Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Increasing availability of sensor-based location traces for individuals, combined with the goal of better understanding user context, has resulted in a recent emphasis on algorithms for automatically extracting users’ significant places from location data. Place-finding can be characterized by two sub-problems, (1) finding significant locations, and (2) assigning semantic labels to those locations (the problem of “moving from location to place”) [8]. Existing algorithms focus on the first sub-problem and on finding city-level locations. We use a principled approach in adapting Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) to provide a first solution for finding significant places within the home, based on the first set of long-term, precise location data collected from several homes. We also present a novel metric for quantifying the similarity between places, which has the potential to assign semantic labels to places by comparing them to a library of known places. We discuss several implications of these new techniques for the design of Ubicomp systems.

Seeking to be sensitive to users, smart home researchers have focused on the concept of control. They attempt to allow users to gain control over their lives by framing the problem as one of end-user programming. But families are not as we typically conceive them, and a large body of ethnographic research shows how their activities and routines do not map well to programming tasks. End-user programming ultimately provides control of devices. But families want more control . In this paper, we explore this disconnect. Using grounded contextual fieldwork with dual-income families, we describe the control that families want, and suggest seven design principles that will help end-user programming systems deliver that control.

Ubicomp developers are increasingly borrowing from other disciplines, such as anthropology and creative design, to inform their design process. In this paper, we demonstrate that the discipline of history similarly has much to offer ubicomp research. Specifically, we describe a historically-grounded approach to designing ubicomp systems and applications for the home. We present findings from a study examining aging and housework that demonstrate how our approach can be useful to sensitize ubicomp developers to the impact of cultural values on household technology, to reunderstand the home space, and to spur development of new design spaces. Our findings suggest that historically-grounded research approaches may be useful in more deeply understanding and designing for context both in and outside of the home.

In current authoring tools for location-aware applications the designer typically places trigger zones onto a map of the target environment and associates these with events and media assets. However, studies of deployed experiences have shown that the characteristics of the usually invisible ubiquitous computing infrastructure, especially limited coverage and accuracy, have a major impact on an experience. We propose a new approach in which designers work with three layers of information: information about the physical world, information about digital media, but also visualizations of ubiquitous infrastructure. We describe the implementation of a prototype authoring tool that embodies this approach and describe how it has been used to author a location-based game for mobile phones called Tycoon. We then outline the key challenges involved in generalizing this approach to more powerful authoring tools including acquiring and visualizing infrastructure data, acquiring map data, and flexibly specifying how digital content relates to both of these.

We describe a set of fixed-function and programmable blocks, , previously developed to provide non-programming, non-electronics experts the ability to construct and customize basic embedded computing systems. We present a novel and powerful tool that, combined with these building blocks, enables end-users to automatically generate an optimized physical implementation derived from a virtual system function description. Furthermore, the tool allows the end-user to specify optimization criteria and constraint libraries that guide the tool in generating a suitable physical implementation, without requiring the end-user to have prior programming or electronics experience. We summarize experiments illustrating the ability of the tool to generate physical implementations corresponding to various end-user defined goals. The tool enables end-users having little or no electronics or programming experience to build useful customized basic sensor-based computing systems from existing low-cost building blocks.

This paper presents an analysis, implementation and evaluation of the physical mobile interaction techniques , and . Based on this we have formulated guidelines that show in which context which interaction technique is preferred by the user. Our main goal was to identify typical situations and scenarios in which the different techniques might be useful or not. In support of these aims we have developed and evaluated, within a user study, a low-fidelity and a high-fidelity prototype to assess , and interaction techniques within different contexts. Other work has shown that mobile devices can act as universal remote controls for interaction with smart objects but, to date, there has been no research which has analyzed when a given mobile interaction technique should be used. In this research we analyze the appropriateness of three interaction techniques as selection techniques in smart environments.

This paper reports on issues related to the use of mobile phones by women aged 60 years and over. The study started with a series of focus group discussions, which covered usage patterns, problems, benefits, ideal phone design, and desired and unwanted features. It then moved to an exploration of the group’s cooperative learning process when encountering an unfamiliar mobile phone. The issues raised in the discussions were translated into an online questionnaire, which was responded to by 67 women aged 60 and over. This study makes two main contributions to the field. First, it is one of a very few studies that provides a diagrammatic representation of older mobile phone female users’ cooperative learning process and strategies. Second, the study presents a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, which provides more nuanced interpretation and understanding of the use of mobile phones by older women.

Implicit in much research and application development for mobile phones is the assumption that the mobile phone is a suitable proxy for its owner’s location. We report an in-depth empirical investigation of this assumption in which we measured proximity of the phone to its owner over several weeks of continual observation. Our findings, summarizing results over 16 different subjects of a variety of ages and occupations, establish baseline statistics for the proximity relationship in a typical US metropolitan market. Supplemental interviews help us to establish reasons why the phone and owner are separated, leading to guidelines for developing mobile phone applications that can be smart with respect to the proximity assumption. We show it is possible to predict the proximity relationship with 86% confidence using simple parameters of the phone, such as current cell ID, current date and time, signal status, charger status and ring/vibrate mode.

Over the last decade, new information and communication technologies have lived a secret life. For individuals and institutions around the world, this constellation of mobile phones, personal computers, the internet, software, games, and other computing objects have supported a complex set of religious and spiritual needs. In this paper, I offer a survey of emerging and emergent techno-spiritual practices, and the anxieties surrounding their uptake. I am interested in particular in the ways in which religious uses of technology represent not only a critique of dominant visions of technology’s futures, but also suggest a very different path(s) for ubiquitous computing’s technology envisioning and development.

People who are deaf or hard-of-hearing may have challenges communicating with others spoken words and may have challenges being aware of audio events in their environments. This is especially true in public places, which may not have accessible ways of communicating announcements and other audio events. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of a mobile sound transcription tool for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Our tool, Scribe4Me, is designed to improve awareness of sound-based information in any location. When a button is pushed on the tool, a transcription of the last 30 seconds of sound is given to the user in a text message. Transcriptions include dialog and descriptions of environmental sounds. We describe a 2-week field study of an exploratory prototype, which shows that our approach is feasible, highlights particular contexts in which it is useful, and provides information about what should be contained in transcriptions.