Eleni Christopoulou

The PLANTS System: Enabling Mixed Societies of Communicating Plants and Artefacts

In this paper we discuss research work that enables the development of mixed societies of communicating plants and artefacts. PLANTS is an EU-funded Research and Development project, which aims to investigate methods of creating “interfaces” between artefacts and plants in order to enable people to form mixed, interacting (potentially co-operating) communities. Amongst others the project aims to develop hardware and software components that should enable a seamless interaction between plants and artefacts in scenarios ranging from domestic plant care to precision agriculture. This paper deals with the approach that we follow for the development of the homonymous system and discusses its architecture with special focus on describing the communication among artefacts and plants and on designing an ontology that provides a formal definition of the domain under consideration.

CLIO: blending the collective memory with the urban landscape

This paper presents the methodology and outcomes of the Collective City Memory of Oulu study that we conducted in order to research whether it is feasible to embed community shared memories in the physical landscape of a city exploiting deployed public computing infrastructure. Personal memories that contribute to the collective memory in time are altered or lost with their carries and along with them a part of the culture of a city is lost; ubiquitous computing technologies today could allow us to capture and preserve collective memory, as well as to blend it into the urban landscape. CLIO is an urban computing system that allows people to form and interact with the collective memory; we deployed it at Oulu exploiting the citys infrastructure and we monitored how people interact with it and conducted a number of user trials. Findings support our statements that the collective memory of a city can be blended into the urban landscape and that people perceive it as a way of preserving aspects of the city culture.

Collective city memory: field experience on the effect of urban computing on community

In this paper we present field experience and user evaluation results from a long-term real world deployment of a novel urban computing application. Our goal has been to study the effect of applying urban computing to its three constituents: place, community and infrastructure. A suitable application for this, should enable us to evaluate how a city is altered, how the perception of people about the city changes, whether the communication among people is encouraged and what is the benefit from a citys infrastructure. We deployed CLIO, an urban computing application that allows forming and interacting with the collective city memory, in two different cities, in Greece and Finland. We carried out in-the-field user trials and interviews, and collected detailed logs for more than two months, evaluating both the suitability of our application for our purpose and the effect of this urban computing application to the city and its people. Our findings shed light on how a city and the perception of people about it change, reveal the extend to which an urban computing system can affect a community and evaluate the role of public infrastructure in those transformations.

Using Ontologies to Address Key Issues in Ubiquitous Computing Systems

One proposed way to realize the AmI vision is to turn everyday objects into artifacts (by adding sensing, computation and communication abilities) and then use them as components of Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) applications within an Ami environment. The (re)configuration of associations among these artifacts will enable people to set up their living spaces in a way that will serve them best minimizing at the same time the required human intervention. During the development and deployment of UbiComp applications, a number of key issues arise such as semantic interoperability and service discovery. The target of this paper is to show how ontologies can be used into UbiComp systems so that to address such issues. We support our approach by presenting the ontology that we developed and integrated into a framework that supports the composition of UbiComp applications.

The Vision of the Sociable Smart City

In this paper we define what is a Sociable Smart City and how this vision can be realised. This vision elaborates on recent developments in smart cities around the world where novel technologies and applications have been introduced in order to provide services and promote economic growth and sustainability. According to our approach a smart city has to also focus on social and cultural aspects, to allow people to interact with their cities in novel ways and to enable them to shape and decide the future of the city. This approach has originated from the large-scale deployment and evaluation of the CLIO urban computing system, which enables people to interact with the collective city memory. Our findings revealed that a system that exploits city infrastructure and both people’s and artificial intelligence in order to empower and engage them in social activities may enhance citizen participation and sense of belonging as well as it may enable urban social interactions. Aiming to address the Sociable Smart City vision, we held a homonymous workshop in 2013 that brought together researchers of urban computing, smart cities, pervasive technologies and hci. Among its outcomes has been a definition of the Sociable Smart City, the identification of challenges in realising it, the proposition of applications that can accelerate its adoption and what their impact can be, as well as the identification of the major stakeholders involved.

CLIO: Context Supporting Collective City Memory

Personal memories as expressed through narrations, photos or drawings, published or confined texts, often describe events that have occurred in cities, in time these personal memories are melded into a collective memory attached to the physical space. Collective memory is closely related to location, refers to a time period and reflects the social interactions of people who share it. All these parameters of context, location, time and social interactions, which affect the way collective memory is formed, are parameters of context that modern context-aware systems can exploit, therefore context-aware computing can fundamentally change how people interact with collective memory. This paper presents a context-aware system that allows people to form and interact with collective city memory through a ubiquitous environment, called CLIO, CLIO is based on a reasoning and inference process that exploits both context and rules on it.

Enabling the User to Setup Ubiquitous Computing Applications Based on Intelligent Context

Context-aware ubiquitous computing applications thrive in extremely dynamic and heterogeneous environments. When they are delivered to the user preconfigured and without the capability to be adapted, they may fail to satisfy the user’s changing needs and may give the user the feeling that control is taken away from him. In this paper we present how context can be exploited in ubiquitous computing environments in order to enable the user to setup his own application. We will focus on how context can be modelled using ontologies, on the management of accumulated context data and on the reasoning process based on intelligent context and rules defined by the user.

Field experience and user evaluation from a real-world internet application in an urban-scale environment

In this paper, we present experience and evaluation results from an urban-scale real-world internet application deployment. Our application invites people to share memories, relate them to the city space, form a collective memory by identifying relations among them and finally, to interact with it via diverse interfaces dispersed in the physical city landscape. We have followed an iterative development and research process, starting with a web-based internet application, moving to a mobile app and finally, deploying it on an array of interactive pervasive displays. On each iteration, we have conducted user evaluations in the physical landscape of a city. Our findings shed light on how users perceive diverse interfaces, on how to blend digital layers of content with the physical landscape, and on how a real-world internet application can foster social interactions.

Middleware for building ubiquitous computing applications using distributed objects

Ubiquitous systems are characterized by multi-fold complexity, stemming mainly from the vast number of possible interactions between many heterogeneous objects and services. Devices ranging from simple everyday objects populated with sensing, actuating and communication capabilities to complex computer systems, mobile or not, are treated as reusable “components” of a dynamically changing physical/digital environment. As even an individual object with limited functionality, may present advanced behavior when grouped with others, our aim is to look at how collections of such distributed objects can collaborate and provide functionality that exceeds the sum of their parts. This paper presents GAS-OS, a middleware that supports building, configuring and reconfiguring ubiquitous computing applications using distributed objects.

Content seeking strategies in urban computing applications

This paper presents our findings on factors that affect seeking and selecting of location-related content in an urban computing application hosted on an array of city-dispensed public interactive displays. Earlier researchers have pointed out discrepancies between self-proclaimed information needs and actual seeking behaviours, we present here empirical results that delineate a number of factors that users actually take into account during seeking location-related content in urban computing applications. We have conducted our research via a community content sharing application hosted on an array of municipally owned public interactive displays and by monitoring user interaction with it via a behind-the-scenes detailed logging mechanism that reported all tactile interactions that users had on the displays. Our findings reveal how the design of interface elements, the location of the user in relation to the presented content and the character of users whereabouts affect content selection of random users in the wild.