Activity-Centric Computing Systems

• Activity-Centric Computing (ACC) addresses deep-rooted information management problems in traditional application centric computing by providing a unifying computational model for human goal-oriented ‘activity,’ cutting across system boundaries. • We provide a historical review of the motivation for and development of ACC systems, and highlight the need for broadening up this research topic to also include low-level system research and development. • ACC concepts and technology relate to many facets of computing; they are relevant for researchers working on new computing models and operating systems, as well as for application designers seeking to incorporate these technologies in domain-specific applications

Activity-based computing: computational management of activities reflecting human intention

An important research topic in artificial intelligence is automatic sensing and inferencing of contextual information, which is used to build computer models of the user’s activity. One approach to build such activity-aware systems is the notion of activity-based computing (ABC). ABC is a computing paradigm that has been applied in personal information management applications as well as in ubiquitous, multidevice, and interactive surface computing. ABC has emerged as a response to the traditional application- and file-centered computing paradigm, which is oblivious to a notion of a user’s activity context spanning heterogeneous devices, multiple applications, services, and information sources. In this article, we present ABC as an approach to contextualize information, and present our research into designing activity-centric computing technologies

Designing for the invisible: user-centered design of infrastructure awareness systems

Infrastructure awareness systems reveal invisible aspects of infrastructures to their existing or potential users. Designing such systems is challenging as it requires making visible the hidden activity of infrastructures while providing information of interest to the users. To address this challenge we introduce the AMC technique (for Awareness Model Cards). This technique relies conceptually on awareness model's concepts of nimbus and focus. The main objective is to match the users' interests to the information the infrastructure awareness systems can provide, through the use of card matching. This technique provides three benefits: 1) evaluate how relevant is the information displayed by infrastructure awareness systems; 2) identify which of users' interests infrastructure awareness systems do not take into account; 3) identify elements of re-design in the infrastructures themselves, so to improve their adoption

Remarkable Objects: Supporting Collaboration in a Creative Environment

In this paper, we report the results of a field trial of a Ubicomp system called CAM that is aimed at supporting and enhancing collaboration in a design studio environment. CAM uses a mobile-tagging application which allows designers to collaboratively store relevant information onto their physical design objects in the form of messages, annotations and external web links. The purpose of our field trial was to explore the role of augmented objects in supporting and enhancing creative work. Our results show that CAM was used not only used to support participants’ mutual awareness and coordination but also to facilitate designers in appropriating their augmented design objects to be explorative, extendable and playful supporting creative aspects of design work. In general, our results show how CAM transformed static design objects into ‘remarkable’ objects that made the creative and playful side of cooperative design visible

GridOrbit public display:Providing grid awareness in a biology laboratory

We introduce GridOrbit, a public awareness display that visualizes the activity of a community grid used in a biology laboratory. This community grid executes bioin-formatics algorithms and relies on users to donate CPU cycles to the grid. The goal of GridOrbit is to create a shared awareness about the research taking place in the biology laboratory. This should promote contribu-tions to the grid, and thereby mediate the appropriation of the grid technology. GridOrbit visualizes the activity in the grid, shows information about the different active projects, and supports a messaging functionality where people comment on projects. Our work explores the usage of interactive technologies as enablers for the appropriation of an otherwise invisible infrastructure

Designing Context-aware Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Unipolar and Bipolar Disorders

This position paper presents our preliminary design of context-aware cognitive behavioral therapy for unipolar and bipolar disorders. We report on the background for this study and the methods applied in the ongoing design process. The paper ends by presenting and discussing different design options. We hope this will be useful input for further discussion at the workshop