Andreas Rieger

BerlinTainment: an agent-based context-aware entertainment planning system

Service providers, especially in the mobile entertainment domain, are facing increasing competition. The ability to design, develop, and deploy unique context-aware entertainment services fast and easily as well as the capability to provide intuitive user interfaces becomes essential for market players. Furthermore, todays mobile world is made up of heterogeneous networks accessible via various devices with different characteristics. Progressive users have the desire to utilize the same services and access the same information content on all available devices. At the same time, service providers have to diversify their services in order to remain competitive and attract the various customer segments making up the mass market. We introduce an agent-based serviceware framework to assist service providers in developing innovative services, thus reducing the time to market of the respective applications. The realized serviceware framework offers personalization, location awareness, and the multi-access service platform, a flexible solution for ubiquitous service access. Thus, our solution allows a heterogeneous landscape of end devices to access an application servers mobile services in a multimodal, multilingual, and multimedia-based manner. We describe the utilization of the different modules of the service framework as well as the BerlinTainment application, an entertainment planning system based on the framework.

BerlinTainment - an agent-based serviceware framework for context-aware services

In the near future, providers of mobile services will face increasing competition. Therefore, the ability to design, develop and deploy reliable context-aware services fast and easily will become essential. We introduce an agent-based serviceware framework assisting service providers in developing innovative services, thus reducing the time-to-market of the respective applications. The realized serviceware framework offers personalization, location awareness and device independence within each single service. We describe the utilization of the different modules of the framework as well as prototypical application services in the entertainment domain based on the framework developed within the BerlinTainment project.

A 3-layer architecture for smart environment models

Enriched with more and more intelligent devices modern homes rapidly transform into smart environments. Their growing capabilities enable the implementation of a new generation of ubiquitous applications, but also raise the complexity of the development. Developers of applications for smart environments must cope with a multitude of sensors, devices, users and thus contexts. We present a model-based approach for modeling of, reasoning about and controlling smart environments. A context model provides adaptive applications with a unified access to the smart home environment and, through a unique approach of utilizing executable models, also reflects its state at runtime. The presented approach supports runtime user interface adaption and reconfiguration for seamless interaction and has been successfully utilized to build several context-adaptive applications running in our smart home testbed.

Looking for unexpected consequences of interface design decisions: the MeMo workbench

This paper discusses and illustrates work in progress on the MEMO workbench for early model-based usability evaluation of interface designs. Characteristic features of the workbench include (a) the prediction of errors via rules that refer to user attributes; and (b) the automatic generation of methods for performing specific tasks and for recovering from errors.

An agent-based architecture for ubiquitous multimodal user interfaces

Todays mobile world is made up of heterogeneous networks combined with various devices with different characteristics. Progressive users have the desire to utilize the same services and access the same information content on all their available devices. Therefore, an efficient way of providing user interfaces for multiple devices and their different modalities is needed. Current service development architectures, however, do not provide an easy approach for creating multimodal interfaces on different devices. Our agent-based architecture, the multi-access service platform, offers a flexible solution for ubiquitous service access. Using an abstract description of content and interactions, it is capable of generating user interfaces in languages such as HTML, WML, and VoiceXML. Therefore, our solution allows a heterogeneous landscape of devices to access an application servers mobile services. The paper concludes with the description of a mobile service we have implemented based on the multi-access service platform.

An Agent-Based Augmented Reality Demonstrator in the Domestic Energy Domain

In this work we propose an approach for comfortable and accelerated development of user interfaces for software agents.We apply model-based techniques and emphasise the capability of this technique by describing two user interfaces which are different in nature, but have been developed with the same model. We present the applicability of both user interfaces by means of an agent-based application in the domestic energy domain. As opposed to similar approaches we retain all degrees of freedom for the applied multi-agent framework.

Requirements for Applying Simulation-Based Automated Usability Evaluation to Model-Based Adaptive User Interfaces for Smart Environments

Users in smart environments benefit from context-aware applications that are able to adapt their user interfaces UI to specific situations. In the same way as the development of adaptive applications poses high demands on the designers, the evaluation of their usability also becomes more complex and time consuming because the context of use and different adaptation variants need to be considered. While automated usability evaluations cannot fully replace user tests in this domain, they can be applied to multiple adaptation variants at an early stage of development and thus reduce time and complexity. This paper presents general requirements for applying automated model-based usability evaluations that apply simulated user interaction as an approach to evaluate UIs of adaptive applications based on the underlying development models.

Applying Model-Based Techniques to the Development of UIs for Agent Systems

To counter difficulties of user interface (UI) development, model based techniques became firmly established over the last years. The basic idea of model based user interface development (MBUID) is to formally specify a UIs appearance and behaviour by means of several models. Especially for distributed multi-agent systems, the appliance of MBUID can be most promising. Agent applications involve many different execution platforms and heterogeneous devices and perfectly fit for Ambient Assisted Living landscapes due to their innate characteristics of distribution and autonomy.When it comes to agent systems, one always has to consider the fact that humans have to communicate with agents in the end. It is our opinion that most approaches neglect this fact and thus cut the dynamics and the capabilities of distributed multi-agent systems. Hence in this work, we present an approach for the development of UIs for software agents which applies model based techniques and also retains all degrees of freedom for the underlying multi-agent system.