Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Digital libraries offer substantial volumes of declarative knowledge to the information society. This paper explores the extent to which current and future digital libraries, also known as ubiquitous knowledge environments, can be made sufficiently usable, accessible and smart to support an inclusive information society and the aspiration of universal access. Using a range of converging methods to evaluate a random sample of such digital library websites, it is concluded that, whilst they act as substantial and functional repositories for knowledge, there is potential to improve, particularly in accessibility and smartness. The current methods are validated through the substantial statistical significance levels and by the meaningful patterns found in the resulting data. A new measure of system smartness is introduced and found to provide a useful metric for present purposes, though it is clear that further work will be needed.

Coupling is the action of binding two entities so that they can operate together to provide new functions. In this article, we propose a formal definition for coupling and present a graph theoretic notation so that the side-effects of the creation of a coupling can be analyzed in a formal and systematic way. We then describe I-AM (Interaction Abstract Machine), a middleware that supports the dynamic coupling of interaction resources such as screens, keyboards and mice, to form a unified interactive space. Using our notation, we illustrate how couplings are supported in I-AM.

In order to provide information and communication services without disrupting human activity, information services must implicitly conform to the current context of human activity. However, the variability of human environments and human preferences make it impossible to preprogram the appropriate behaviors for a context aware service. One approach to overcoming this obstacle is to have services adapt behavior to individual preferences though feedback from users. This article describes a method for learning situation models to drive context-aware services. With this approach an initial simplified situation model is adapted to accommodate user preferences by a supervised learning algorithm using feedback from users. To bootstrap this process, the initial situation model is acquired by applying an automatic segmentation process to sample observation of human activities. This model is subsequently adapted to different operating environments and human preferences through interaction with users, using a supervised learning algorithm.

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) scenarios place strong emphasis on the fact that interaction takes place through natural interfaces, in such a way that people can perceive the presence of smart objects only when needed. As a possible solution to achieving relaxed and enjoyable interaction with the intelligent environments depicted by AmI, the ambient could be equipped with suitably designed multimodal interfaces bringing up the opportunity to communicate using multiple natural interaction modes. This paper discusses challenges to be faced when trying to design multimodal interfaces that allow for natural interaction with systems, with special attention to speech-based interfaces. It describes an application that was built to serve as a test bed and to conduct evaluation sessions in order to ascertain the impact of multimodal natural interfaces on users and to assess their usability and accessibility.

A major challenge of Ambient Intelligence lies in building middleware that can ease service implementation through allowing the application developer to emphasize only the service logic. In this paper we describe the architecture of an Ambient Intelligence system established in the scope of the European research project CHIL (Computers in the Human Interaction Loop). CHIL aims at developing and realizing computer services that are delivered to humans in an implicit and unobtrusive way. The framework presented here supports the implementation of human-centric context-aware applications. This includes the presentation of the sensors used in CHIL spaces, the mechanisms employed for controlling sensors and actuating devices, as well as the perceptual components and the middleware approach for combining them in the scope of applications. Special focus lies on the design and implementation of an agent based framework that supports “pluggable” service logic in the sense that the service developer can concentrate on coding the service logic independently of the underlying middleware. Following the description of the framework, we elaborate on how it has been used to support two prototype context-aware human centric and non-obtrusive services.

User interface (UI) plasticity denotes UI adaptation to the context of use (user, platform, physical and social environment) while preserving usability. Our approach to this problem is to bring together MDE (Model Driven Engineering) and SOA (Service Oriented Approach) within a unified framework that covers both the development stage and the runtime phase of plastic UI’s. In particular, an interactive system is modelled as a graph of models that can be dynamically manipulated by, and/or encapsulated as services.

Informative Art display systems have been proposed to provide users with information considered relevant at arbitrary points of work or living engagement, originating from many different –mostly geographically dislocated– sources and presented at the periphery of human (visual) perception. Having the displays operate at the periphery of a user’s attention allows other user tasks to sustain primary. Much like the information presented by wallclocks, posters, paintings or windows, peripheral displays move to the center of attention only when appropriate and desirable. Abstract art has been proposed to serve as the visualization paradigm, encoding information into graphical or pictorial artwork by subtly modifying its shape, color and appearance details or its overall impression. This paper approaches a systematic elaboration of visual metaphors able to deliver information via peripheral displays in an aesthetic, artful way. In our approach, the choice of metaphors is driven by the aesthetic appeal of the visual appearance of the display as a whole, out of which certain dynamic emblems or symbols are used to conotate information in a visual style. From experiments we find, that such metaphors are considered by users as a means of personal emotional expression, and that controllable aesthetic attractiveness turns out to be the dominant factor of display appreciation. The choice of aesthetic themes, as well as the control of emblem and symbol dynamics are supported and implemented in our , a general purpose software framework for informative art display systems.

The number of conference or meeting rooms with multiple displays available is on the rise. While this increased availability of displays opens up many new opportunities, the management of information across them is not trivial, especially when multiple users with diverging interests have to be considered. This particularly applies for dynamic ensembles of displays. We propose to cast the Display Mapping problem as an optimization task, where we define an explicit criterion for the global quality of a display mapping and then use computer support to calculate the optimum. We argue that in dynamic multi-user, multi-display environments, an automatic – or at least computer supported – document-display assignment improves the user experience in multi-display environments.

Ambient Assisted Living is currently one of the important research and development areas, where accessibility, usability and learning plays a major role and where future interfaces are an important concern for applied engineering. The general goal of ambient assisted living solutions is to apply ambient intelligence technology to enable people with specific demands, e.g. handicapped or elderly, to live in their preferred environment longer. Due to the high potential of emergencies, a sound emergency assistance is required, for instance assisting elderly people with comprehensive ambient assisted living solutions sets high demands on the overall system quality and consequently on software and system engineering – user acceptance and support by various user-interfaces is an absolute necessity. In this article, we present an Assisted Living Laboratory that is used to train elderly people to handle modern interfaces for Assisted Living and evaluate the usability and suitability of these interfaces in specific situations, e.g., emergency cases.

In ubiquitous computing environments, the computer technology will recede into the background of our lives for its ultimate goal, invisibility. For ensuring security and privacy in those environments, both human beings and surrounding devices should be authenticated under the interaction methods that are used for ubiquitous services. However, the invisibility of devices, the adaptiveness of interactions, and the varying performance of devices will make it difficult to achieve it. In this paper, we reconsider authentication for ubiquitous computing environments and propose a conceptual framework for resolving the difficulties.