Gerd Kortuem

Smart objects as building blocks for the Internet of things

The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as nearfield communications, real-time localization, and embedded sensors lets us transform everyday objects into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such objects are building blocks for the Internet of Things and enable novel computing applications. As a step toward design and architectural principles for smart objects, the authors introduce a hierarchy of architectures with increasing levels of real-world awareness and interactivity. In particular, they describe activity-, policy-, and process-aware smart objects and demonstrate how the respective architectural abstractions support increasingly complex application.

When peer-to-peer comes face-to-face: collaborative peer-to-peer computing in mobile ad-hoc networks

This paper motivates and describes the notion of mobile ad-hoc information systems. Such a system consists of a decentralized and self-organizing network of autonomous, mobile devices that interact as peers. Connectivity is determined by distance between devices; as hosts change their physical location they establish pair-wise communication links based on mutual proximity. We describe application scenarios for mobile ad-hoc information systems and identify technical challenges of a generic software infrastructure. Moreover, we present the goals and architecture of Proem, a peer-to-peer system and development platform for mobile ad-hoc applications. Proem has successfully been used as instructional tool in an advanced software engineering course on peer-to-peer computing.

A relative positioning system for co-located mobile devices

If a mobile computing device knows how it is positioned and oriented in relation to other devices nearby, then it can provide enhanced support for multi-device and multi-user interactions. Existing systems that provide position information to mobile computers are reliant on externally deployed infrastructure, such as beacons or sensors in the environment. We introduce the Relate system, which provides fine-grained relative position information to co-located devices on the basis of peer-to-peer sensing, thus overcoming dependence on any external infrastructure. The system is realised as a hardware/software plug-in, using ultrasound for peer-to-peer sensing, USB to interface with standard mobile devices, and data abstraction and inferencing to map sensor data to a spatial model that maintains both quantitative and qualitative relationships. We present a set of services and applications to demonstrate the utility of the system. We report experimental results on the accuracy of the relative position and orientation estimates, and other aspects of system performance.

Smart Sensing and Context

Invited Paper.- CenceMe - Injecting Sensing Presence into Social Networking Applications.- Spatial and Motion Context.- Mapping by Seeing - Wearable Vision-Based Dead-Reckoning, and Closing the Loop.- The Design of a Pressure Sensing Floor for Movement-Based Human Computer Interaction.- Sensing Motion Using Spectral and Spatial Analysis of WLAN RSSI.- Inferring and Distributing Spatial Context.- Context Sensitive Adaptive Authentication.- Human Behavior as Context.- A Sensor Placement Approach for the Monitoring of Indoor Scenes.- Recognition of User Activity Sequences Using Distributed Event Detection.- Behavior Detection Based on Touched Objects with Dynamic Threshold Determination Model.- Towards Mood Based Mobile Services and Applications.- Recognising Activities of Daily Life Using Hierarchical Plans.- Context Frameworks and Platforms.- GlobeCon - A Scalable Framework for Context Aware Computing.- ESCAPE - An Adaptive Framework for Managing and Providing Context Information in Emergency Situations.- Capturing Context Requirements.- Deployment Experience Toward Core Abstractions for Context Aware Applications.- Sensing Technologies and Case Studies.- Ambient Energy Scavenging for Sensor-Equipped RFID Tags in the Cold Chain.- Escalation: Complex Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks.- Multi-sensor Cross Correlation for Alarm Generation in a Deployed Sensor Network.

Cooperative Artefacts: Assessing Real World Situations with Embedded Technology

Ubiquitous computing is giving rise to applications that interact very closely with activity in the real world, usually involving instrumentation of environments. In contrast, we propose Cooperative Artefacts that are able to cooperatively assess their situation in the world, without need for supporting infrastructure in the environment. The Cooperative Artefact concept is based on embedded domain knowledge, perceptual intelligence, and rule-based inference in movable artefacts. We demonstrate the concept with design and implementation of augmented chemical containers that are able to detect and alert potentially hazardous situations concerning their storage.

Building intelligent environments with Smart-Its

Smart-Its are self-contained, stick-on computers that attach to everyday objects. These augmented objects become soft media, enabling dynamic digital relationships with users and each other. In the Smart-Its project, we are developing technology to realize a vision of computation everywhere, where computer technology seamlessly integrates into everyday life, supporting users in their daily tasks. By embedding sensors, computation, and communication into common artifacts, future computing applications can adapt to human users rather than the other way around. However, its currently difficult to develop this type of ubiquitous computing because of the lack of toolkits integrating both the required hardware and software. Therefore, we are creating a class of small computers - called Smart-Its - equipped with wireless communication and sensors to make it possible to create smart artifacts with little overhead.

Physical prototyping with Smart-Its

Exploring novel ubiquitous computing systems and applications inevitably requires prototyping physical components. Smart-Its are hardware and software components that augment physical objects with embedded processing and interaction to address this need. Our work, which uses small computing devices called Smart-Its, addresses the need to create embedded interactive systems that disappear from the foreground to become secondary to the physical objects with which people interact during everyday activities. Such systems create new design challenges related to prototyping with embedded technologies and require careful consideration of the physical design context.

A collaborative wearable system with remote sensing

This paper presents a collaborative wearable system based on the notion of remote sensing. Remote sensing lets users of wearable or stationary computers perceive a remote environment through the sensors of a remote wearable computer. We describe a concrete system with remote sensing capability that is designed to enhance the communication and cooperation of highly mobile computer technicians.

Software organization for dynamic and adaptable wearable systems

There is a growing interest in a class of systems having dynamic and adaptable properties. In this paper we discuss our work on one subclass of such systems, that of wearable computers. In particular, our interest is in the software organization necessary to build wearable computing systems. We will examine some of the key properties of such a software organization such as the ability to rapidly and dynamically reconfigure software to meet both physical changes and information changes of the wearable system. This has lead us to study a middleware layer for a wearable system that supports dynamic reconfiguration. The middleware approach is studied in the context of the NETMAN-a network maintenance assistant. Current results from the system evaluations and the final system requirements and open issues are presented.

Sensing and visualizing spatial relations of mobile devices

Location information can be used to enhance interaction with mobile devices. While many location systems require instrumentation of the environment, we present a system that allows devices to measure their spatial relations in a true peer-to-peer fashion. The system is based on custom sensor hardware implemented as USB dongle, and computes spatial relations in real-time. In extension of this system we propose a set of spatialized widgets for incorporation of spatial relations in the user interface. The use of these widgets is illustrated in a number of applications, showing how spatial relations can be employed to support and streamline interaction with mobile devices.