Gerhard Austaller

Engineering multimedia-aware personalized ubiquitous services

Ubiquitous computing focusing on users and tasks instead of devices and singular applications is an attractive vision for the future. The idea of nomadic, mobile users in particular poses new challenges for hardware and software. Mobile devices provide vastly different presentation capabilities and need to integrate into heterogeneous environments. Network bandwidth is far from being constant and services may be available only when online. This paper presents MUNDO, an infrastructure for ubiquitous computing that addresses these challenges. The infrastructure is intended to be non-monolithic with its parts supporting mobile computing using multi-modal user interfaces, mobile data delivery, and ad-hoc communication and networking.

Using Web Services to Build Context-Aware Applications in Ubiquitous Computing

Ubiquitous and mobile web applications are typically very autonomous in nature, because they rely on additional information about the user’s context. In this paper we present a general context model for including context information into ubiquitous and mobile web applications. Our model is based on layers, which cover the path from context sources to the application level, including all intermediate filtering and context fusion. As an example, we present a context-aware calendar application built according to our context model.

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.