Ubiquitous Computing

1
Ubiquitous Computing

• Part 2 Application areas and evaluation
  challenges

2
Agenda

• Questions
• Demo questions
• Application themes
• Context, capture and everyday computing
• Evaluation challenges

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Context-Aware Interaction
location
identity
objects
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What is Context?

• Any information that can be used to characterize
  the situation of an entity
• Who, what, where, when
• Why is it important?
• information, usually implicit, that applications
  do not have access to
• Its input that you dont get in a GUI

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How to Use Context

• To present relevant information to someone
• Mobile tour guide
• To perform an action automatically
• Print to nearest printer
• To show an action that use can choose
• Want to phone the number in this email?

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Early Work on Context Support

• Bill Schilit, Xerox PARC
• Main software architect of PARCTab
• Location-aware rules for app behavior

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Case Study tour guides

• Very popular theme
• Location is an easy piece of context
• G. Abowd et al. Cyberguide A mobile
  context-aware tour guide. Balzer/ACM Wireless
  Networks, Vol. 3(5), 1997, pp. 421-433.

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How Cyberguide worked
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Context-Aware Challenges

• More Context
• Who, What, Where, When, Why
• Fusion
• Uncertainty
• Identity Vision Speech Footfall

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Natural Context-Aware

• Augmented Reality

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Capture Access

• Natural Input
• Indexing

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Motivating Capture

• Scenarios in Weisers Scientific American
  article
• Sal doesn't remember Mary, but she does vaguely
  remember the meeting. She quickly starts a search
  for meetings in the past two weeks with more than
  6 people not previously in meetings with her, and
  finds the one.
• Sal looks out her windows at her neighborhood.
  Sunlight and a fence are visible through one, and
  through others she sees electronic trails that
  have been kept for her of neighbors coming and
  going during the early morning.

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Automated capture and access

• Use of computers to preserve records of the live
  experience for future use ?allowing the human
  user to engage in the activity with knowledge
  that details will be available later
• (Abowd Mynatt 2000)
• Points of consideration
• capture needs to be natural
• user access is important
• details of an experience is recorded as streams
  of information

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eClass / Classroom 2000

• Our original exploration for capture
• (Brotherton 2001)

Captures presentation slides annotations audio/vi
deo URLs visited
Automatically generates Web accessible notes
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StuPad (Student NotePad)

• Support student note-takingin eClass (CHI99,
  UIST99)
• students personalize the captured experience

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IBM TeamSpace

• Create and manage meetings, users, agendas,
  action items, presentations
• (CSCW00, Richter 2004)
• Conduct meetings using synchronous tools
• slide annotation
• low-bandwidth video
• agenda viewer
• action item viewer

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Related Work

• Benefits of automated capture and access have
  been explored in several domains, such as
• Classrooms eClass, Lecture Browser,
• Authoring on the Fly
• Meetings Tivoli, Dynomite, NoteLook,
• TeamSpace, NotePals
• Generalized experiences Audio Notebook, Xcapture
  
• Many, many more
• But many new applications visit ideas already
  explored in earlier work

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Design space and holes(UBICOMP01)

• Application design space defined by
• Who Users roles
• What Experience captured representation
• When Time scale
• Where Physical environments
• How Augmented devices methods
• Kinds of applications not yet fully explored
• Long-term access of captured data
• Capture of informal experiences
• Capture of distributed and remote experiences
• Capture with mobility
• More variety in devices employed
• More variety in environments supported

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Capture Access

• Ubiquitous Access

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Capture Access Challenges

• Compelling applications
• Family memories (FVA)
• Personal memory aids (PAL)
• Timescale
• Short, medium, long
• Annotation at point of capture
• Indexing, summarization

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Everyday Computing

• Supporting the continuous ebb flow of action in
  everyday life
• Scaling w.r.t. time
• Activity unstructured, informal, continuous
• Task well-defined, production, begin/end

Write presentation blank document enter
text format print and save
Write about ubicomp multiple drafts multiple
documents reuse outside work evolving thought
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Designing for Everyday Activities

• No clear beginning or end
• Closure vs. flexibility and simplicity
• Interruption is expected
• Design for resumption
• Concurrent activities
• Monitoring for opportunity
• Time is important discriminator
• Interpret events
• Associative models needed
• Reacquire information from multiple pts of view

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Evolution of Augmented Whiteboard

• LiveBoard - Natural input
• Tivoli - Meeting capture
• Dummbo
• Context in support of impromtu meetings
• Flatland (CHI 99)
• lightweight behaviors
• visibility
• associative storage
• browsing in time

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Challenge of Evaluation

• Bleeding edge technology
• Novelty
• Unanticipated uses
• Quantitative metrics

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Evaluation Strategies

• Bleeding Edge
• Audio Aura Scenarios
• Lightweight Ethnography
• Flatland
• Long-Term Studies
• Classroom 2000

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Social Issues
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Conclusions

• Just scratched the surface
• Scale hard to imagine
• Real life interaction noisy, erroneous
• Continuous interaction time sensitive
• Evaluation

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For more information

• CS 7470 Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing
• Conferences
• Ubicomp (since 1999)
• Pervasive Computing (2002, 2004)
• IEEE PerCom (2003 2004)
• Journals
• Springer Verlag Personal and Ubiquitous Computing
• IEEE Pervasive Computing (a gift!)