ITR: Human-centered Design of Context-aware Computing: Scalability, Usability and Privacy

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

When humans interact with each other and their environment, there are breakdowns that naturally result due to the mismatch in their understanding of the current situation. This is often exacerbated by computers because they only have a minimal understanding of human dialogue and interaction. The breakdowns can be smoothed out by making computers more aware of the physical and social contexts they are a part of. This project seeks to investigate user-centered methods and technologies to assist designers and developers in the design, prototyping, and evaluation of real-world context-aware applications, focusing on issues that have yet to be addressed, including usability, privacy, and scalability. This work focuses on (1) exploring new user-centered methods and tools for designing, prototyping, and evaluating context-aware applications, (2) understanding the nature of privacy concerns with respect to context-aware systems and developing mechanisms for addressing these concerns, and (3) providing an infrastructure to help programmers to build these applications for a large number of users and sensors. This work will be evaluated by developing two socially relevant applications: (1) emergency response support for coordinating, communicating, and allocating resources, and (2) an augmented wheelchair providing word prediction for individuals with motor impairments