This paper tries to serve as an introductory reading to privacy issues in the field of ubiquitous computing. It develops six principles for guiding system design, based on a set of fair information practices common in most privacy legislation in use today: notice, choice and consent, proximity and locality, anonymity and pseudonymity, security, and access and recourse. A brief look at the history of privacy protection, its legal status, and its expected utility is provided as a background.

This paper borrows ideas from social science to inform the design of novel "sensing" user-interfaces for computing technology. Specifically, we present five design challenges inspired by analysis of human-human communication that are mundanely addressed by traditional graphical user interface designs (GUIs). Although classic GUI conventions allow us to finesse these questions, recent research into innovative interaction techniques such as `Ubiquitous Computing' and `Tangible Interfaces' has begun to expose the interaction challenges and problems they pose. By making them explicit we open a discourse on how an approach similar to that used by social scientists in studying human-human interaction might inform the design of novel interaction mechanisms that can be used to handle human-computer communication accomplishments.

Automatic health monitoring helps enable independent living for the elderly by providing specific information to caregivers. This goal, called aging in place,is increasingly important as an unprecedented portion of the population enters old age. I introduce the simultaneous tracking and activity recognition (STAR) problem,whose solution provides this key information. I propose using data from many minimally invasive sensors commonly found in home security systems to provide simultaneous room-level tracking and recognition of many of the activities of daily living (ADLs). ADLs have been chosen by physicians to gauge the severity of cognitive and physical ailments. I describe a Rao-Blackwellised particle filter for room level tracking, rudimentary activity recognition, and data association, as well as a Monte Carlo EM approach for online parameter learning. I demonstrate results from experiments in an instrumented home and on simulated data. Proposed extensions improve the approach and add more complex activity recognition. We discuss how to integrate a growing vocabulary of activities into the tracker.

In ubiquitous computing environments, multiple users work with a wide range of different devices. In many cases, users interact and collaborate using multiple heterogeneous devices at the same time. The configuration of the devices should be able to change frequently due to a highly dynamic, flexible and mobile nature of new work practices. This produces new requirements for the architecture of an appropriate software infrastructure. In this paper, an architecture designed to meet these requirements is proposed. To test its applicability, this architecture was used as the basis for the implementation of BEACH, the software infrastructure of i-LAND (the ubiquitous computing environment at GMD-IPSI). It provides the functionality for synchronous cooperation and interaction with roomware components, i.e. room elements with integrated information technology. In conclusion, our experiences with the current implementation are presented.

Abstract. Evaluating the usability of mobile systems raises new concerns and questions, challenging methods for both lab and field evaluations. A recent literature study showed that most mobile HCI research projects apply lab-based evaluations. Nevertheless, several researchers argue in favour of field evaluations as mobile systems are highly context-dependent. However, field-based usability studies are difficult to conduct, time consuming and the added value is unknown. Contributing to this discussion, this paper compares the results produced by a laboratory- and a field-based evaluation of the same context-aware mobile system on their ability to identify usability problems. Six test subjects used the mobile system in a laboratory while another six used the system in the field. The results show that the added value of conducting usability evaluations in the field is very little and that recreating central aspects of the use context in a laboratory setting enables the identification of the same usability problem list. 1

Occupants of future computing environments with ubiquitous display devices may feel inundated with changing digital information. One solution is to create a reasoning module that accepts requests to display information from multiple applicatins and controls how the information is presented to minimize visual disruptions to users. Such a system might use information about what activity is occurring in the space to exploit a powerful phenomenon of the human visual system: change blindness.

Indoor ultrasonic location systems provide fine-grained position data to ubiquitous computing applications. However, the ultrasonic location systems previously developed utilize narrowband transducers, and thus perform poorly in the presence of noise and are constrained by the fact that signal collisions must be avoided. In this paper, we present a novel ultrasonic location system which utilizes broadband transducers. We describe the transmitter and receiver hardware, and characterize the ultrasonic channel bandwidth. The system has been deployed as a polled, centralized location system in an office. Test results demonstrate that the system can function in high levels of environmental noise, and that it has the capability for higher update rates than previous ultrasonic location systems.

E-commerce and m-commerce demand for full-fledged, increasingly complex applications which need to offer ubiquitous access in terms of the anytime/anywhere/anymedia paradigma. From a software engineering point of view, the development of such ubiquitous web applications requires proper modeling methods in order to ensure architectural soundness and maintainability. Recently, web modeling methods started recognizing this fact by providing first concepts for dealing with ubiquity. In this paper, two of these modeling methods are compared, identifying their strengths and shortcomings. As a prerequisite, an evaluation framework is introduced, using the notion of customization as the uniform mechanism to enable ubiquity. Customization adapts a web application towards a particular context which reflects the environment the application is running in. To enable a holistic view on the development process of a ubiquitous web application, customization is regarded as a new modeling dimension, influencing all other tasks of ubiquitous web application development.

We introduce the PlaceLab, a new “living laboratory ” for the study of ubiquitous technologies in home settings. The PlaceLab is a tool for researchers developing context-aware and ubiquitous interaction technologies. It complements more traditional data gathering instruments and methods, such as home ethnography and laboratory studies. We describe the data collection capabilities of the laboratory and current examples of its use. Author Keywords Ubiquitous computing, context-aware, living laboratory, home, sensors, research methods, ethnography. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):

rwise similar cells. Columns correspond to the cells treated by different drug candidates, and rows correspond to gene activity expressed in the form of molecular concentrations. The darkness of the band at each row--column intersection indicates a specific gene's activity level under the drug candidate's influence. A technique called gel electrophoresis, in which researchers use an electric field to sort molecules by size, produces the readout. When genes produce different -sized RNA molecules, this technique can help discriminate between them. In the common biochemical procedure called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), genetic material (RNA, in this case) is amplified (repeatedly duplicated) so we can detect the molecules' presence by using the electrophoresis technique. Thus, the entire experiment consists of . Exposing cells to drug candidates . Destroying the cells and performing PCR on their molecular components . Applying electrophoresis . Taking an image of the gel to captu