Class � MIT MAS741 Context-aware

Greg Detre

Wednesday, October 09, 2002

 

Papers

Bellotti

people�s behaviour is non-deterministic and highly contingent, with most of the complexity arising out of social interaction

no system except the user can reliably second-guess what the user intends/needs

Dey�s component architecture may not properly equip the designer with the tools to provide the necessary visibility and control

two big issues:

intelligibility

accountability

considers problems with privacy, identity, access, storage

needs to know when to defer to the user

 

Design principles and human-salient details required to realize them:

  1. inform the user of current contextual system capabilities and understandings
  2. Provide feedback including:

Feedforward � What will happen if I do this?

Confirmation � What am I doing and what have I done?

  1. Enforce identity and action disclosure
  2. Provide control (and defer) to the user

 

 

Shafer

drew contrasts between desktop and environment

four primary methods of utilising context information:

resolving inferences

tailoring lists of options

triggering automatic behaviours

tagging information for later retrieval

ubiquitous computing

multimodal interaction

physically embodied interaction

dynamic set of devices

lack of a single focal point

multiple simultaneous users

how does the information get in there:

programmed/taught by user

learned

fixed/installed

shared

two guidelines

minimise cost of error � easy undo

minimise user confusion � avoid having multiple rules that depend on single pieces of context

ted: he felt they avoided the interesting AI issues

when we tell the system everything, it�s merely adaptable

 

Discussion

Things to do

Consider an untrustworthy world for context-aware session next week

Design Experiments

Everyone is going to take a particular scenario of their choice and present a short (5 mins) explanation of how this scenario could be understood and augmented by context-aware technology.�� The idea is to focus on some of the papers and ideas we discussed today by highlighting the implementation issues and pointing out where a particular architecture (widgets, blackboards, networked, other...) can resolve the issues.

Maybe consider an adaptive hypermedia scenario? or a file-organiser/GUI scenario?

Me - motorbike helmet

this is a real case of whether you trust your context-aware systems in a messy world � high-risk

because if you�re wearing headphones, you know that you�re insulated from the world

but if you�ve got this machine that you think you can place your trust in, and that�s a false trust, then you�re actually worse off

it wants to listen out for horns and screeches � surely their audio spectra should be fairly identifiable

use the doppler effects

use visual pointers to attract you to the sound localisation

what about the subtler things? or where there�s no screech, because they just hit you

you�d probably hear the screeching

can it catch things that you wouldn�t otherwise have noticed

what if it creates sounds for things that aren�t sounds

e.g. if there�s someone coming up faster than they should

impose visual blobs to show vehicles coming up behind, or if they don�t have lights

the problem with vision is that your vision is already busy

vibration???

maybe also connect with vibrations on the bike seat

also give you signals about your bike (either arhythmic motor sounds, or bike clanking)

maybe have a paranoia setting, use different modalities to signal different urgencies

if you turn off the paranoia setting, what about manufacturer liability

what does it do that military helmets don�t do?

bitchin� betty � woman�s voice that talks in your ear if you�re going to crash, and helps wake you up if you�ve been knocked out by g-forces, plus you�ve got a one-eye visual display

ted�s helmet: they don�t turn on blinkers when you move your head, or display potholes (audio)

there are people in wheelchairs who can command direction using head direction, but still waggle when they�re talking (but only in restricted degrees of freedom)

how the hell does the helmet know about potholes?

I don�t think the helmet should learn over time � it shouldn�t have a user model, in my opinion

i.e. the difference between context-awareness and adaptive context-awareness

in contrast, the house isn�t physically dangerous to you, and the task it has to do is much more complex

having said that, the house is usually more annoying than right

the only thing that people don�t mind is its controlling the heat

I don�t think that houses are actually going to get better at this, because the complexity is so far beyond

 

Napier � GIS geographical information systems

interesting in indexing art + poetry using GIS

e.g. walking around Grantchester, where Wittgenstein used to go, and have the poems written there read to you

i.e. the world�s a museum

he�s interested in organising the information so that all the museum opening hours are easily available

ted: a www designed for moments, not information � what would we do different?

e.g. what modes of transport you have available, user preferences, city-wide problems/exhibitions etc.

 

Walt Whitman lived just off Brattle

the Chelsea Hotel in NY � opium smell in the halls

 

Wynne(sp?)

widgets vs broadcasting vs blackboards

 

Andrea � context and communication

how people communicate with each other

e.g. IM clients, phone conversations etc.

help you manage your resources, your privacy

the data is mine, so the architecture has to fit that

i.e. no broadcast model, for instance

although you could always build a privacy layer/protocol on top of any architecture

blackboard � big repository of events, owned by my hardware

but a blackboard is centralised, whereas the devices are distributed

in a group of people, do they all have their own? yes

when should information belong to who it�s going to benefit? e.g. when your boss wants to look at the communication patterns between employees

maybe people accept that they just don�t have privacy anymore � or alternatively, there�s a trade-off between privacy and convenience/functionality

Misc

file organiser

������� blackboard

 

are we really single-channel communicators???

 

ted: suspects that the MS Word spell-checker looks at the sentence structure when suggesting words

 

how does the system know whether you don�t like what it�s doing now, but will like it later?

 

one thing you�ll notice about good hotels is that both the human and machine levels of context-awareness and responsiveness will be higher

different areas will have different densities and inter-connectedness of sensors

Admin

Kirsh & Agre � philosophers/sociologists

add a paper on architecture

philosophical analyses of contextual situations that exist

me:

adaptive hypermedia???

Minsky

Napier:

databases

paper on how recall spatial iconography

book on AI and geography

 

Questions