Xavier Alamán

A Prototype of a Context-Based Architecture for Intelligent Home Environments

This paper presents a proposal of a context-based architecture to achieve the required synergy among the ubiquitous computing devices of an intelligent environment. These devices produce context information that models the behaviour of the environment. This context information is the glue among the devices and the context-aware applications. The generated context information provides a common view of the world. A blackboard architecture allows to share this context information and a context model is proposed to represent it. A prototype of such a smart room has been developed, including several devices as well as a set of context-aware demonstrators. They work together employing the context information stored on the blackboard.

Easing the smart home: Semi-automatic adaptation in perceptive environments

This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, (project TIN2004-03140) and by U.A.M-Grupo Santander (project Itech Calli), and is part of the UAM-SOLUZIONA AmI Laboratory research program. Special thanks to Eran Eden and Manuel Freire for their recommendations.

A Mechanism for Solving Conflicts in Ambient Intelligent Environments

Ambient Intelligence scenarios describe situations in which multitude of devices and agents live together. In this kind of scenarios is frequent to see the appearance of conflicts when modifying the state of a device as for example a lamp. Those problems are not as much of sharing of resources as of conflict of orders coming from different agents. This coexistence must deal also with the desire of privacy of the different users over their personal information such as where they are, what their preferences are or to whom this information should be available. When facing incompatible orders over the state of a device it turns necessary to make a decision. In this paper we propose a centralised mechanism based on prioritized FIFO queues to decide the order in which the control of a device is granted. The priority of the commands is calculated following a policy that considers issues such as the commanders role, commands type, contexts state and commander-context and commander-resource relations. Finally we propose a set of particular policies for those resources that do not adjust to the general policy. In addition we present a model pretending to integrate privacy through limiting and protecting contextual information.

A Plug and Play Spoken Dialogue Interface for Smart Environments

In this paper we present a plug and play dialogue system for smart environments. The environment description and its state are stored on a domain ontology. This ontology is formed by entities that represent real world contextual information and abstract concepts. This information is complemented with linguistic parts that allow to automatically create a spoken interface for the environment. The spoken interface is based on multiple dialogues, related to every ontology entity with linguistic information. Firstly, the dialogue system creates appropriate grammars for the dialogues. Secondly, it creates the dialogue parts, employing a tree structure. Grammars support the recognition process and the dialogue tree supports the interpretation and generation processes. The system is being tested with a prototype formed by a living room. Users may interact with and modify the physical state of this living room environment by means of the spoken dialogue interface.

Adaptive manuals as assistive technology to support and train people with acquired brain injury in their daily life activities

Assistive technologies and ubiquitous computing can be related since both try to help people in their lives. This common objective motivated us to develop and evaluate a system that puts ubiquitous computing technologies into the rehabilitation process of people with acquired brain injury. Thus, in this paper, we present and evaluate a system that shows adaptive manuals for daily-life activities for people with acquired brain injury. This first evaluation allowed us to validate our approach and also to extract valuable information about these systems as well as environmental factors that may affect the patients.

Creating e‐books in a distributed and collaborative way

This paper describes how groups of authors may create electronic books about the knowledge area of their interest by means of unsupervised collaborative work. For this task we propose a Web‐based groupware system that allows building Web sites that can be considered as electronic books. In these Web sites we can find in a structured way the relevant knowledge about an area or topic. The system allows the creation of e‐books in the Web, in an asynchronous and distributed way, and without the need of an editor for managing the task. This is possible through a knowledge crystallisation process supported by virtual communities of experts. Currently, there are several active e‐books, which have been created by groups of students at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. Examples include the operating systems e‐book and the uncertain reasoning e‐book and these are described.

Developing Mixed Reality Educational Applications: The Virtual Touch Toolkit.

In this paper, we present Virtual Touch, a toolkit that allows the development of educational activities through a mixed reality environment such that, using various tangible elements, the interconnection of a virtual world with the real world is enabled. The main goal of Virtual Touch is to facilitate the installation, configuration and programming of different types of technologies, abstracting the creator of educational applications from the technical details involving the use of tangible interfaces and virtual worlds. Therefore, it is specially designed to enable teachers to themselves create educational activities for their students in a simple way, taking into account that teachers generally lack advanced knowledge in computer programming and electronics. The toolkit has been used to develop various educational applications that have been tested in two secondary education high schools in Spain.

VirtualTouch: A Tool for Developing Mixed Reality Educational Applications and an Example of Use for Inclusive Education

This article describes VirtualTouch, a tool for developing mixed reality educational applications. VirtualTouch proposes the use of virtual worlds and tangible user interfaces to offer a “mixed reality” experience. Using VirtualTouch a teacher may easily design learning modules, which are immediately implemented and used in the classroom. A first experience of such use, focused in the area of inclusive education, is also presented. The results of this experience are encouraging, showing that mixed reality applications have a high potential for use in this area.

Context Adaptive Interaction with an Automatically Created Spoken Interface for Intelligent Environments

In this paper we present the interpretation and generation processes of a spoken dialogue interface for intelligent environments. The interface is automatically created for each specific environment and the interpretation and generation vary depending on the environment and its context. These processes rely on a dialogue tree structure. Several modules process the tree structure and the environment context information to produce specific dialogues for the current environment state. Dialogues are provided with clarification, error recovering, anaphora resolution and other capabilities. The interface is implemented in a real intelligent environment laboratory.

Easing the Smart Home: A rule-based language and multi-agent structure for end user development in Intelligent Environments

The present paper summarizes the Phd Dissertation of Manuel Garcia-Herranz [1] including the oral defenses.