Implicit Interaction: A Prerequisite for Practical AmI

Intelligent User Interfaces represent one of the three distinguishing characteristics of AmI environments. Such interfaces are envisaged as mediat-ing between the services available in an arbitrary physical environment and its inhabitants. To be effective, such interfaces must operate in both proactive and passive contexts, implicitly and explicitly anticipating and responding to user requests. In either case, an awareness of the prevailing situation is essential – a process that demands a judicious combination of data and decision fusion, as well as collaborative and centralized decision making. Given the constraints of AmI environments realizing a distributed lightweight computational infrastruc-ture augmented with a need to address user needs in a timely manner poses sig-nificant challenges. In this paper, various issues essential to enabling seamless, intuitive and instinctive interaction in AmI environments are explored.

Speaker's Bio

Dr. Richard Tynan is currently a Post Doctoral Research Fellow with CLARITY: The Centre for Sensor Web Technologies. In 2008, he received his Ph. D. from University College Dublin for his thesis titled: Interpolation for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) Redundancy Identification and Sensor Hibernation. In 2003, he received a Bachelor of Science Degree (Honors) from University College Dublin. In the summers of 2004, 2005 and 2006 he was awarded a research internship at the prestigious IBM T.J. Watson Research Center at Yorktown, New York. He was the recipient of a coveted IRCSET scholarship for his Ph. D. and has been successful with two funding proposals submitted to the National Access Programme at the Tyndall Institute. His work is focused on intelligent power management for WSNs, simulation and benchmarking of Intelligent Sensor Networks and he works on a number of demonstrator projects in which his work is leveraged in real world scenario e.g. SmartBay, Ambient Assisted Living and TennisSense. He has authored over 40 peer reviewed publications in various international journals, conferences and workshops.

Authors' Info:

M.J O’Grady, G.M.P. O’Hare, S. Dobson R. Tynan, C. Muldoon, J. Ye
CLARITY: Centre for Sensor Web Technologies,
UCD School of Computer Science & Informatics
University College Dublin,
Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.