[Ubicomp] Context Awareness & Smart Objects II

(C4 Smart cup) H. Gellersen, M. Beigl, H. Krull, The Mediacup: Awareness Technology Embedded in an Everyday Object, HUC 1999.

• It's a cup augmented with sensing, processing and communication capabilities, and broadcast in smart environments with context.
• I think the idea is quite interesting, and they also consider the basic properties - the cup can also be dishwashed, so it is now a cup with more functions and added values that can be helpful to our life and still remain original usage.
• Since this paper is published 7 years ago, I think the information is not enough. Check their website (http://mediacup.teco.edu/) - their associated projects are also (even more) interesting.

(C5 Smart mirror) Nicolas Roussel, Helen Evans, Heiko Hansen, Mirrorspace: using proximity as an interface to video-mediated communication, Ubicomp 2003.

• It's a video communication system that uses proximity as an interface to provide smooth transitions between peripheral awareness and very close and intimate forms of communication.
• I enjoy reading this paper since the following respects:
  • It's kind of related to carewall, the project we're trying to work on.
  • It points out the problem I wanna solve before: "it felt important to us that people could actually look into each other's eyes, so the camera was placed right in the middle of the screen." But the black dot is not natural. I haven't thought any good ways to solve. -> However, they points out "the majority of the people didn't think about the camera at all." (Really? I wanna try!)
  • Interesting idea: "By moving forward or backward, people alter not only their own image but also the image of the remote persons." => But I wonder how smooth the image will be.
  • The sharing smae space idea is a little bit horrifying, I think.

(C6 Attentive objects) Pattie Maes, Attentive Objects: Enriching people's natural interaction with everyday objects, INTERACTIONS, 7~8, 2005.

• attentive object:
  • to make people's lives more convenient - by augmenting objects with sensors, communication and computation, and by using intelligent interface techniques to predict what a person may be interested in.
  • to enrich people's natural interaction with everyday objects, to enrich (even enlighten) people's live
• I'm looking forward to "interact" with objects - life should be different and more convenient throught this way :)

(C7 Smart chair) S. Mota and R. W. Picard (2003), Automated Posture Analysis for Detecting Learner's Interest Level, Workshop on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition for Human-Computer Interaction, CVPR HCI, June, 2003.

• It provides a system for recognizing naturally occurring postures and associated affective states related to a child's interest level while performing a learning task on a computer.
• I think the most difficult part is to recognize posture and interpret, i.e. activity recognition is quite challenging.
• Combining with other signals is quite important! e.g. facial expression, etc.
• Can't find video... http://affect.media.mit.edu/projectpages/chair/

(C8 smart kitchen) Leonardo Bonanni, Chia-Hsun Lee, Ted Selker, *CounterIntelligence: Augmented Reality Kitchen*, CHI 2005.

Ubicomp course @NTU 2006/3/13

[Ubicomp] Context Awareness & Smart Objects I

(C1 Context-awareness survey) G. Chen, D. Kotz, A Survey of Context-Aware Mobile Computing Research, Technical Report TR2000-381, Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, November 2000.

• Context is the set of environmental states and settings that either determines an application's behavior or in which an application event occurs and is interesting to the user.
• Context-aware computing is a mobile computing paradigm in which applications can discover and take advantage of contextual information (such as user location, time of day, nearby people and devices, and user activity).
• two definitions of context-aware computing:
  • Active context awareness: an application automatically adapts to discovered context, by changing the application's behavior.
  • Passive context awareness: an application presents the new or updated context to an interested user or makes the context persistent for the user to retrieve later.

• Afterthoughts: This survey paper is really helpful since it discusses definitions and also introduces many related works to context-aware computing, helping us not only understand what it really is but also know more about current works. Context-aware computing is indeed important in Ubicomp - we should establish clear concepts to it.

(C2 Sensors survey) Michael Beigl, Albert Krohn, Tobias Zimmer and Christian Decker, Typical Sensors needed in Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing, First International Workshop on Networked Sensing Systems (INSS) 2004, Tokyo, Japan, June 22-23. 2004.

• sensors (in small & cheap devices): capture physical parameters from the environment or objects => input to functions => determine general contextual information.
• 7 general types of sensors:
  • movement
  • light
  • force
  • temperature
  • audio
  • humidity
  • proximity/activity
• primary restrictions: form factors & energy consumption
• Afterthought: Very interesting! It draws clear and useful classifications of sensors for Ubicomp, making me start to think about objects surrounding me: How do I sense important info? With what kind of appropriate devices? In what way can I implement? etc.

(C3 Toolkit) D. Salber, A. K. Dey and G. D. Abowd, The Context Toolkit: Aiding the Development of Context-Enabled Applications, CHI 1999.

Ubicomp course @NTU 2006/3/6

[Ubicomp] Vision

1. Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21th Century, Scientific American, September 1991.
2. Mark Weiser, Some computer science issues in ubiquitous computing, Communications of the ACM, 36(7):75-85, July 1993.
   
   • my slides
   • This paper: good for us to understand main ideas and spirits of Ubicomp, and also realize design and implementation issues.
   • It seems that if we want to have a new design of Ubicomp, we will be limited by or have to counter hardware issues first. No wonder there are also some discussions about how can we design to make users feel easy to change Ubicomp objects. (e.g. u-Texture: Self-Organizable Universal Panels for Creating Smart Surroundings, Ubicomp 2005)
   • However, if we are limited by hardware problems, it is possible that interesting designs will be only ideas. (e.g. Jackie Lee from MIT media lab: physical Word.)
   • It is important to understand the history of the field you want to research.
3. (V3) Winograd, T., From computing machinery to interaction design, In Peter Denning and Robert Metcalfe (eds.), Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing, Springer-Verlag, 1997, 149-162.
4. (V4) Mark Weiser, John S. Brown, The Coming Age of Calm Technology, 1996.

Discussion:

• What does it mean for a computer to disappear?
• Physical V.S. feeling
• Complexity: present給人用的方式感覺
• Object展現的方式、樣子 is very important(affordance, e.g. door – you know how to open it)
• If computers are as mature as motors, it will be nature
• Weiser: focus on user ability, instead of strong computing
  less about performance, but principles on applying to daily life
  also a trade-off: hope that we can use little attention but achieve high performace/output/work

Ubicomp course @NTU 2006/2/27

Paper worlds!

I would like to use this blog for paper review!