Tim Schwartz

Gumo: the general user model ontology

We introduce the general user model ontology Gumo for the uniform interpretation of distributed user models in intelligent semantic web enriched environments. We discuss design decisions, show the relation to the user model markup language UserML and present the integration of ubiquitous applications with the u2m.org user model service.

Acquisition of spatial knowledge in location aware mobile pedestrian navigation systems

In this paper we regard the navigation aid provided by mobile navigation systems in a real environment and the effects of these mobile assistants to the development of spatial knowledge. Therefore, we report on a user study concerning the acquisition of spatial knowledge. This study sets up on a former study described by Krüger and colleagues and sheds light on problems concerning the acquisition of survey knowledge while being navigated by a mobile handheld PC.

Geo referenced dynamic bayesian networks for user positioning on mobile systems

The knowledge of the position of a user is valuable for a broad range of applications in the field of pervasive computing. Different techniques have been developed to cope with the problem of uncertainty, noisy sensors, and sensor fusion. In this paper we present a method, which is efficient in time- and space-complexity, and that provides a high scalability for in- and outdoor-positioning. The so-called geo referenced dynamic Bayesian networks enable the calculation of a users position on his own small hand-held device (e.g., Pocket PC) without a connection to an external server. Thus, privacy issues are considered and completely in the hand of the user.

This is me: using ambient voice patterns for in-car positioning

With the range of services that can be accessed inside a car constantly increasing, so are the opportunities for personalizing the experience for both driver and other passengers. A main challenge however is to find out who is sitting where without asking explicitly. The solution presented in this paper combines two sources of information in a novel way: Ambient speech and mobile personal devices. The approach offers improved privacy by putting the user in control, and it does not require specialized positioning technologies such as RFID. In a data-driven evaluation, we confirm that the accuracy is sufficient to support a ten-speaker scenario in practice.

Hybrid Teams: Flexible Collaboration Between Humans, Robots and Virtual Agents

With the increasing capabilities of agents using Artificial Intelligence, an opportunity opens up to form team like collaboration between humans and artificial agents. This paper describes the setting-up of a Hybrid Team consisting of humans, robots, virtual characters and softbots. The team is situated in a flexible industrial production. The work presented here focuses on the central architecture and the characteristics of the team members and components. To achieve the overall team goals, several challenges have to be met to find a balance between autonomous behaviors of individual agents and coordinated teamwork.

Modeling and simulating assistive environments in 3-D with the YAMAMOTO toolkit

We present the map modeling toolkit YAMAMOTO, which allows to efficiently model and design assistive building environments in 3-D. We focus on the tools ability to represent and simulate sensors and actuators, i.e. navigational beacons used for indoor positioning and navigation purposes. An interactive avatar can be used to simulate and evaluate location-based applications in the virtual model. Vice versa, the model can be used to visualize the state of the real world, including the location of the user and the content of public displays.

Seamless Resource-Adaptive Navigation

Research in the project RENA (REsource-Adapative NAvigation) together with DFKI GmbH, BMW Research and Technology AG, and Eyeled GmbH has been concerned with the conceptual and methodological foundations and the design of a resource-adaptive platform for seamless outdoor and indoor navigation that can serve as a basis for product development by the companies in the RENA consortium. Future in-car assistance systems will have a user interface, which adapts to the driver´s current exposure caused by the actual traffic situation.

Hybrid Teams of Humans, Robots, and Virtual Agents in a Production Setting

This video paper describes the practical outcome of the first milestone of a project aiming at setting up a so-called Hybrid Team that can accomplish a wide variety of different tasks. In general, the aim is to realize and examine the collaboration of augmented humans with autonomous robots, virtual characters and SoftBots (purely software based agents) working together in a Hybrid Team to accomplish common tasks. The accompanying video shows a customized packaging scenario and can be downloaded from http://hysociatea.dfki.de/?p=441.

UbiSpot - A user trained always best positioned engine for mobile phones

We implemented a positioning engine for mobile phones that can be trained by the users to recognize places as personal landmarks by their wireless communication fingerprint. Our always-best-positioned approach integrates heterogeneous sensor data, such as Bluetooth (BT) device addresses, WLAN MACs, GSM cell ids and GPS coordinates, if available. As an alternative to measuring the signal strength of wireless access points, our positioning engine measures the relative frequency of their appearance and disappearance over time, which closely correlates to their distance. The user can add new places as symbolic names to a hierarchical location model at any time using their mobile phone. For each place, the wireless sensor fingerprint can be trained by the user to define a landmark. Once landmarks have been trained, the positioning engine continuously matches the current sensor profile against the database of learned fingerprints and chooses the most likely place. In case that no BT or WLAN APs are visible, the hierarchical data model can at least derive a higher-level description of the current region based on GSM or GPS as fallback strategy in the sense of being always best positioned. We evaluated the positioning accuracy in our universitys lab environment in terms of hits and misses and investigated the effect of various time window sizes for the frequency measurement of the fingerprint. The symbolic location model can be applied for example to adapt the mobile device to different contexts, e.g. automatically mute the ringtone in meeting rooms, trigger location-dependent rules and events, or disclose the current location to friends. (Abstract)

2nd multimodal interfaces for automotive applications (MIAA 2010)

This paper summarizes the main objectives of the 2nd IUI workshop on multimodal interfaces for automotive applications (MIAA 2010).