Abstract. Informative Art display systems have been proposed to provide users with information considered relevant at arbitrary points of work or living engagement, originating from many different –mostly geographically dislocated– sources and presented at the periphery of human (visual) perception. Having the displays operate at the periphery of a user's attention allows other user tasks to sustain primary. Much like the information presented by wallclocks, posters, paintings or windows, peripheral displays move to the center of attention only when appropriate and desirable. Abstract art has been proposed to serve as the visualization paradigm, encoding information into graphical or pictorial artwork by subtly modifying its shape, color and appearance details or its overall impression. This paper approaches a systematic elaboration of visual metaphors able to deliver information via peripheral displays in an aesthetic, artful way. In our approach, the choice of metaphors is driven by the aesthetic appeal of the visual appearance of the display as a whole, out of which certain dynamic emblems or symbols are used to conotate information in a visual style. From experiments we find, that such metaphors are considered by users as a means of personal emotional expression, and that controllable aesthetic attractiveness turns out to be the dominant factor of display appreciation. The choice of aesthetic themes, as well as the control of emblem and symbol dynamics are supported and implemented in our peripheral display framework, a general purpose software framework for informative art display systems.

Abstract. Ambient information systems, often referred to as ambient displays, peripheral displays or informative art systems (IAS), aim at providing users with information considered relevant at arbitrary points of work or living engagement, in easy and quickly to convey, aesthetic and artful style. Adhering principles of visual perception, visualization and design, information coming from various different (hardware and software) sensors is aggregated through abstraction and selective omission, and displayed at the periphery of a user's attention. art, naive art, comic drawings up to photographic images or technical drawings have been proposed, but all grounded on the “I-throw-it-out-there-and-watch” design paradigm 1, totally excluding the user, his background knowledge and his aesthetic appreciation from the design process. This paper advocates for a useroriented, participatory design process for IASs. Addressing canvas style IASs, i.e. displays that decorate apartments, offices, foyers and the like in the first (but not the only) place, in our approach the choice of the IAS canvas theme is left to the user. To steer the (design) process of identifying symbols within a chosen theme we have developed categories of metaphors like color, space, shape, abstraction, scale and dimension, and discuss their potential with respect to pre-attentive and interpretative cognition. From experiments with users we find, that the choice of themes and the identification of metaphoric symbols are considered as a means of personal emotional expression (or in other words, as “a matter of taste”). Aesthetic attractiveness turns out to be a dominant factor of IAS appreciation. A general purpose software framework for IASs is presented, implementing sensor data acquisition, context recognition, aggregation and filtering, as well as 2D/3D graphics engine, dynamically controlling the visual appearance of themes and symbols.

This paper discusses a novel architecture of intelligent user services that address the domain of networked home environments. The work described in this paper represents the central achievements of the first 1.5 years in the work package on intelligent user services within the EU-IST funded research project Amigo. The discussed service architecture consists of five distinct services that address both user- and system oriented issues in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) home environments.

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. In the rapidly developing space of novel technologies that combine sensing and semantic technologies, research on smart products has the potential of establishing a research field in itself. In this paper, we synthesize existing work in this area in order to define and characterize smart products. We then reflect on a set of challenges that semantic technologies are likely to face in this domain. Finally, in order to initiate discussion in the workshop, we sketch an initial comparison of smart products and semantic sensor networks from the perspective of knowledge technologies. 1

In this paper we present a system that provides personalized privacy support for large public displays based on the current social situation and individual privacy profiles. We first present the results of a user study that was conducted to derive the requirements for the design of the system. In the second part of the paper, we describe the developed system consisting of a program for privacyenhancing information management and a small personal artefact for an easy adaptation of the privacy settings to the local context.

Abstract. A café table is a traditional setting for conversation. Tabletop displays may have an active role in this connection. In particular for a museum scenario, conversation after the visit is important for a joint elaboration of a small group visit experience. We propose the museum café as the location to introduce a tabletop display meant to foster and support conversation about the visit. The goal of the system is to influence the development of the conversation by adopting persuasion techniques. We describe a system that monitors the conversation among the visitors and dynamically shows visual stimuli on the table surface. An initial formative evaluation is conducted through a series of qualitative user studies. 12 1

The task is in the research area of cooperation technologies. In particular the task will focus on support to co-located users. Cooperation technologies have traditionally been used to support geographically distributed users, with the exception for support in the context of meeting rooms. Ubiquitous and mobile technologies open for new scenarios and a growing number of applications are supporting cooperation among co-located users. The task is aiming at supporting designers of these applications. The master thesis will focus on creating a set of design guidelines for information sharing among co-located users within collaborative systems. The task is expected to result in a set of design guidelines, using a structured method called patterns. These guidelines should aid designers and developers in the creation of mechanisms for the support of information sharing between colocated users in collaborative work- and learning systems. The patterns should be based on a set of re-occurring problems within co-located sharing, identified by a review of relevant literature, research and existing solutions.

This paper presents a component-oriented programming model and middleware support services for building ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) applications that are composed out of smart objects on demand. Applications are realized as graphs representing smart objects and their services binding. Services are provided through high-level abstractions called plugs with semantically rich interfaces that allow them to be discovered and invoked dynamically. Our middleware supports the integration of heterogeneous smart objects by implementing a high level interaction model suited to the end-user and providing dynamic discovery, synthesis and binding of services. In this way we can deploy UbiComp applications that adapt to the dynamics of an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environment. A smart home application that employees everyday augmented objects is used to illustrate the approach. We give implementation details with an emphasis to the compositional aspects and provide a scalability analysis for the service discovery process.

Abstract—This paper presents a set of guidelines for the design of multi-user awareness systems. In a first step, general requirements for team awareness systems are analyzed. In the second part of the paper, the identified requirements are aggregated and transformed into concrete design guidelines for the development of team awareness systems.