Learning about End-User Development for Smart Homes by "Eating Our Own Dog Food"

SPOK is an End-User Development Environment that permits people to monitor, control, and configure smart home services and devices. SPOK has been deployed for more than 4 months in the homes of 5 project team members for testing and refinement, prior to longitudinal experiments in the homes of families not involved in the project. This article reports on the lessons learned in this initial deployment

About Composing Our Own Smart Home

EUD4Services (End-User Development for Services) workshop, in Conjunction with AVI 2010, Rome, May 2010This paper reports on an empirical study designed as a follow-up of a theoretical model intended to support reasoning about the composition of smart artifacts by end users. We have solicited 17 families and used a combination of interviews and playful cultural probes. Results show that families are willing to couple smart objects to improve their lives, and that the theoretical questions raised by our model are sound

An Ecological View of Smart Home Technologies

International audienceIn this paper we propose an ecological view in which a smart home is seen as an interconnected collection of smart objects that work together to provide services to inhabitants. We review home technologies in a historical context in which the home is a personal habitat that provides services to inhabitants , and draw lessons from the profusion of new services that were made possible by the introduction of electricity in the home during the 20th century. We examine possible metaphors for smart homes, including the smart home as an inside-out autonomous robot, and the smart home as an ecosystem of smart objects providing services. We propose a taxonomy for smart home services and discuss examples for each class of service. We conclude with a discussion of required system qualities and potential show-stoppers. Continued advances in information and communication technologies, coupled with progress in machine learning, sensors, actuators and human computer interaction make it increasingly easy to embed technologies for perception, action, communication and interaction in ordinary human objects. The result is an enabling technology for smart objects and smart environments with the potential to provide revolutionary new services. In this paper we discuss how this technology can be used to create new forms of intelligent services for the home. We begin by discussing historical barriers to Home Automation, and propose an alternative ecological view of the home as a personal habitat that provides services such as personal protection and shelter from the elements. We examine the profound rupture in the nature of services that resulted from the introduction of electricity in the home at the beginning of the 20 th century and draw lessons from the adoption of different forms of electric appliances. We then examine the nature of services that are made possible by the introduction of ambient intelligence in the home. We propose a taxonomy for smart home services in terms of tools, housekeepers, advisors, and media. For each class, we explore forms of services for different functional areas of the home. We conclude by discussing required system qualitie

Working Document on Gloss Ontology

This document describes the Gloss Ontology. The ontology and associated class model are organised into several packages. Section 2 describes each package in detail, while Section 3 contains a summary of the whole ontology

Context Awareness in Systems with Limited Resources

Mobile embedded systems often have strong limitations regarding available resources. In this paper we propose a statistical approach which could scale down to microcontrollers with scarce resources, to model simple contexts based on raw sensor data. As a case study, two experiments are provided where statistical modeling techniques were applied to learn and recognize different contexts, based on accelerometer data. We furthermore point out applications that utilize contextual information for power savings in mobile embedded systems

Developing software for user interface

vii, 156 p. : il.; 24 cm

Developing software for the user interface

Indeks Bibliografi hlm. 245-251xiv, 256 hlm. : il. ; 23 cm

Adaptation and Plasticity of User Interfaces

. This paper introduces the notion of plasticity, a new property of interactive systems that denotes a particular type of user interface adaptation. It also presents a generic framework inspired from the model-based approach, for supporting the development of plastic user interfaces. This framework is illustrated with simple case studies. KEYSWORDS. User interface adaptation, plasticity. 1. Introduction: A Design Space for Adaptation In HCI, adaptation is modeled as two complementary system properties: adaptability and adaptivity. Adaptability is the capacity of the system to allow users to customize their system from a predefined set of parameters. Adaptivity is the capacity of the system to perform adaptation automatically without deliberate action from the user's part. Whether adaptation is performed on human requests or automatically, the design space for adaptation includes three additional orthogonal axes (see Figure 1): . The target for adaptation. This axis denotes the enti..