Jo Vermeulen

From today's augmented houses to tomorrow's smart homes: new directions for home automation research

A considerable amount of research has been carried out towards making long-standing smart home visions technically feasible. The technologically augmented homes made possible by this work are starting to become reality, but thus far living in and interacting with such homes has introduced significant complexity while offering limited benefit. As these technologies are increasingly adopted, the knowledge we gain from their use suggests a need to revisit the opportunities and challenges they pose. Synthesizing a broad body of research on smart homes with observations of industry and experiences from our own empirical work, we provide a discussion of ongoing and emerging challenges, namely challenges for meaningful technologies, complex domestic spaces, and human-home collaboration. Within each of these three challenges we discuss our visions for future smart homes and identify promising directions for the field.

Gummy for multi-platform user interface designs: shape me, multiply me, fix me, use me

Designers still often create a specific user interface for every target platform they wish to support, which is time-consuming and error-prone. The need for a multi-platform user interface design approach that designers feel comfortable with increases as people expect their applications and data to go where they go. We present Gummy, a multi-platform graphical user interface builder that can generate an initial design for a new platform by adapting and combining features of existing user interfaces created for the same application. Our approach makes it easy to target new platforms and keep all user interfaces consistent without requiring designers to considerably change their work practice.

The office smartwatch: development and design of a smartwatch app to digitally augment interactions in an office environment

In office spaces, knowledge workers interact both with each other and with various analog and digital devices in the office. We think that the office environment opens up an interesting space to utilize smartwatches to support and digitally augment interactions. In this paper, we describe the design and development of a smartwatch application to digitally augment interactions that are commonly performed in an office environment. For example, our application allows one to physically and virtually lock and unlock doors, to acquire room information and to send virtual knocks with an app running on the watch.

Service-Interaction Descriptions: Augmenting Services with User Interface Models

Semantic service descriptions have paved the way for flexible interaction with services in a mobile computing environment. Services can be automatically discovered, invoked and even composed. On the contrary, the user interfaces for interacting with these services are often still designed by hand. This approach poses a serious threat to the overall flexibility of the system. To make the user interface design process scale, it should be automated as much as possible. We propose to augment service descriptions with high-level user interface models to support automatic user interface adaptation. Our method builds upon OWL-S, an ontology for Semantic Web Services, by connecting a collection of OWL-S services to a hierarchical task structure and selected presentation information. This allows end-users to interact with services on a variety of platforms.

I Bet You Look Good on the Wall: Making the Invisible Computer Visible

The design ideal of the invisible computer, prevalent in the vision of ambient intelligence (AmI), has led to a number of interaction challenges. The complex nature of AmI environments together with limited feedback and insufficient means to override the system can result in users who feel frustrated and out of control. In this paper, we explore the potential of visualising the system state to improve user understanding. We use projectors to overlay the environment with a graphical representation that connects sensors and devices with the actions they trigger and the effects those actions produce. We also provided users with a simple voice-controlled command to cancel the last action. A small first-use study suggested that our technique might indeed improve understanding and support users in forming a reliable mental model.

A Generic Approach for Multi-Device User Interface Rendering with UIML

We present a rendering engine for displaying graphical user interfaces on multiple devices. The renderer interprets a standardized XML-based user interface description language: the User Interface Markup Language (UIML). A generic architecture for the renderer is defined so that deployment of the engine on different devices implies only little effort. We show that our rendering engine can be used on iDTV set-top boxes, mobile phones, PDAs and desktop PCs, and smoothly integrates with both local and remote application logic. As a test bed for the UIML specification we also explore support for extensions to UIML that enable the user interface designer to maximize accessibility and target multiple devices and different types of users at once

PervasiveCrystal: Asking and Answering Why and Why Not Questions about Pervasive Computing Applications

Users often become frustrated when they are unable to understand and control a pervasive computing environment. Previous studies have shown that allowing users to pose why and why not questions about context-aware applications resulted in better understanding and stronger feelings of trust. Although why and why not questions have been used before to aid in debugging and to clarify graphical user interfaces, it is currently not clear how they can be integrated into pervasive computing systems. We explain in detail how we have extended an existing pervasive computing framework with support for why and why not questions. This resulted in PervasiveCrystal, a system for asking and answering why and why not questions in pervasive computing environments.

Activity-centric support for ad hoc knowledge work: a case study of co-activity manager

Modern knowledge work consists of both individual and highly collaborative activities that are typically composed of a number of configuration, coordination and articulation processes. The desktop interface today, however, provides very little support for these processes and rather forces knowledge workers to adapt to the technology. We introduce co-Activity Manager, an activity-centric desktop system that (i) provides tools for ad hoc dynamic configuration of a desktop working context, (ii) supports both explicit and implicit articulation of ongoing work through a built-in collaboration manager and (iii) provides the means to coordinate and share working context with other users and devices. In this paper, we discuss the activity theory informed design of co-Activity Manager and report on a 14 day field deployment in a multi-disciplinary software development team. The study showed that the activity-centric workspace supports different individual and collaborative work configuration practices and that activity-centric collaboration is a two-phase process consisting of an activity sharing and per-activity coordination phase.

Co-activity manager: integrating activity-based collaboration into the desktop interface

Activity-Based Computing (ABC) has been proposed as an organisational structure for local desktop management and knowledge work. Knowledge work, however, typically occurs in partially overlapping subgroups and involves the use of multiple devices. We introduce co-Activity Manager, an ABC approach that (i) supports activity sharing for multiple collaborative contexts, (ii) includes collaborative tools into the activity abstraction and (iii) supports multiple devices by seamlessly integrated cloud support for documents and activity storage. Our 14 day field deployment in a multidisciplinary software development team showed that activity sharing is used as a starting point for long-term collaboration while integrated communication tools and cloud support are used extensively during the collaborative activities. The study also showed that activities are used in different ways ranging from project descriptions to to-do lists, thereby confirming that a document-driven activity roaming model seems to be a good match for collaborative knowledge work

Improving intelligibility and control in Ubicomp

Users often become frustrated when they are unable to understand and control a ubicomp environment. Previous work has suggested that ubicomp systems should be intelligible to allow users to understand how the system works and controllable to let users intervene when the system makes a mistake. In my thesis, I focus on novel user interfaces and interaction techniques to support intelligibility and control.