AIM: Design and Implementation of Agent-based Intelligent Middleware for Ubiquitous HCI Environments

Abstract

With the emergence of ubiquitous computing era, it has become increasingly important for a middleware which takes full advantage of HCI factors to support user-centric services. Many kinds of studies on HCI-friendly middleware for supporting user-centric services have been performed. However, previous studies have problems in supporting HCI factors, which are needed for user-centric services. In this paper, we present an agent-based intelligent middleware, which is called AIM, that provides user-centric services in ubiquitous HCI environments. We describe the middleware requirements for user-centric services by analyzing various HCI-friendly middleware and design AIM middleware which effectively supports various HCI factors such as context information management, pattern inference of user's behavior, and dynamic agent generation, etc. We introduce service scenarios based on the user's modalities in smart spaces. Finally, prototype implementation is illustrated as a manifestation of the benefits of the introduced infrastructure.