Interacting with Augmented Environments

2010

The smart environment and device interoperability requires interoperability in three levels in physical environment: transferring bits through communication channel, using services of different devices, and understanding the meaning of information unambiguously. Smart-M3 is information interoperability solution developed in the DIEM project for smart environments. It is based on the idea to share the information of embedded devices using a common ontology models that guarantee that information is understood similarly in each device and application. The key element of Smart-M3 is a semantic information broker that is exposed as an information sharing service in service level. It enables the development of multi-device, multivendor and cross-domain applications based in information mash-ups. This paper presents an information interoperability approach and basic principles and research challenges related to how smart environments can be built on top of it. The core parts of Smart-M3 have been published as open source software.

… Computing.[Online]. …, 2001

In an age where wirelessly networked appliances and devices are becoming commonplace, there is a necessity for providing a standard interface to them that is easily accessible by any mobile user. The design outlined in this paper provides an infrastructure and communication protocol for presenting services to heterogeneous mobile clients in a physical space via some short range wireless links. This system uses a Communication Manager to communicate with the client devices. The Communication Manager can be modified easily to work with any type of communication medium, including TCP/IP, Infrared, CDPD and Bluetooth. All the components in our model use a language based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) giving it a uniform and easily adaptable interface. We explain our trade-offs in implementation and through experiments we show that the design is feasible and that it indeed provides a flexible structure for providing services. Centaurus defines a uniform infrastructure for heterogeneous services, both hardware and software , to be made available to diverse mobile users within a confined space.

IEEE Distributed Systems Online, 2006

Design strategies and a flexible, adaptable middleware architecture for resource-limited, evolving systems.

Ubiquitous Computing advocates the construction of large mobile and distributed systems that help enhance physical spaces and aid users in performing various kinds of tasks. These systems, however, are incredibly complex. Developers face a number of challenges in developing ubiquitous computing applications and services. These systems are highly dynamic and fault-prone. Different systems have different resources and policies; hence, programs are not portable across different ubiquitous computing environments. Finally, the device and service richness of these environments cause further complexity in terms of choosing appropriate resources and algorithms for performing a task. In this paper, we first identify key aspects of the complexity of ubiquitous computing systems. We then propose a middleware that helps tackle these aspects of complexity and simplify the development of ubiquitous computing systems. This middleware enables ubiquitous computing systems to become self-configuring, self-repairing and adaptive. Developers program ubiquitous computing systems in terms of high-level, parameterized tasks. The values of task parameters may be provided by the end-user or automatically inferred by the middleware based on the current state of the environment, context-sensitive policies, and learned user preferences. We finally evaluate the reduction in complexity enabled by the middleware.

EICS '17 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems , 2017

Nowadays we are surrounded by many different computing devices, but applications running on them are still largely independent. It should be possible to address this shortcoming to provide a better user experience. There is a lack of tools to realize this vision, so we aim to develop a framework that allows third-party developers to build applications that run across multiple co-located devices. Three key related work areas have been identified: proxemics, indoor positioning and multi-device applications. The work is under way to define the framework's architecture and the design of core components, as well as to develop a supporting indoor positioning solution. We will also be developing prototypes in order to perform usability tests to assess if this approach is beneficial to potential users.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2002

Today a variety of terms -like Ubiquitous Computing, Pervasive Computing, Invisible Computing, Ambient Intelligence, Sentient Computing, Post-PC Computing, etc. -refers to new challenges and paradigms for the interaction among users and mobile and embedded computing devices. Fertilized by a vast quantitative growth of the Internet over the past years and a growing availability of wireless communication technologies in the wide, local and personal area, a ubiquitous use of "embedded" information technologies is evolving. Most of the services delivered through those new technologies are services adapted to context, particularly to the person, the time and the place of their use. The aim for seamless service provision to anyone (personalized services), at any place (location based services) and at any time (time dependent services) has brought the issues of software framework design and middleware to a new discussion: it is expected that context-aware services will evolve, enabled by wirelessly ad-hoc networked, autonomous special purpose computing devices (i.e. "smart appliances"), providing largely invisible support for tasks performed by users. It is further expected that services with explicit user input and output will be replaced by a computing landscape sensing the physical world via a huge variety of electrical, magnetic, optical, acoustic, chemical etc. sensors, and controlling it via a manifold of actuators in such a way that it becomes merged with the virtual world. Applications and services will have to be greatly based on the notion of context and knowledge, will have to cope with highly dynamic environments and changing resources, and will need to evolve towards a more implicit and proactive interaction with users.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008

