G Georgios Metaxas

SCORPIODROME: an exploration in mixed reality social gaming for children

This paper describes the design of SCORPIODROME a mixed reality game for groups of 3--4 children aged 11--14. SCORPIODROME is designed for social gaming; i.e., computer gaming that is intended to support and trigger social interaction between players to occur within and around playing the game. The paper discusses some of the lessons learnt from this design process and how SCORPIODROME paves the way towards the development of a whole class of mixed reality games. Finally, we reflect upon some of the methodological issues encountered.

Daily activities diarist: supporting aging in place with semantically enriched narratives

The Daily Activities Diarist is an awareness system that supports social connectedness between seniors living alone and their social intimates. The Daily Activities Diarist extracts automatically an Activity-of-Daily-Life (ADL)-journal from data collected through a wireless sensor network installed at the home of the seniors. We describe the design of the system, its implementation and the lessons from two trials lasting 2 weeks each. The paper makes the case for narrative presentation of awareness information and for seamful design of awareness systems of this ilk.

Evaluation of a pervasive awareness system designed for busy parents

Does pervasive technology have a role to play in supporting the communication of busy couples? Especially when they are already living together and already have a high degree of awareness of each others rhythms of daily life, their whereabouts and needs? A two week long field study of an awareness system allowed eight working couples to automatically exchange place, activity and calendar information as well as messages and photos. Data analysis provides both qualitative and quantitative evidence which suggest strongly that such a system can provide support for availability, coordination, reassurance and affection for this group. Findings which inform the design of such systems are: the need for transitions in places instead of location information to support coordination, the two tracks of daily communication of busy parents (reassurance and emergency) and usability barriers in current mobile applications which prevent this group from engaging in photo sharing. The contexts and unexpected uses that participants found in the system are described in detail.

`Aware of What?' A Formal Model of Awareness Systems That Extends the Focus-Nimbus Model

We present a formal-model of awareness-systems founded upon the focus and nimbus model of Benford et al [2] and of Rodden [19]. The model aims to provide a conceptual tool for reasoning about this class of systems. Our model introduces the notions of aspects , attributes and resources in order to expose the communicational aspects of awareness-systems. We show how the model enables reasoning about issues such as deception and plausible deniability, which arguably are crucial for enabling users to protect their privacy and to manage how they present themselves to their social network.

Amelie: A Recombinant Computing Framework for Ambient Awareness

This paper presents Amelie, a service oriented framework that supports the implementation of awareness systems. Amelie adopts the tenets of Recombinant computing to address an important non-functional requirement for Ambient Intelligence software, namely the heterogeneous combination of services and components. Amelie is founded upon FN-AAR an abstract model of Awareness Systems which enables the immediate expression and implementation of socially salient requirements, such as symmetry and social translucence. We discuss the framework and show how system behaviours can be specified using the Awareness Mark-up Language AML.

Modelling social translucency in mediated environments

This paper concerns social aspects of interaction with ambient intelligence applications that support awareness of activities and whereabouts of others. It introduces FN-AAR, an abstract model of such systems, which allows to model social translucence, an essential requirement for the social embedding and acceptance of such technologies. FN-AAR abstracts away from implementation concerns, modelling the information shared and the information that is observable by actors. The model allows describing and clarifying fine nuances regarding the concept of social translucence lending clarity to earlier discussions. It is argued that building systems that support this conceptual model will allow their users to specify and configure the disclosure and display of information in terms meaningful to them rather and relevant to their concerns.

Awareness of Daily Life Activities

The well-publicized aging of Western societies has prompted a growing interest into technologies that support awareness in cross-generational families. The idea of supporting continual and partly automated flow of information between seniors living alone and their social intimates has been gaining ground among researchers but even among industries. It is anticipated that such an information flow can help bridge geographical distance, discrepant lifestyles, and daily routines, potentially providing peace of mind to both parties and feelings of being connected.

Abstractions of Awareness: Aware of What?

This chapter presents FN-AAR, an abstract model of awareness systems. The purpose of the model is to capture in a concise and abstract form essential aspects of awareness systems, many of which have been discussed in design essays or in the context of evaluating specific design solutions.

Pervasive awareness

We are interested in systems that support awareness between individuals, by exchanging information that is automatically captured and presenting it to members of their social network. Here we demonstrate a principle for the operation of these systems which we describe as pervasive awareness: awareness information is aggregated opportunistically as mobile devices carrying some information migrate across space and cluster dynamically. We present a minimal demonstration of the principle where qualitative location information is used to select information offered by context capture devices (for the demonstration these are cameras).

Natural Contextual Reasoning for End Users

The realization and deployment of the Internet of Things require providing to non-programmers some level of programmatic control for tailoring system behaviour to their context and needs. We introduce a simple context-range semantics (CRS) and a context-range editor (CoRE) that support end users formulate and understand logical expressions regarding context. The editor builds on two key ideas (a) contextual information is used to evaluate and minimize logical expressions; (b) logical expressions are presented in a disjunctive normal form (DNF) thus applying a principle established in mental model theory. User tests reveal situations in which the theory regarding the intuitiveness of the DNF needs to be extended with a new element: Logical terms are easier to comprehend and formulate when grouped according to their semantic affinity. We report two experiments that demonstrate the intuitiveness of this approach and how it improves performance of non-programmers in specifying context sensitive system behaviour.