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The grammar underlying the creation of a rule
Source publication
In the domain of rule-based automation and intelligence most efforts concentrate on building the technological infrastructure,
often disregarding user-home interaction requirements. This paper attempts to mitigate this issue by defining a rich-web rule
visual design interface specifically aimed at non-skilled home inhabitants.
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... and readability (reqs. 1b, 1d and 3a) by exploiting a formal rule representation gram- mar (see Figure 3) based upon four fixed keywords: IF, THEN, WHEN, OR IF (req. 1c and 1d). ...
Context 2
... and 1d). The first two are mandatory for the creation of any rule, while the others are optional (dotted in Figure 3). A rule composed with this grammar follows the natural language (req. 1b). ...
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Citations
... More expressive rules can be found in the work described in [4], in which IF-THEN rule constructions are extended with optional WHEN sentences, allowing the distinction between the event and the rule condition, which is more accurate for an ECA approach. In addition, OR-IF statements can be used to specify alternative behavior. ...
Smart environments are becoming a reality in our society and the number of intelligent devices integrated in these spaces is increasing very rapidly. As the combination of intelligent elements will open a wide range of new opportunities to make our lives easier, final users should be provided with a simplified method of handling complex intelligent features. Specifying behavior in these environments can be difficult for non-experts, so that more efforts should be directed towards easing the customization tasks. This work presents an entirely visual rule editor based on dataflow expressions for interactive tabletops which allows behavior to be specified in smart environments. An experiment was carried out aimed at evaluating the usability of the editor in terms of non-programmers’ understanding of the abstractions and concepts involved in the rule model, ease of use of the proposed visual interface and the suitability of the interaction mechanisms implemented in the editing tool. The study revealed that users with no previous programming experience were able to master the proposed rule model and editing tool for specifying behavior in the context of a smart home, even though some minor usability issues were detected.
... Wearable Computing for lowering access barriers is presented by WristHome [2,3], a system for turning existing wrist-worn devices into flexible home access points by exploiting a modular architecture independent from the specific watch device and from the underlying home automation system. Activity Delegation for making places "smarter" and keeping the user in control is presented by Rules-Book, a mobile application for the creation of rules [4] and context-aware applications by end users. The objective here is to let the user maintain the desired autonomy in her home; a common way to realize this goal is by explicitly delegating some tasks to the smart environment, thus perceiving it as useful and cooperative. ...
This paper summarizes the Ph.D. thesis of Luigi De Russis.
... The recent work by Bonino et al. described in [32] sketches a visual interface that specifically targets non-skilled or low-technological skilled home-dwellers (i.e. non-expert users) based on a drag-and-drop metaphor. ...
A considerable part of the behavior in smart environments relies on event-driven and rule specification. Rules are the mechanism most often used to enable user customization of the environment. However, the expressiveness of the rules available to users in editing and other tools is usually either limited or the available rule editing interfaces are not designed for end-users with low skills in programming. This means we have to look for interaction techniques and new ways to define user customization rules. This paper describes a generic and flexible meta-model to support expressive rules enhanced with data flow expressions that will graphically support the definition of rules without writing code. An empirical study was conducted on the ease of understanding of the visual data flow expressions, which are the key elements in our rule proposal. The visual dataflow language was compared to its corresponding textual version in terms of comprehension and ease of learning by teenagers in exercises involving calculations, modifications, writing and detecting equivalences in expressions in both languages. Although the subjects had some previous experience in editing mathematical expressions on spreadsheets, the study found their performance with visual dataflows to be significantly better in calculation and modification exercises. This makes our dataflow approach a promising mechanism for expressing user-customized reactive behavior in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments. The performance of the rule matching processor was validated by means of two stress tests to ensure that the meta-model approach adopted would be able to scale up with the number of types and instances in the space.
... The work described in [17] sketches a visual interface that specifically targets non-expert users based on a drag-and-drop metaphor. It relies on a rule grammar for expressing conditions and rule alternatives. ...
Nowadays, business models are in permanent evolution since the requirements belongs to a rapidly evolving world. In a context where communications all around the world travel so fast the business models need to be adapted permanently to the information the managers receive. In such world, traditional software development, needed for adapting software to changes, do not work properly since business changes need to be in exploitation in shorter times. In that situation, it is needed to go quicker from the business idea to the exploitation environment. This issue can be solved accelerating the development speed: from the expert to the customer, with no textendashor few, technical intervention. This paper proposes an approach to empower domain experts in developing adaptability solutions by using automated sets of production rules in a friendly way. Furthermore, a use case that implements this kind of development was used in a real problem prototype.
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Intelligent environments, such as smart homes or domotic systems, have the potential to support people in many of their ordinary activities, by allowing complex control strategies for managing various capabilities of a house or a building: lights, doors, temperature, power and energy, music, etc. Such environments, typically, provide these control strategies by means of computers, touch screen panels, mobile phones, tablets, or In-House Displays. An unobtrusive and typically wearable device, like a bracelet or a wrist watch, that lets users perform various operations in their homes and to receive notifications from the environment, could strengthen the interaction with such systems, in particular for those people not accustomed to computer systems (e.g., elderly) or in contexts where users are not in front of a screen. Moreover, such wearable devices can reduce the technological gap introduced in the environment by home automation systems, thus permitting a higher level of acceptance in the daily activities and improving the interaction between the environment and its inhabitants. In this paper, we introduce the dWatch, a personal wearable notification and control device, integrated in an intelligent platform for domotic systems, designed to optimize the way people use the environment, and built as a wrist watch so that it is easily accessible, worn by people on a regular basis and unobtrusive.
The wide spread prevalence of mobile devices, the decreasing costs of sensor technologies and increased levels of computational power have all lead to a new era in assistive technologies to support persons with Alzheimer’s disease. There is, however, still a requirement to improve the manner in which the technology is integrated into current approaches of care management. One of the key issues relating to this challenge is in providing solutions which can be managed by non-technically orientated healthcare professionals. Within the current work efforts have been made to develop and evaluate new tools with the ability to specify, in a non-technical manner, how the technology within the home environment should be monitored and under which conditions an alarm should be raised. The work has been conducted within the remit of a collaborative patient-carer system to support self-management for dementia. A visual interface has been developed and tested with 10 healthcare professionals. Results following a post evaluation of system usability have been presented and discussed.
A Smart Environment is an environment enriched with disappearing devices, acting together to form an "intelligent entity". In such environments, the computing power pervades the space where the user lives, so it becomes particularly important to investigate the user's perspective in interacting with her surrounding. Interaction, in fact, occurs when a human performs some kind of activity using any computing technology: in this case, the computing technology has an intelligence of its own and can potentially be everywhere. There is no well-defined interaction situation or context, and interaction can happen casually or accidentally. The objective of this dissertation is to improve the interaction between such complex and different entities: the human and the Smart Environment. To reach this goal, this thesis presents four different and innovative approaches to address some of the identified key challenges. Such approaches, then, are validated with four corresponding software solutions, integrated with a Smart Environment, that I have developed and tested with end-users. Taken together, the proposed solutions enable a better interaction between diverse users and their intelligent environments, provide a solid set of requirements, and can serve as a baseline for further investigation on this emerging topic.
