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Abowd, Gregory D.

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End date: 2000 × Start date: 1995 × Type: Text ×

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Building a Better Intercom: Context-Mediated Communication within the Home

2000 , Kidd, Cory D. , O'Connell, Thomas , Nagel, Kristine Susanne , Patil, Sameer , Abowd, Gregory D.

As we enable everyday environments with ubiquitous technology, there are many opportunities to support simple activities in useful ways. We are investigating how an environment made aware of the location and activities of its occupants can better support direct human-human communication. Specifically, we have instrumented a home to explore lightweight, spontaneous hands-free communication between residents in different parts of the home. Our working prototype demonstrates how existing technologies of voice recognition, indoor positioning and audio routing lay the foundation for the exploration of a variety of more intelligent alternatives to the traditional home intercom system. We show how context can be used to mediate the initiation and management of one- and two-way audio connections between residents, supporting a range of within-home conversational patterns. In this paper, we describe a variety of home communication scenarios and the general infrastructure we have built to explore them.

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Distributed Mediation of Imperfectly Sensed Context in Aware Environments

2000 , Dey, Anind K. , Mankoff, Jennifer C. , Abowd, Gregory D.

Current context-aware services make the assumption that the context they are dealing with is correct. However, in reality, both sensed and interpreted context is often imperfect. In this paper, we describe an architecture that supports the building of context-aware services that assume context is imperfect and allows for the refinement of this imperfect context by mobile users in aware-environments. We discuss the architectural mechanisms and design heuristics that arise from supporting this refinement over space and time. We illustrate the use of our architecture and heuristics through two example context-aware services, an In-Out Board for the home and a situation-aware reminder tool.

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The Conference Assistant: Combining Context-Awareness with Wearable Computing

1999 , Dey, Anind K. , Futakawa, Masayasu , Salber, Daniel , Abowd, Gregory D.

We describe the Conference Assistant, a prototype mobile, context-aware application that assists conference attendees. We discuss the strong relationship between context-awareness and wearable computing and apply this relationship in the Conference Assistant. The application uses a wide variety of context and enhances user interactions with both the environment and other users. We describe how the application is used and the context-aware architecture on which it was based.

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Interacting with Multiple Alternatives Generated by Recognition Technologies

1999 , Mankoff, Jennifer C. , Abowd, Gregory D. , Hudson, Scott E.

Despite significant advances in recognition technologies in areas such as speech and gesture recognition, our experience tells us that recognition errors and uncertainty are unlikely to disappear. For the foreseeable future, use of recognition based systems will introduce uncertainty into the input process. If interactive systems are going to work robustly with recognition-based input, it will be necessary to consider uncertainty as a normal part of input handling rather than considering it to be an anomaly or an exceptional condition. This paper considers techniques for explicit treatment of input uncertainty in user interfaces. In particular, it considers a general class of techniques for the display of, and interaction with, multiple alternatives generated by recognition technologies. Augmentation of the typical event-handling infrastructure is discussed, as well as an application interface infrastructure which attempts to minimize the impact of uncertainty on the application. A prototype system that embodies this infrastructure is also considered.

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Interaction Techniques for Ambiguity Resolution in Recognition-Based Interfaces

2000 , Mankoff, Jennifer C. , Hudson, Scott E. , Abowd, Gregory D.

Because of its promise of natural interaction, recognition is coming into its own as a mainstream technology for use with computers. Both commercial and research applications are beginning to use it extensively. However the errors made by recognizers can be quite costly, and this is increasingly becoming a focus for researchers. We present a survey of existing error correction techniques in the user interface. These mediation techniques most commonly fall into one of two strategies, repetition and choice. Based on the needs uncovered by this survey, we have developed OOPS, a toolkit that supports resolution of input ambiguity through mediation. This paper describes four new interaction techniques built using OOPS, and the toolkit mechanisms required to build them. These interaction techniques each address problems not directly handled by standard approaches to mediation, and can all be re-used in a variety of settings.

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Securing Context-Aware Applications Using Environment Roles

2000 , Covington, Michael J. , Long, Wende , Srinivasan, Srividhya , Dey, Anind K. , Ahamad, Mustaque , Abowd, Gregory D.

In the future, a largely invisible and ubiquitous computing infrastructure will assist people with a variety of activities in the home and at work. The applications that will be deployed in such systems will create and manipulate private information and will provide access to a variety of other resources. Securing such applications is challenging for a number of reasons. Unlike traditional systems where access control has been explored, access decisions may depend on the context in which requests are made. We show how the well-developed notion of roles can be used to capture security-relevant context of the environment in which access requests are made. By introducing environment roles, we create a uniform access control framework that can be used to secure context-aware applications. We also present a security architecture that supports security policies that make use of environment roles to control access to resources.

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A Scalable Workload Model of Media-Enhanced Classrooms

1999 , Chervenak, Ann L. , Vellanki, Vivekanand , Yanasak, Ivan , Harel, Nissim , Rodenstein, Roy , Abowd, Gregory D. , Brotherton, Jason Alan , Ramachandran, Umakishore

We present a scalable workload model for media-enhanced classrooms. Such classrooms include equipment for presenting multimedia streams and for capturing streams of information (audio, video and notes) during a lecture. Our model characterizes the workload of a centralized or distributed server that supports multiple classrooms. The workload includes server bandwidth, network bandwidth and server storage requirements. Using our workload model, we present detailed performance measurements of one media-enhanced classroom system, Classroom 2000. We identify patterns in user behavior, and demonstrate that the number of simultaneous study sessions varies with time of day according to a beta distribution. In addition, we model the total number of study sessions on a particular day using a simple linear model that depends on proximity to midterm and final examinations. Finally, we use the model to predict how the capabilities of a Classroom 2000 server must scale to support hundreds of classrooms and thousands of students.

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The Smart Floor: A Mechanism for Natural User Identification and Tracking

2000 , Orr, Robert J. , Abowd, Gregory D.

We have created a system for identifying people based on their footstep force profiles and have tested its accuracy against a large pool of footstep data. This floor system may be used to transparently identify users in their everyday living and working environments. We have created user footstep models based on footstep profile features and have been able to achieve a recognition rate of 93% using this feature-based approach. We have also shown that the effect of footwear is negligible on recognition accuracy.

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Collaborative research with Masayasu Futakawa at Hitachi

1999 , Abowd, Gregory D.

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An Architecture to Support Context-Aware Applications

1999 , Dey, Anind K. , Salber, Daniel , Futakawa, Masayasu , Abowd, Gregory D.

Context is an important, yet poorly utilized source of information in interactive computing. It is difficult to use because, unlike other forms of user input, there is not common, reusable way to handle context. Most context-aware applications have been built in an ad hoc manner. We discuss the requirements for dealing with context and present an architectural solution we have designed and implemented to help application designers build context-aware applications more easily. We illustrate the use of the architecture through a context-aware application that assists conference attendees.

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