Fernando Lyardet

iClouds – Peer-to-Peer Information Sharing in Mobile Environments

The future mobile and ubiquitous computing world will need new forms of information sharing and collaboration between people. In this paper we present iClouds, an architecture for spontaneous mobile user interaction, collaboration, and transparent data exchange. iClouds relies on wireless ad hoc peer-to-peer communications. We present the iClouds architecture and different communication models, which closely resemble familiar communication forms in the real world. We also design a hierarchical information structure for storing the information in iClouds. We present our prototype implementation of iClouds which runs on wireless-enabled PDAs.

CoINS: Context Sensitive Indoor Navigation System

The context sensitive indoor navigation system (CoINS) implements an architecture to develop context-aware indoor user guidance services and applications. This paper presents a detailed discussion on algorithms and architectural issues in building an indoor guidance system. We first start with the world model and required mapping to 2D for the process of path calculation and simplification. We also compare several algorithm optimizations applied in this particular context. The system provides the infrastructure to support different techniques of presenting the path and supporting user orientation to reach a certain destination in indoor premises

Context-Aware Indoor Navigation

Over the past few years, several technological advances have been made to enable locating people in indoor settings, where way finding is something we do on a daily basis. In a similar way as it happened with GPS and todays popular outdoor navigation systems, indoor navigation is set to become one of the first, truly ubiquitous services that will make our living and working environments intelligent. Two critical characteristics of human way finding are destination choice and path selection. This work focuses on the latter, which traditionally has been assumed to be the result of minimizing procedures such as selecting the shortest path, the quickest or the least costly path. However, this path approximations are not necessarily the most natural paths. Taking advantage of context-aware information sources, this paper presents an easy to deploy context-aware indoor navigation system, together with an efficient spatial representation, and novel approach for path adaptation to help people find their destination according to their preferences and contextual information. We tested our system in one building with several users to estimate first an assessment of preference values, and later to compare how the paths suggested by our system correspond to those people would actually follow. The positive results of this evaluation confirm the suitability of our models and algorithms.

Design Patterns for Context-Aware Adaptation

In this paper we show how the judicious use of design patterns can improve the design of context-awareness in software systems. We first review well-known problems in the development of context-aware applications. Next, we present our view on the design process of context-aware software; we introduce design patterns and explain why they can be useful to improve the quality of this kind of applications. We finally present some design patterns we mined by researching on successful context-aware approaches. Some concluding remarks are finally presented together with further work we are pursuing.

Engineering intuitive and self-explanatory smart products

One of the main challenges in ubiquitous computing is making users interact with computing appliances in an easy and natural manner. In this paper we discuss how to turn ordinary devices into Smart Products that are more intuitive to use and are self-explanatory. We present a general architecture and a distributed runtime environment for building such Smart Products and discuss a number of user interaction issues. As an example, we describe our smart coffee machine and its validation through systematic user testing.

Modeling Physical Hypermedia Applications

In this paper we present a modeling approach for building physical hypermedia (PH) applications, i.e. those applications in which real and digital objects are navigated using the hypertext paradigm. We first survey the state of the art in this kind of ubiquitous applications. We stress the importance of modeling and design activities and present our design approach, an extension of the well-known Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Method (OOHDM); we finally discuss some further work we are pursuing in this area.

Customizing Business Processes in Web Applications

In this paper we discuss several issues related to the introduction of business processes in the life cycle of Web based E-commerce applications. We first argue that business processes have been so far neglected by modeling and design methodologies treating them as by-products of conceptual and navigational design artifacts, and as a consequence introducing different design and usability problems in the final products. We introduce a novel approach in which processes and activities are treated as first class citizens during application modeling and design. In the core of the paper we analyze the problem of customizing business processes to different user profiles or individuals. We show that using our approach we obtain modular and evolvable solutions.

Fine-Grained Evaluation of Local Positioning Systems for Specific Target Applications

Location-aware software has become widespread outdoors. Indoor applications are now on the rise. However, careful selection of the appropriate local positioning system (LPS) and application fine-tuning are required in order to guarantee acceptable user experience. We present a simulation-based approach that includes application characteristics, LPS characteristics, and building characteristics to this complex task and illustrate how the appropriate LPS can be chosen and how applications can be fine-tuned. A sophisticated indoor navigation system is used as sample application. The paper also provides insights into subtle details and caveats of different LPS technologies from an application and building viewpoint.

Smart Products: Building Blocks of Ambient Intelligence

The first edition of AmI-Blocks’07 workshop took place on 7 th of November 2007 in Darmstadt, in conjunction with the European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI-07). The focus of the workshop was to bring together experts of diverse areas such as Ubiquitous Computing, Product Engineering, Cognitive Science, Human Computer Interaction, Economics, and Artificial Intelligence, with the specific goal of helping shape a vision of creating living and working environments out of Smart Products. The topic chosen to focus the workshop’s discussions was: “Smart Products: Building Blocks of Ambient Intelligence”. This focus reflects a growing trend of research that understands the creation of future technology-assisted living and working spaces, as the result of the collaborations between devices and services gradually being deployed, one product at a time.