Unobtrusive Services Research Articles

Exploring End User Programming Needs in Home Automation

Home automation faces the challenge of providing ubiquitous, unobtrusive services while empowering users with approachable configuration interfaces. These interfaces need to provide sufficient expressiveness to support complex automation, and notations need to be devised that enable less tech-savvy users to express such scenarios. Rule-based and process-oriented paradigms have emerged as opposing ends of the spectrum; however, their underlying concepts have not been studied comparatively. We report on a contextual inquiry study in which we collected qualitative data from 18 participants in 12 households on the current potential and acceptance of home automation, as well as explored the respective benefits and drawbacks of these two notation paradigms for end users. Results show that rule-based notations are sufficient for simple automation tasks but not flexible enough for more complex use cases. The resulting insights can inform the design of interfaces for smart homes to enable usable real-world home automation for end users.

Cognitive resource-aware unobtrusive service provisioning in ambient intelligence environments

The cognitive load placed on users by both the proactive and spontaneous provisioning of service functionality and by the physical activities performed in ambient intelligence environments can lead to the depletion of their mental resources. This paper demonstrates how burdening the inappropriate selection of service functionality can be for users by conducting a semi-naturalistic and controlled user test to investigate the significance of the cognitive resource depletion problem in specific ambient intelligence environments. A dynamic service binding and scheduling mechanism is provided based on different types of interference and on mental resources and their demand requirements. A technical evaluation is conducted by simulating the mechanism over a set of various abstract service compositions, making use of real datasets of user interactions with diverse HCI services and daily physical activities. The results show that this mechanism ensures less cognitively taxing, unobtrusive service composition provisioning.

Personalization for unobtrusive service interaction

Increasingly, mobile devices play a key role in the communication between users and the services embedded in their environment. With ever greater number of services added to our surroundings, there is a need to personalize services according to the user needs and environmental context avoiding service behavior from becoming overwhelming. In order to prevent this information overload, we present a method for the development of mobile services that can be personalized in terms of obtrusiveness (the degree in which each service intrudes the user’s mind) according to the user needs and preferences. That is, services can be developed to provide their functionality at different obtrusiveness levels depending on the user by minimizing the duplication of efforts. On the one hand, we provide mechanisms for describing the obtrusiveness degree required for a service. On the other hand, we make use of Feature Modeling techniques in order to define the obtrusiveness level adaptation in a declarative manner. An experiment was conducted in order to put in practice the proposal and evaluate the user acceptance for the personalization capabilities provided by our approach.

Marketing to the Affluent

Of the 182 million adult Americans, more than 6 percent are in households earning $100,000 or more a year (11 million). To attract affluent travelers, the minimum requirements include absolute cleanliness, uncompromising safety, deluxe accommodations, and unobtrusive service. Wealthy travelers want the finest facility and amenities, personal attention, service responsiveness, and luxurious appointments. And they want to be surrounded by other affluent people. The minimum expectations of such guests include accommodations with views, fluffy towels, large closets, room safes, swimming pools, business centers, fine restaurants, unobtrusive service, spas with personal trainers, room service on every floor, room refrigerators stocked with real food, a VCR in every guest room, and services and products that maximize time.

Vale

Patient and unobtrusive service, faithfully rendered year by year, often by reason of its very familiarity receives less than its merited meed of recognition, but we are happy here to pay all honour to one of the editors of Greece & Rome, who, after twenty-five years' loyal service to this journal, must now on medical advice relinquish his post. A glance at the list of books reviewed, for example, in one year in vol. xvii, numbering 102 in all, is eloquent testimony to the impressive role so long sustained by the man to whom we gratefully dedicate this issue, Mr. E. R. A. Sewter. His many brief reviews, while making their point, have ever given illumination to senior scholars, schoolmasters, and others, who sought to know more of some classical publication than its title might well convey. A measure of Mr. Sewter's quality is to be seen in the gap he leaves behind him. Scarce twelve men nowadays could sustain the weight this rugged Ajax so lightly wielded. Mr. Sewter, as he withdraws into retirement, takes with him the gratitude, not only of the Press and Editorial Board, but also of the vast number of his readers who have benefited from his services. Once more we are given occasion to reflect upon that grand Shakespearian phrase—‘The constant service of the antique world’.

William Bottomley.

THE death of William Bottomley at Glasgow on October 19, at sixty-three years of age, removes one who, throughout the greater part of his life, did genuine, unobtrusive service to the cause of applied science by the assistance he-gave to his uncle, Lord Kelvin. A son of the late Mr. William Bottomley of Fortbreda, County Down, and of Anna Thomson, the second of Lord Kelvin's sisters, Bottomley was trained as a civil engineer. In 1872, Sir William Thomson and Fleeming Jenkin undertook to act in partnership as engineers for the manufacture and laying of telegraph cables which were to connect the cities of the Brazilian coast, from the Amazon to the River Plate. Bottomley was -put in charge of a staff of young assistants at the works of the Hooper Company at Millwall Docks where the cable was being made.