Carsten Magerkurth

Bridging the physical and digital in pervasive gaming

A new generation of entertainment technology takes computer games to the streets---and ultimately beyond.

Designing smart artifacts for smart environments

Smart artifacts promise to enhance the relationships among participants in distributed working groups, maintaining personal mobility while offering opportunities for the collaboration, informal communication, and social awareness that contribute to the synergy and cohesiveness inherent in collocated teams. Two complementary trends have resulted in the creation of smart environments that integrate information, communication, and sensing technologies into everyday objects. We distinguish between two types of smart artifacts: system-oriented, importunate smartness and people-oriented, empowering smartness. The system-oriented and people-oriented approaches represent the end points of a line along which we can position weighted combinations of both types of smartness depending on the application domain. We developed the Hello.Wall, our version of an ambient display, for the Ambient Agoras environment. The Hello.Wall transmits organization-oriented information publicly and information addressed to individuals privately.

Internet of things-aware process modeling: integrating iot devices as business process resources

The Internet of Things (IoT) has grown in recent years to a huge branch of research: RFID, sensors and actuators as typical IoT devices are increasingly used as resources integrated into new value added applications of the Future Internet and are intelligently combined using standardised software services. While most of the current work on IoT integration focuses on areas of the actual technical implementation, little attention has been given to the integration of the IoT paradigm and its devices coming with native software components as resources in business processes of traditional enterprise resource planning systems. In this paper, we identify and integrate IoT resources as a novel automatic resource type on the business process layer beyond the classical human resource task-centric view of the business process model in order to face expanding resource planning challenges of future enterprise environments.

Towards modeling real-world aware business processes

In this paper we aim at bringing together the Web of Things (WoT) domain with the domain of enterprise business process modeling in order to work towards a Future Internet that includes all layers of networked technology stacks. We suggest introducing new notation concepts to the current business process modeling standards to facilitate modeling WoT aware business processes. We obtain and classify known WoT specific properties of real-world business processes. By means of a sensor based case study we analyze existing business process modeling standards such as Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN), Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL), Extended Event-driven Process Chain (eEPC) and Unified Modeling Language (UML) in order to extract WoT specific process properties. A final evaluation concludes with the current most fitting process notation for modeling real world processes using WoT technology and suggests extending established approaches by including WoT specific aspects.

IoT Reference Architecture

In this chapter we present our IoT Reference Architecture. This IoT Reference Architecture is, among others, designed as a reference for the generation of compliant IoT concrete architectures that are tailored to one’s specific needs. For other usages of the IoT Architectural Reference Model see Chap. 3.

Ambient Displays and Mobile Devices for the Creation of Social Architectural Spaces

In this paper, we address three major issues, look at their interaction and combination and present our results on how to arrive at solutions for these issues. The issues are: 1) supporting informal communication and atmosphere in organisations, 2) the role and potential of ambient displays in future work environments, and 3) the combination of mostly static artefacts that are integrated in the architectural environment with mobile devices carried by people. Our results can be considered as steps towards the design and realization of what we call “social architectural spaces” in the context of future work environments. These environments will be populated with a range of different smart artefacts that are designed to facilitate awareness and notification as well as informal communication. We address a range of spaces in office buildings including public spaces, e.g., in the hallway, the foyer, and the cafeteria that have not been the focus of research so far. In particular, we present two artefacts: the Hello.Wall, a wall-size large ambient display, and the ViewPort, a mobile handheld device. They are interacting with each other via wireless networks and different types of sensing technology. The artefacts and the software were developed in the EU-funded “Disappearing Computer”- project “Ambient Agoras: Dynamic Information Clouds in a Hybrid Worlds”.

Smart artefacts as affordances for awareness in distributed teams

The manifolds of spaces and places we are entering, populating, transiently crossing and eventually leaving (only to immerse in another subsequent context) as part of our daily activities in our personal, public and professional lives are undergoing a dramatic change. Although this change is taking place we are aware of it only in a limited fashion due to its unobtrusive character as illustrated in the statement by Streitz and Nixon (2005): “It seems like a paradox but it will soon become reality: The rate at which computers disappear will be matched by the rate at which information technology will increasingly permeate our environment and our lives”.

IoT Reference Model

The first major contribution of the IoT Architectural Reference Model (IoT ARM) is the IoT Reference Model itself. Besides models, the IoT Reference Model provides the concepts and definitions on which IoT architectures can be built. This Chapter introduces the IoT Reference Model as a precondition for working with the Reference Architecture that is introduced in Chap. 8.

Introducing Entity-Based Concepts to Business Process Modeling

The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) that comprises interconnected physical devices such as sensor networks and its technologies like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is increasingly adopted in many industries and thus becomes highly relevant for process modeling and execution. As BPMN 2.0 does not yet consider the idiosyncrasies of real-world entities we suggest new modeling concepts for a physical entity as well as a sensing task and an actuation task to make BPMN IoT-aware.

Intelligent privacy support for large public displays

This paper presents a novel concept for personalized privacy support on large public displays. In a first step, a formative evaluation was conducted in order to analyze the requirements of potential users regarding the protection of private information on large public displays. The insights gained in this evaluation were used to design a system, which automatically adapts the information visible on public displays according to the current social situation and the individual privacy preferences of the user working on the display. The developed system was evaluated regarding its appropriateness for daily usage and its usefulness to protect privacy.