Abstract. The smart home offers a new opportunity to augment people's lives with ubiquitous computing technology that provides increased communications, awareness, and functionality. Recently, a number of trends have increased the likelihood that the aware home can soon become a reality. We examine a number of challenges from the technical, social, and pragmatic domains that we feel must be overcome before the vision of the smart home, posited by ubiquitous computing research, can become a reality. Our hope in raising these issues is to create a conversation among researchers in the varied disciplines that make up ubiquitous computing. In particular, we hope to raise awareness of the existing literature on the adoption, use, and history of domestic technologies, as well as the use of situated studies, and the benefits that these can bring to bear on the design and evaluation of technologies for the home

Abstract. A motivation behind much UbiComp research has been to make our lives convenient, comfortable and informed, following in the footsteps of Weiser’s calm computing vision. Three themes that have dominated are context awareness, ambient intelligence and monitoring/tracking. While these avenues of research have been fruitful their accomplishments do not match up to anything like Weiser’s world. This paper discusses why this is so and argues that is time for a change of direction in the field. An alternative agenda is outlined that focuses on engaging rather than calming people. Humans are very resourceful at exploiting their environments and extending their capabilities using existing strategies and tools. I describe how pervasive technologies can be added to the mix, outlining three areas of practice where there is much potential for professionals and laypeople alike to combine, adapt and use them in creative and constructive ways.

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Abstract. Advances in sensor technology, embedded processing power, and modeling and reasoning software, have created the possibility for everyday products to sense the environment and pro-actively anticipate user needs. There is however a risk of creating environments in which people experience a lack of control. The aim of this study is to explore the degree in which people are willing to delegate control to a pro-active home atmosphere control system. The findings suggest that participants are willing to delegate control to easy-to-use systems, and they do not want to delegate control to complex and unpredictable systems. It is argued that the willingness to delegate should not be considered as a fixed degree, rather system initiative might depend on the situation at hand or on changes in time. Design research on mixed initiative systems faces a methodological challenge, in terms of measuring user experience of autonomous prototypes in a controlled way, while still preserving the sense of a realistic experience. The paper describes advantages and disadvantages of testing in a simulated home environment versus testing in the field.

Abstract. The Semantic Web can be seen as a means of improving the interoperability between systems, applications, and information sources. Emerging personal computing paradigms such as mobile and ubiquitous computing will benefit from better interoperability, as this is an enabler for a higher degree of automation of many tasks that would otherwise require the end-users ’ attention. In this paper we present one possible view of mobile and ubiquitous computing enhanced with the application of Semantic Web technologies, and explore the various benefits of policy-awareness to this application domain. 1

To be successful, ubicomp applications must be designed with their environment and users in mind and evaluated to confirm that they do not disrupt the users' natural workflow. Well-established techniques for understanding users and their environment exist, but are not specifically designed to assess how well the computing and physical task environments blend. We present strengths and weaknesses of several qualitative and quantitative user study techniques for ubicomp. We applied these techniques to the design and evaluation of a ubicomp application for cell biology laboratories (Labscape). We describe how these techniques helped identify design considerations that were crucial for Labscape's adoption and demonstrate their ability to measure how effectively applications blend into an environment.

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Abstract Since GPS receivers have become a commodity anyone could access and use location information simply and freely. Such an easy access to ones ’ location is instrumental to development of location-aware applications. However, existing applications are static in that they do not model relations between places and mobile things. Moreover, these applications do not allow to easily map the physical location of mobile devices to virtual resources on the Internet. We attempt to bridge this gap by extending the base concepts that make up the Internet with the physical location of devices, in order to facilitate the development of Web-based locationaware applications for embedded mobile devices. In this chapter, we propose a simple infrastructure for the ”Web of Things ” that extends the existing Web to enable location-aware applications. The proposed solution enables a naturally hierarchic way to search for location-aware devices and the services they provide.

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