User preferences in intelligent environments

Intelligent Environments and other Computer Science sub-fields based on the concepts of context and context-awareness are created with the explicit or implicit intention of providing services which are satisfying to the intended users of those environments. This article discusses the pragmatic importance of Preferences within the process of developing Intelligent Environments as a conceptual tool to achieve that system-user alignment and we also look at the practical challenges of implementing different aspects of the concept of Preferences. This study is not aimed at providing a definitive solution, rather to assess the advantages and disadvantages of different available options with the view to inform the next wave of developments in the area

A smart campus template

We highlight a lack of models and theories associated with the Smart Campus concept and also an absence of processes to support its design and development. This paper provides a first approach to a theory and a set of design principles to guide their development. The theory and principles are flexible enough to be easily adapted and adopted by any organization interested in developing a Smart Campus

Managing preference profiles in multi-user intelligent environments

Development of Intelligent Environments have been so far mostly ad-hoc and here we investigate one fundamental bottleneck which needs to be addressed to facilitate more effective developments in the future: handling of user preferences in a multiple user environment. This paper analyzes some cases which combine different approaches to manage users preferences combining services at higher and lower levels with user-led and environment-led approaches. We assess some practical pros and cons in each of these combinations as well as some more fundamental building blocks which developers need to reflect on from a scientific point of view before embarking on the engineering of these systems

Contexts and context-awareness revisited from an intelligent environments perspective

Context is a useful concept somehow unconsciously used by humans in daily life problem-solving. Recently several subareas of computer science have been increasingly trying to rely on this concept to design systems with practical use in certain predefined circumstances. The perception is that imbuing in the system certain context-awareness qualities can support intelligent decision-making in specific practical situations. Despite a significant number of implemented systems which aim at providing context-awareness there is a lack of commonly accepted and used methodologies and tools. At the root of this, is the lack of agreement on a set of good principles or standards which can act as a guide to the scientific community and the developers interested in this class of systems. There have been some extensive surveys on the use of context, still there is no theoretical corpus emerging which we can use to discuss the essential concepts making up the fabric of contexts and its use by system developers. Here we attempted such enterprise at a level which is more formal than popular surveys, in a way that is not implementation dependent and in a way that highlights key concepts of relevance to developers. We reassessed first the basic concepts identifying the need to more prominently consider system beneficiaries’ satisfaction. We then transfer explicitly these values to a more formal outline of the basic components and the operations which emerge as relevant. We identify and highlight the tasks of context activation, comparison, influence, construction, and interaction. We hint at how these may work in practice and explained these through examples. We show how the theory is flexible enough by generalizing it to multiusers so that optimization of global preferences and expectations is used to drive system development and system behaviour

User preferences in intelligent environments

Intelligent Environments and other Computer Science sub-fields based on the concepts of context and context-awareness are created with the explicit or implicit intention of providing services which are satisfying to the intended users of those environments. This article discusses the pragmatic importance of Preferences within the process of developing Intelligent Environments as a conceptual tool to achieve that system-user alignment and we also look at the practical challenges of implementing different aspects of the concept of Preferences. This study is not aimed at providing a definitive solution, rather to assess the advantages and disadvantages of different available options with the view to inform the next wave of developments in the area