Section: Research Program

End User Programming of Smart Environments

End users programming, smart home, smart environment

Pervasive computing promises unprecedented empowerment from the flexible and robust combination of software services with the physical world. Software researchers assimilate this promise as system autonomy where users are conveniently kept out of the loop. Their hypothesis is that services, such as music playback and calendars, are developed by service providers and pre-assembled by software designers to form new service frontends. Their scientific challenge is then to develop secure, multiscale, multi-layered, virtualized infrastructures that guarantee service front-end continuity. Although service continuity is desirable in many circumstances, end users, with this interpretation of ubiquitous computing, are doomed to behave as mere consumers, just like with conventional desktop computing.

Another interpretation of the promises of ubiquitous computing, is the empowerment of end users with tools that allow them to create and reshape their own interactive spaces. Our hypothesis is that end users are willing to shape their own interactive spaces by coupling smart artifacts, building imaginative new functionality that were not anticipated by system designers. A number of tools and techniques have been developed to support this view such as CAMP [53] or iCAP [33] .

We are investigating an End-User Programming (EUP) approach to give the control back to the inhabitants. With this approach, smart home services, using sensors, actuators and services would be configured by the inhabitants. Our research focuses on easy to use tools and languages for :

• Installation and maintenance of devices and services.

• Visualisation and control of the Smart Home.

• Service configuration.

• Detection and resolution conflicting demands on sensors and actuators by services.