Marko Jurmu

Multipurpose Interactive Public Displays in the Wild: Three Years Later

Extended research on interactive public displays deployed in a city center reveals differences between the publics stated information needs and their actual information behavior and highlights effects that an artificial environment cannot duplicate.

Scroll, tilt or move it: using mobile phones to continuously control pointers on large public displays

Large and public displays mostly provide little interactivity due to technical constraints, making it difficult for people to capture interesting information or to influence the screens content. Through the combination of largescale visual output and the mobile phone as an input device, bidirectional interaction with large public displays can be enabled. In this paper, we propose and compare three different interaction techniques (Scroll, Tilt and Move) for continuous control of a pointer located on a remote display using a mobile phone. Since each of these techniques seemed to have arguments for and against them, we conducted a comparative evaluation and discovered their specific strengths and weaknesses. We report the implementation of the techniques, their design and results of our user study. The experiment revealed that while Move and Tilt can be faster, they also introduce higher error rates for selection tasks.

UBI-Hotspot 1.0: Large-Scale Long-Term Deployment of Interactive Public Displays in a City Center

We present the design, implementation, deployment and evaluation of novel urban computing infrastructure called ‘UBI-hotspot’. It is effectively a large interactive public display embedded with other computing resources. We have deployed a network of UBI-hotspots around downtown Oulu, Finland, to establish a public laboratory for conducting experimental ubiquitous computing research in authentic urban setting with diverse real users and with sufficient scale and time span. We focus on the first version of the UBI-hotspot which offers a wide range of services via different interaction modalities. We analyze the usage and user acceptance of the UBI-hotspots from qualitative and quantitative data collected over a period of eight months. Our first observations show that this type of infrastructure may be a useful addition to the urban space.

From school food to skate parks in a few clicks: using public displays to bootstrap civic engagement of the young

We present Ubinion, a service that utilizes large public interactive displays to enable young people to give personalized feedback on municipal issues to local youth workers. It also facilitates discussion and sharing the feedback online using modern social networking services. We present the motivation and rationale behind Ubinion and analyze the results from three large-scale user trials conducted in authentic settings. The evaluation shows that young users are positive about adopting Ubinion, and that they quickly appropriated its use to provide feedback outside the intended scope of the system, but still reflecting their concerns. We argue that Ubinions design as a fun and informal tool is appropriate for its purpose, and discuss the versatility of public interactive displays as a municipal feedback medium and as content sources for online communities in general.

Supporting distributed private and public user interfaces in urban environments

Proliferation of large public displays in urban cityscape gives rise to applications distributed between public displays and mobile devices. However, real deployment of distributed applications on top of this new infrastructure is challenging as no commonly accepted architectural solutions exist to rely on. In this paper, we present a platform supporting distributed application user interfaces on interactive large public screens and personal mobile devices. We demonstrate the functionality and potential of our approach by presenting a deployment of the platform with multiple distributed applications in authentic setting in a city center. We found this platform feasible to deploy interactive, appealing services on top of, and a non-cost information pick-up service as the most appealing to users.

Web-based framework for spatiotemporal screen real estate management of interactive public displays

In this paper we present a web-based framework for spatiotemporal screen real estate management of interactive public displays. The framework facilitates dynamic partitioning of the screen real estate into virtual screens assigned for multiple concurrent web applications. The framework is utilized in the implementation of so-called UBI-hotspot, which provides various information services via different interaction modalities including mobile. The framework facilitates seamless integration of third party web applications residing anywhere in the public Internet into the UBI-hotspot, thus catering for a scalable and open architecture. We report the deployment of a network of indoor and outdoor UBI-hotspots at downtown Oulu, Finland. The quantitative data on the usage of the UBI-hotspots implicitly speaks in favor of the practical applicability of the framework.

Towards connectivity management adaptability: context awareness in policy representation and end-to-end evaluation algorithm

An infrastructure based on multiple heterogeneous access networks is one of the leading enablers for the emerging pervasive and ubiquitous computing paradigm, in which the optimal management of diverse networking resources is a challenging problem. This paper presents a context-aware policy mechanism and related end-to-end evaluation algorithm for adaptive connectivity management of multi-access wireless networks. A policy is used to express the criteria for adaptive selection of the best local and remote network interfaces. The best connection can then be used for the establishment of a channel as well as the maintenance of on-going data transmission. Rich context information is considered in the policy representation with respect to user profile and preference, application characteristics, device capability, and network QoS condition. The decision of the best access networks to be used is made on the basis of an end-to-end evaluation process. The decision can be made in both Master-Slave and Peer-to-Peer modes. The paper focuses on the methods for policy representation and connection evaluation algorithm. A case study is presented to show the usability of the proposed policy mechanism and decision-making algorithm in the adaptive management of heterogeneous networking resources.

Adaptive connectivity management middleware for heterogeneous wireless networks

The trends of network convergence and mobile accessibility in the Internet are bringing new challenges to the connectivity management of end hosts. Concerning network convergence, the configuration of heterogeneous access networks should be taken into consideration. As for mobile accessibility, seamless handoff between diverse access points is a challenging issue. This article presents the design and implementation of connectivity management middleware (CMM), a channel-based architecture for context-aware connectivity management. This architecture can both provide network awareness to applications and manage network resources in an adaptive fashion. In the case of network awareness, the platform provides interfaces for applications to query network QoS and availability status, as well as subscribe connection events. As for adaptive resource management, channel-based transport services for seamless access switching and disconnection treatment are provided based on a policy mechanism. A prototype is implemented with which experiments were performed in a GPRS-WLAN integrated environment in order to demonstrate the operational correctness of the architecture. Performance metrics are measured and analyzed.

Open Urban Computing Testbed

We present a unique urban computing testbed for studying the utilization of ubiquitous computing technology in the public urban space of a city center. The testbed comprises of a wide range of pervasive computing infrastructure and different middleware resources. We demonstrate the applicability and benefits of the testbed in evaluating technology pilots and prototyping new ubiquitous services in real-world urban setting. We conclude with a discussion on the challenges in deploying this kind of a large-scale testbed in a public urban space.

Lease-Based Resource Management in Smart Spaces

We present a lease-based method for managing various resources in smart spaces. We argue that leases introduce a flexible way of utilizing context information in the management, and thus facilitate the optimization of resource usage. This work-in-progress paper presents our initial concept and methodology, along with ideas for further development