Rui José

Open Display Networks: A Communications Medium for the 21st Century

Open public display networks could emerge as a new communications medium for the 21st century, but this transformation can only occur if the technology moves from its current, closed model to a new, open one.

Scalable and Flexible Location-Based Services for Ubiquitous Information Access

In mobile distributed environments applications often need to dynamically obtain information that is relevant to their current location. The current design of the Internet does not provide any conceptual models for addressing this issue. As a result, developing a system that requires this functionality becomes a challenging and costly task, leading to individual solutions that only address the requirements of specific application scenarios. In this paper we propose a more generic approach, based on a scalable and flexible concept of location-based services, and an architectural framework to support its application in the Internet environment. We describe a case study in which this architectural framework is used for developing a location-sensitive tourist guide. The realisation of this case study demonstrates the applicability of the framework, as well as the overall concept of location-based services, and highlights some of the issues involved.

The AROUND architecture for dynamic location-based services

This paper presents a generic concept of location-based service as an abstraction for supporting the association between computational resources and location. The objective is to extend the advantages of service-based architectures to the development of location-based systems, thus providing a more open and extensible alternative to the “vertical” approaches typically used in this type of system. The novel AROUND architecture is proposed as an approach for supporting location-based services in the Internet environment. AROUND provides a service location infrastructure that allows applications to select services that are specifically associated with their current location. The architecture includes a flexible scope model that defines the association between services and location, and a service location infrastructure organised by spatial criteria and optimised for location-based queries. Based on a prototype implementation of this architecture, we have developed two case studies that illustrate the use of this approach for developing location-based systems. The overall results provide a valuable insight into the applicability of the architecture, and suggest that this model of location-based services can provide a useful approach for the development of a wide range of location-based applications.

Ambient Intelligence: Beyond the Inspiring Vision.

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) has emerged in the past 10 years as a multidisciplinary field within ubiquitous computing, attracting considerable research, funding and public attention and leading to many research groups, and conferences specifically focused on Ambient Intelligence topics. From its conception, AmI has always been a field strongly driven by a particular vision of how ICT technologies would shape our future. This has given the AmI vision, essentially as proposed by ISTAG, an excessively central role in shaping the field and setting its research agenda. We argue that this inspiring vision should no longer be the main driver for AmI research and that we should now re-interpret its role in the background of 10 years of research. In this paper, we reflect on what it means for AmI to move behind its foundational vision and we identify a number of emerging trends around some of its core concepts, more specifically the notion of intelligence, the system view and the requirements process. The main motivation is to search for alternative research directions that may be more effective in delivering today the essence of the AmI vision, even if they mean abandoning some of the currently prevailing approaches and assumptions. Overall, these trends provide a more holistic view of AmI and may represent important contributions for bringing this field closer to realisation, delivery and real social impact.

An open architecture for developing mobile location-based applications over the Internet

The mobile Internet is enabling a broad range of new applications that dynamically obtain information that is relevant to their current location. This type of application would greatly benefit from generic mechanisms for supporting the association between network resources and physical space, but existing systems are typically based on vertical approaches valid only for narrow application scenarios. This paper argues that a comprehensive solution to this issue should address the important challenges of heterogeneity and openness, and proposes an approach based on the concept of location-based service, i.e. a service whose usage is associated with physical space, as a generic abstraction to support the development of location-dependent systems. The paper describes a model for associating location scopes with services, an architecture to support the discovery of location-based services on the Internet, and a prototype infrastructure in which several services and applications have been developed for validating the architecture.

A Framework for Context-Aware Adaptation in Public Displays

Several approaches for context-aware public display systems exist but none has been able to bridge the gap between the myriad of possible interactive features of a display and adaptation rules for its content. In this paper, we propose a framework of digital footprints generated by the interaction with public displays that can be used as a means to dynamically characterise a place. We describe these footprints, how they can be generated and how they can be used by context-aware display systems to adapt to the social environment of a place.

Beyond interaction: tools and practices for situated publication in display networks

The ability to engage users in content generation is both a major goal and a major challenge for public displays. While previous work has extensively explored the specific challenges associated with interaction processes, little attention has been paid to the broad range of issues that go beyond interaction itself. More specifically, public display systems do not seem to offer a set of tools and techniques that people may feel comfortable to use for whatever communication purposes they might have. There are no publication concepts that can frame expectations on how content creation, distribution, presentation and curation are handled by display systems. In our research, we seek to explore new publication concepts for public displays, and for that purpose we have developed instant places, a platform enabling people to connect with the places they visit and control the projection of their identity in public displays. The system frames interaction events within two specific publication concepts: pin badges and posters. We describe our first deployments at three different locations and the results obtained from usage data and in-situ surveys about content publication practices.

PuReWidgets: a programming toolkit for interactive public display applications

Interaction is repeatedly pointed out as a key enabling element towards more engaging and valuable public displays. Still, most digital public displays today do not support any interactive features. We argue that this is mainly due to the lack of efficient and clear abstractions that developers can use to incorporate interactivity into their applications. As a consequence, interaction represents a major overhead for developers, and users are faced with inconsistent interaction models across different displays. This paper describes the results of a study on interaction widgets for generalized interaction with public displays. We present PuReWidgets, a toolkit that supports multiple interaction mechanisms, automatically generated graphical interfaces, asynchronous events and concurrent interaction. This is an early effort towards the creation of a programming toolkit that developers can incorporate into their public display applications to support the interaction process across multiple display systems without considering the specifics of what interaction modality will be used on each particular display.

Key challenges in application and content scheduling for Open Pervasive Display Networks

Todays digital signage systems typically show content that has been scheduled well in advance by their respective “owners”, i.e., companies or individuals who paid for and/or operate the public display. However, with the shift to open display networks that can obtain content from many sources and the corresponding advances in interaction and sensing technologies, the scheduling requirements in this domain are set to change radically. For example, we envision that displays in our environment will soon be able to adapt to their surroundings and allow viewers to appropriate them by actively selecting and/or contributing content. Such levels of interactivity and context-awareness will require new approaches to content scheduling. In this paper we discuss the challenges faced in developing new forms of application and content scheduling for Open Pervasive Display Networks.

A practical framework for ethics: the PD-net approach to supporting ethics compliance in public display studies

Research involving public displays often faces the need to study the effects of a deployment in the wild. While many organizations have institutionalized processes for ensuring ethical compliance of such human subject experiments, these may fail to stimulate sufficient awareness for ethical issues among all project members. Some organizations even require such assessments only for medical research, leaving computer scientists without any incentive to consider and reflect on their study design and data collection practices. Faced with similar problems in the context of the EU-funded PD-Net project, we have implemented a step-by-step ethics process that aims at providing structured yet lightweight guidance to all project members both stimulating the design of ethical user studies, as well as providing continuous documentation. This paper describes our process and reports on 3 years of experience using it. All materials are publicly available and we hope that other projects in the area of public displays, and beyond, will adopt them to suit their particular needs.