aim to use this information as input to tools that allow real-time support, browsing, retrieval and summarization of meetings. Our aim is to research (semantic) representations of what takes place during meetings in order to allow generation, e.g. in virtual reality, of meeting activities (discussions, presentations, voting, etc.). Being able to do so also allows us to look at tools that provide support during a meeting and at tools that allow those not able to be physically present during a meeting to take part in a virtual way. This may lead to situations where the differences between real meeting participants, human-controlled virtual participants and (semi-) autonomous virtual participants disappear

Semantics-based platform for context-aware and personalized robot interaction in the internet of robotic things

Robots are moving from well-controlled lab environments to the real world, where an increasing number of environments has been transformed into smart sensorized IoT spaces. Users will expect these robots to adapt to their preferences and needs, and even more so for social robots that engage in personal interactions. In this paper, we present declarative ontological models and a middleware platform for building services that generate interaction tasks for social robots in smart IoT environments. The platform implements a modular, data-driven workflow that allows developers of interaction services to determine the appropriate time, content and style of human-robot interaction tasks by reasoning on semantically enriched loT sensor data. The platform also abstracts the complexities of scheduling, planning and execution of these tasks, and can automatically adjust parameters to the personal profile and current context. We present motivational scenarios in three environments: a smart home, a smart office and a smart nursing home, detail the interfaces and executional paths in our platform and present a proof-of-concept implementation. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Access Control Synthesis for Physical Spaces

Access-control requirements for physical spaces, like office buildings and airports, are best formulated from a global viewpoint in terms of system-wide requirements. For example, "there is an authorized path to exit the building from every room." In contrast, individual access-control components, such as doors and turnstiles, can only enforce local policies, specifying when the component may open. In practice, the gap between the system-wide, global requirements and the many local policies is bridged manually, which is tedious, error-prone, and scales poorly. We propose a framework to automatically synthesize local access control policies from a set of global requirements for physical spaces. Our framework consists of an expressive language to specify both global requirements and physical spaces, and an algorithm for synthesizing local, attribute-based policies from the global specification. We empirically demonstrate the framework's effectiveness on three substantial case studies. The studies demonstrate that access control synthesis is practical even for complex physical spaces, such as airports, with many interrelated security requirements

Diverse perceptions of smart spaces

This is the era of smart technology and of ‘smart’ as a meme, so we have run three workshops to examine the ‘smart’ meme and the exploitation of smart environments. The literature relating to smart spaces focuses primarily on technologies and their capabilities. Our three workshops demonstrated that we require a stronger user focus if we are advantageously to exploit spaces ascribed as smart: we examined the concept of smartness from a variety of perspectives, in collaboration with a broad range of contributors. We have prepared this monograph mainly to report on the third workshop, held at Bournemouth University in April 2012, but do also consider the lessons learned from all three. We conclude with a roadmap for a fourth (and final) workshop, which is intended to emphasise the overarching importance of the humans using the spac

“No powers, man!”: A student perspective on designing university smart building interactions

Smart buildings offer an opportunity for better performance and enhanced experience by contextualising services and interactions to the needs and practices of occupants. Yet, this vision is limited by established approaches to building management, delivered top-down through professional facilities management teams, opening up an interaction-gap between occupants and the spaces they inhabit. To address the challenge of how smart buildings might be more inclusively managed, we present the results of a qualitative study with student occupants of a smart building, with design workshops including building walks and speculative futuring. We develop new understandings of how student occupants conceptualise and evaluate spaces as they experience them, and of how building management practices might evolve with new sociotechnical systems that better leverage occupant agency. Our findings point to important directions for HCI research in this nascent area, including the need for HBI (Human-Building Interaction) design to challenge entrenched roles in building management

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable