Lieven Trappeniers

The Internet of Things: The Next Technological Revolution

A wide range of researchers from academia and industry, as well as businesses, government agencies, and cities, are exploring the technologies comprising the Internet of Things from three main perspectives: scientific theory, engineering design, and the user experience.

Enabling the Masses to Become Creative in Smart Spaces

In this chapter we present a first analysis towards the enablement of mass creativity in the Internet of Things, potentially leading to a wide range of new tangible, interactive applications that leverage the fundamental new possibilities of an emerging Web of Things. After an introduction of the socio-cultural practice of ‘Do-it-Yourself’ (DiY) as apparent in society, and a discussion on what DiY can mean for the Internet of Things, we introduce a typology of how people can potentially create and customise on top of the Internet of Things. Based on that, we elaborate three concepts forming a basis for new creation paradigms in such smart spaces, potentially leading to new DiY-enabling functions in Internet of Things service creation environments: the Call-Out Internet of Things, the Smart Composables Internet of Things, and the Phenomena Internet of Things. Next to a discussion of applicable state-of-the-art for implementing parts of these concepts, we show first experimental grounding for them, as part of the ongoing exploration process.

Deconstructing casensa: The caemp context-aware empowering platform

In this paper, we deconstruct Casensa, a context-aware assisted living prototype created by Bell Labs, based on critical user participation criteria for context awareness. Casensa supports elderly with early dementia and their caregivers, providing a mechanism for more independent living. In the first part of the paper, we present refined and improved critical participation criteria based on lessons learned from user research. From this, we extract the generic design considerations that guided the design of the platform on which Casensa is actually built: the Context-Aware Empowering Platform (CAEMP). Understanding, configuring, and controlling a self-created intelligent environment form the central topics of the reworked criteria. Next, we discuss how these criteria are translated within Casensa by providing several means to let end users create their own rule-based smart behavior using their own (evolving) language and by allowing the exchange of smart behavior. In the final part of the paper, we demonstrate the technological impact on architecture and an implementation of applying the defined criteria.

Towards abundant DiY service creativity

A profound impact of the Web2.0 lies in its power to transform skilled users into service providers, resulting in more complex value networks. As recently traditional “operated” network infrastructure is complemented with huge amounts of connected smart objects (the Internet-of-Things), the same mass creativity can be made applicable to smart, context-enabled services with real-world interactivity, collaboratively created by end users with varying degrees of programming skills. We report on a vision and solutions addressing easy, do-it-yourself service creation by the masses in an Internet-of-Things-enabled world, from which we discuss the (i) value networks, (ii) enabling technology framework, and (iii) domain-specific proof-of-concepts.

Building Connected Car Applications on Top of the World-Wide Streams Platform: Demo

The connected car is likely to play a fundamental role in the foreseeable Internet of Things. The connectivity aspect in combination with the available data (e.g. from GPS, on-board diagnostics, road sensors) and video (e.g. from dashcams and traffic cameras) streams enable a range of new applications, e.g., accident avoidance, online route planning, energy optimization, etc. These applications, however, come with an additional set of requirements which are not accommodated by the state-of-the-art stream processing platforms. We have built World-Wide Streams (WWS), a novel stream processing platform that has been explicitly designed with those requirements in mind. In this demo presentation, we will show a number of connected car scenarios that we have built on top of WWS.

Dynamic barcodes for a better ubiquitous understanding

Barcodes have survived the shift from paper to screen. Printed boarding passes and paper advertisements are substituted by mobile applications and digital billboards where barcodes remain key to exchange small amounts of information in a quick, uncomplicated way. The move to digital media opens up new opportunities for dynamic usage scenarios involving barcodes. In this paper, we explore how 2D barcodes can increase the awareness of machines in an analog world where information is primarily visualized for humans. Moreover, we exploit displays and cameras as virtual networks to transfer data using 2D barcode slideshows. Hence we address two problems conventional barcodes cope with: a constrained data capacity and a lack of semantics in the data it contains.

Towards a Web of Semantic Tags

Folksonomies are widely used to classify content on the Web. However, plain text annotations hardly fit the vision of the Semantics Web, where an unambiguous understanding of the data by both user and machine is key. Ontologies underpinning the Web help to resolve the ambiguity problem, but a.o. the absence of a detailed world ontology still puts end-user tagging in the front seat for basic content classification. In this paper, we propose semantic tags to bridge the gap between plain text keywords and ontologies. Sematags define aliases (synonyms) and isas (hypernyms) to better cope with the issues traditional tags suffer from. We illustrate how sematags can be defined from scratch or extracted from existing lexicons and knowledge bases. To evaluate our approach, we composed sematags from Wikipedia concepts and used those to semi-automatically tag photos on Flickr.

Public WiFi hotspots at your service

Locating services in public environments substantially differs from finding services in a private local network (e.g. a home network). Conventional discovery protocols require a user terminal to be connected to a network in order to query it for available services. However, out in the city, one can hardly try to connect to every public hotspot within reach to discover the services it might provide. We present a system that offers spontaneous access to nearby local services that can be accessed from a public WiFi hotspot. To this end, we combine information encoded in a hotspots SSID with a database of public access points to discover local services and gracefully interact with them using mobile devices. We demonstrate our approach in an interactive city game.

Combining lively sensed bubbles into sparkling applications

Sensor-driven applications typically analyze sensor data to check whether certain conditions are met and then execute actions accordingly. Creating such applications is often a work of precision as the developer must deal with diverse sensor sources (e.g. built-in hardware or networked sensors), fuzziness of sensor data (e.g. inferring movement from location coordinates), reuse of sensors in different contexts, etc. Moreover, inefficient use of sensor subscriptions can rapidly drain the battery of a mobile device. To better deal with these difficulties, we present the concept of sensor bubbles and sparks: pieces of meaningful sensor data that bubble up in an environment and trigger new application states. By adding OSGi-alike management features to bubbles and sparks, we show how they can be leveraged to build powerful sensor-driven applications.

The first interaction design pattern library for internet of things user created applications

In this paper, we report our analysis of extracting relevant existing and new interaction patterns that are candidates as enabling paradigms to facilitate Internet of Thing user created application building. We first define the context and underline what is an internet of thing user created application and what are the main research issues. We stress the focus on Interaction design as a must have paradigm to reach the Internet of thing user created application vision and highlight the research scope. In this paper we contribute with a template based interaction pattern that refers to competitive advantages and limitations with regard to our vision. The research method allowed us to sort out our first library of interaction pattern in this field. We conclude the paper with lab experimentation and lessons learned.