To support the deployment of ubicomp systems, the ubiquitous computing research community has developed a variety of middleware platforms, meta-operating systems and toolkits. While there is evidence that these systems share certain abstractions, it is not realistic to use the same platform in all environments; systems and applications specialized for specific environments and applications will always be required. In this paper we present a methodology for interoperability that allows developers to innovate and evolve their platforms while allowing others to build interoperable applications. Our approach is based on our design of the Ubicomp Common Model (UCM) and an implementation of this model called the Ubicomp Integration Framework (UIF). Our aim in this work is to provide clear evidence that the UCM unifies the capabilities of ubicomp systems based on an evaluation and analysis of its use in integrating several existing systems into a composite campus environment.

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2000

A declarative SQL-like language and a middleware infrastructure are presented for collecting data from different nodes of a pervasive system. Data management is performed by hiding the complexity due to the large underlying heterogeneity of devices, which can span from passive RFID(s) to ad hoc sensor boards to portable computers. An important feature of the presented middleware is to make the integration of new device types in the system easy through the use of device self-description. Two case studies are described for PerLa usage, and a survey is made for comparing our approach with other projects in the area.

IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2003

ervasive computing can change the way we use computing devices and broaden the Internet's applications enormously. Several universities and research organizations have embarked on exciting new projects in pervasive computing. Mark Weiser predicted pervasive use of computing devices and laid the foundation for research work in this area. 1 He imagined that computing hardware and software will disappear into the background and that users will take them for granted. In the same vein, we are working on a community computing concept where users interface with services, and computing hardware and software is transparent. The pervasive information community organization is a middleware framework that enhances existing Internet-based services. 2 PICO's objective is to meet the demands of time-critical applications in areas such as telemedicine, the military, and crisis management that demand automated, continual, unobtrusive services and proactive realtime collaborations among devices and software agents in dynamic, heterogeneous environments. PICO creates mission-oriented dynamic computing communities that perform tasks for users and devices. It consists of autonomous software entities called delegents (or intelligent delegates) and hardware devices called camileuns (or connected, adaptive, mobile, intelligent, learned, efficient, ubiquitous nodes). PICO's objective is to provide "what we want, when we want, where we want, and how we want" types of services autonomously and continually. The PICO concept extends the current notion of pervasive computing-namely, that computers are everywhere. The novelty of this initiative lies in creating communities of delegents that collaborate proactively to handle dynamic information, provide selective content delivery, and facilitate application interface. In addition, delegents representing lowresource devices can carry out tasks remotely. A case for PICO Mahadev Satyanarayanan has identified four new areas of research-effective use of smart spaces, invisibility, localized scalability, and masking uneven conditioning. 3 In PICO, mobile and static delegents representing camileuns in communities try to use resources as effectively as possible. PICO's layered architecture attempts to mask the heterogeneity among devices and associated software. Service-provisioning communities allow a high degree of transparency between users and applications on one hand and the infrastructure on the other. Randy Katz, in his keynote address at the Per-The pervasive information community organization is a framework for creating mission-oriented dynamic communities of autonomous software entities that perform tasks for users and devices. PICO's telemedicine example scenario demonstrates its potential as a simple, unique, and versatile middleware framework for pervasive computing.

2006

This paper introduces a new lightweight middleware for pervasive environments. This middleware abstracts network communications and provides service introspection and discovery using DNS-SD (DNS-based Service Discovery [1]). Services can declare simplex or duplex communication channels and variables. The middleware supports the low-latency, highbandwidth communications required in interactive perceptual applications. It has been designed to be easy to learn in order to stimulate software reuse in research teams and is revealing to have a high adoption rate.