Designing for systems of smart things

The Internet of Things has been a success for enterprises and several industrial sectors, but not yet a success for end users in home environments at the fringe of the cloud. Many studies reveal that beyond the initial amazement, connected devices add little value over their unconnected siblings, focus on too narrow use cases in mostly hypothetical scenarios, often fail to provide a good out-of-the-box experience, and are not able to learn and adapt in a meaningful way to our complex contextualized realities. Indeed, what is available commercially often feels like reiterating technological innovation over actually progressing human capabilities and addressing important needs.This special issue started from the observation that after years of struggling to gain a foothold, designing for systems has finally found its place and area of application in design for the Internet of Things (IoT). Designing for systems and design for devices connecting into the Internet of Things have been explored not only in recent years, but already some years ago, when ubiquitous computing and later ambient intelligence emerged. While core insights remain valid, technologies have matured and spread significantly over recent years, bringing connected devices and services into the homes and direct proximity of end users..

Discovering Knowledge through Highly Interactive Information Based Systems

[EN] The new Internet era has increased a production of digital data. The mankind had an easy way to the knowledge access never before, but at the same time the rapidly increasing rate of new data, the ease of duplication and transmission of these data across the Net, the new available channels for information dissemination, the large amounts of historical data, questionable quality of the existing data and so on are issues for information overload that causes more difficult to make decision using the right data. Soft-computing techniques for decision support systems and business intelligent systems present pretty interesting and necessary solutions for data management and supporting decision-making processes, but the last step at the decision chain is usually supported by a human agent that has to process the system outcomes in form of reports or visualizations. These kinds of information representations are not enough to make decisions because of behind them could be hidden information patterns that are not obvious for automatic data processing and humans must interact with these data representation in order to discover knowledge. According to this, the current special issue is devoted to present nine experiences that combine visualization and visual analytics techniques, data mining methods, intelligent recommendation agents, user centered evaluation and usability patterns, etc. in interactive systems as a key issue for knowledge discovering in advanced and emerging information systems.[ES] La nueva era de Internet ha aumentado la producción de datos digitales. Nunca nates la humanidad ha tenido una manera más fácil el acceso a los conocimientos, pero al mismo tiempo el rápido aumento de la tasa de nuevos datos, la facilidad de duplicación y transmisión de estos datos a través de la red, los nuevos canales disponibles para la difusión de información, las grandes cantidades de los datos históricos, cuestionable calidad de los datos existentes y así sucesivamente, son temas de la sobrecarga de información que hace más difícil tomar decisiones con la información correcta. Técnicas de Soft-computing para los sistemas de apoyo a las decisiones y sistemas inteligentes de negocios presentan soluciones muy interesantes y necesarias para la gestión de datos y procesos de apoyo a la toma de decisiones, pero el último paso en la cadena de decisiones suele ser apoyados por un agente humano que tiene que procesar los resultados del sistema de en forma de informes o visualizaciones. Este tipo de representaciones de información no son suficientes para tomar decisiones debido detrás de ellos podrían ser patrones de información ocultos que no son obvios para el procesamiento automático de datos y los seres humanos deben interactuar con estos representación de datos con el fin de descubrir el conocimiento. De acuerdo con esto, el presente número especial está dedicado a nueve experiencias actuales que combinan técnicas de visualización y de análisis visual, métodos de minería de datos, agentes de recomendación inteligentes y evaluación centrada en el usuario y patrones de usabilidad, etc. En sistemas interactivos como un tema clave para el descubrimiento de conocimiento en los sistemas de información avanzados y emergentes

A Mobile Robot Generating Video Summaries of Seniors' Indoor Activities

We develop a system which generates summaries from seniors' indoor-activity videos captured by a social robot to help remote family members know their seniors' daily activities at home. Unlike the traditional video summarization datasets, indoor videos captured from a moving robot poses additional challenges, namely, (i) the video sequences are very long (ii) a significant number of video-frames contain no-subject or with subjects at ill-posed locations and scales (iii) most of the well-posed frames contain highly redundant information. To address this problem, we propose to \hl{exploit} pose estimation \hl{for detecting} people in frames\hl{. This guides the robot} to follow the user and capture effective videos. We use person identification to distinguish a target senior from other people. We \hl{also make use of} action recognition to analyze seniors' major activities at different moments, and develop a video summarization method to select diverse and representative keyframes as summaries.Comment: accepted by MobileHCI'1