Soft actuation for home and office

Nowadays, most effort in the area of context-aware systems goes into applications that process sensor data to proactively drive actuators. We share the concerns raised about such fully automated operation. Most notably, due to imperfect context inferences, actuating decisions are often contrary to the user's actual desires. Thus we focus on what we refer to as soft actuation: issuing low-key, non-verbal hints to the user, prompting him to optionally perform specific actuating actions. An actuating action consists in reaching to a nearby object and performing a simple manual operation on it. In this paper we describe the concept of soft actuation, position it with respect to related work, and identify relevant research challenges. © 2013 IEEE

Lessons from SmartCampus: External Experimenting with User-Centric Internet-of-Things Testbed

© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New YorkCreating Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions that can be deployed at scale requires adequate experimentation environments. In the area of experimentation, two trends can be observed. First, there is a shift from lab-based, controlled experiments to experimenting “in the wild”: researchers tend to augment the users’ natural environments and observe how people integrate a new solution into their everyday lives. Second, when a substantial investment in setting up an experimentation infrastructure has been made, it makes sense to open it to a wide community of researchers; the concept of Experimentation-as-a-Service (EaaS) is emerging along these lines. SmartCampus, an IoT testbed developed at the University of Surrey, fits the both trends very well. It involves real users in a natural setting, as IoT devices are deployed in the users’ offices. Further, several user-centric experiments conducted in the SmartCampus were driven by external researchers, i.e., people who do not belong to the team that developed the testbed. In this paper we report on lessons learned from such IoT experiments. After a brief overview of SmartCampus and the experiments themselves, we offer a simple experiment stakeholder model, which identifies key actors and interfaces between them. We then focus on issues related to the external experimenters who take advantage of the experimentation “service.” That focus is motivated by our realization that EaaS, while attractive in principle, gives rise to a number of non-trivial challenges

Lessons from SmartCampus: External Experimenting with User-Centric Internet-of-Things Testbed

Creating Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions that can be deployed at scale requires adequate experimentation environments. In the area of experimentation, two trends can be observed. First, there is a shift from lab-based, controlled experiments to experimenting “in the wild”: researchers tend to augment the users’ natural environments and observe how people integrate a new solution into their everyday lives. Second, when a substantial investment in setting up an experimentation infrastructure has been made, it makes sense to open it to a wide community of researchers; the concept of Experimentation-as-a-Service (EaaS) is emerging along these lines. SmartCampus, an IoT testbed developed at the University of Surrey, fits the both trends very well. It involves real users in a natural setting, as IoT devices are deployed in the users’ offices. Further, several user-centric experiments conducted in the SmartCampus were driven by external researchers, i.e., people who do not belong to the team that developed the testbed. In this paper we report on lessons learned from such IoT experiments. After a brief overview of SmartCampus and the experiments themselves, we offer a simple experiment stakeholder model, which identifies key actors and interfaces between them. We then focus on issues related to the external experimenters who take advantage of the experimentation “service.” That focus is motivated by our realization that EaaS, while attractive in principle, gives rise to a number of non-trivial challenges. © 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York

Graspable and Resource-Flexible Applications for Pervasive Computing at Home

We envision the home populated with regular objects that allow programmatic access to their sensors and actuators. The objects jointly form a pervasive computing platform, open for third-party independently developed applications. A challenge is how to support people in deploying and managing such applications. Today, the user perceives an application as an immaterial artifact, accessed through a screen-based interface of a general-purpose computing device. Contrary to that established paradigm, we propose to reify the pervasive computing application as a simple physical thing, called the "application pill." The pill can easily be grasped and operated: the user brings the pill home, switches it on, and checks if it works just by glancing at its on/off diode. As the application is destined for many homes, each featuring a different collection of objects, the user should be provided with high-level feedback on how well the application can work in her home. Accordingly, the application pill is also equipped with a simple "functionality level" indicator. The degree to which the application can deliver its functionality on top of an available object collection is captured as a single number and displayed by the pill. We present a concrete proof-of-concept elaboration and implementation of these ideas in a pervasive computing middleware platform targeted at cooperating objects

Middleware mechanisms for agent mobility in wireless sensor and actuator networks

This paper describes middleware-level support for agent mobility, targeted at hierarchically structured wireless sensor and actuator network applications. Agent mobility enables a dynamic deployment and adaptation of the application on top of the wireless network at runtime, while allowing the middleware to optimize the placement of agents, e.g., to reduce wireless network traffic, transparently to the application programmer. The paper presents the design of the mechanisms and protocols employed to instantiate agents on nodes and to move agents between nodes. It also gives an evaluation of a middleware prototype running on Imote2 nodes that communicate over ZigBee. The results show that our implementation is reasonably efficient and fast enough to support the envisioned functionality on top of a commodity multi-hop wireless technology. Our work is to a large extent platform-neutral, thus it can inform the design of other systems that adopt a hierarchical structuring of mobile components. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

Node/Proxy portability: Designing for the two lives of your next WSAN middleware

Middleware for wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) provides powerful programming abstractions which simplify application development. While it is highly desirable to reuse WSAN middleware across a wide range of hardware platforms, in practice, complex middleware may not fit in nodes with limited resources. As one possible solution, we propose the so-called proxy approach: the middleware is ported on a general purpose computer, from where the sensors and actuators of the resource-constrained nodes are accessed remotely yet in a way that is transparent to the application, which runs unmodified, as if it resided on the physical nodes. We provide design guidelines and a middleware transformation process for implementing the proxy approach in a structured way. We also present a concrete implementation of the proxy approach for our own middleware, along with a performance evaluation of the proxy software environment in a wired testbed with almost 200 sensor nodes. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Soft Actuation: Smart Home and Office with Human-in-the-Loop

Considerable effort in the area of context-aware systems goes into applications that process sensor data to proactively drive actuators. However, there are concerns about such fully automated operation. Most notably, due to imperfect context inferences, actuating decisions can be contrary to the user's desires. In this article, the authors focus on what they refer to as soft actuation: issuing low-key, nonverbal hints prompting the user to optionally perform a simple manual operation on a nearby object. Soft actuation targets noncritical applications for the home or office. In the spirit of calm technology, special care is taken to respect the user's attention. The authors elaborate the interaction concept and present its experimental evaluation 'in the wild.' The results are encouraging, given that users liked the soft-actuating system and accepted quite a few hints. © 2015 IEEE

Tangible applications for regular objects: An end-user model for pervasive computing at home

This paper describes an end-user model for a domestic pervasive computing platform formed by regular home objects. The platform does not rely on pre-planned infrastructure; instead, it exploits objects that are already available in the home and exposes their joint sensing, actuating and computing capabilities to home automation applications. We advocate an incremental process of the platform formation and introduce tangible, object-like artifacts for representing important platform functions. One of those artifacts, the application pill, is a tiny object with a minimal user interface, used to carry the application, as well as to start and stop its execution and provide hints about its operational status. We also emphasize streamlining the user's interaction with the platform. The user engages any UI-capable object of his choice to configure applications, while applications issue notifications and alerts exploiting whichever available objects can be used for that purpose. Finally, the paper briefly describes an actual implementation of the presented end-user model. © (2010) by International Academy, Research, and Industry Association (IARIA)