Ambient Intelligence: The MyCampus Experience

Abstract

Abstract. Over the past five years, the MyCampus group at Carnegie Mellon University has been developing and experimenting with Ambient Intelligence technologies aimed at enhancing everyday life. The project has drawn on multiple areas of expertise, combining the development of an open Semantic Web infrastructure for context-aware service provisioning with an emphasis on issues of privacy and usability. In this paper, we review key motivations behind the project, discuss the MyCampus Semantic Web infrastructure and report on our experience tailoring the architecture for different environments (e.g. everyday campus life applications, office applications, museum tour guide). This includes a discussion of Semantic e-Wallets aimed at reconciling user demands for context awareness and privacy as well as a description of different context-aware applications developed and evaluated during the course of the project. We also discuss our experience using Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) functionality developed to overcome usability issues associated with capturing complex, context-sensitive user preferences. The paper concludes with a summary of lessons learned so far and of challenges still to be addressed. Over the past five years, the MyCampus group at Carnegie Mellon University has been developing and experimenting with Ambient Intelligence technologies aimed at enhancing everyday life. The project has drawn on multiple areas of expertise, combining the development of an open Semantic Web infrastructure for context-aware service provisioning with an emphasis on issues of privacy and usability. In this paper, we review key motivations behind the project, discuss the MyCampus Semantic Web infrastructure and report on our experience tailoring the architecture for different environments (e.g. everyday campus life applications, office applications, museum tour guide). This includes a discussion of Semantic e-Wallets aimed at reconciling user demands for context awareness and privacy as well as a description of different context-aware applications developed and evaluated during the course of the project. We also discuss our experience using Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) functionality developed to overcome usability issues associated with capturing complex, context-sensitive user preferences. The paper concludes with a summary of lessons learned so far and of challenges still to be addressed. Report Documentation Page

Understanding and capturing people’s privacy policies in a mobile social networking application

“…For instance, Norman may have specified that his colleagues can only access his location during weekdays and while he is on campus. Query processing could also involve the use of obfuscation rules that manipulate the accuracy of the response returned to a user [2,24].…”

“…PEOPLEFINDER is built on top of the MyCampus infrastructure, a semantic web environment in which policies are expressed using a rule extension of the OWL language [24]. The resulting language is capable of modeling a wide range of policies.…”

Learning in the city: context for communities and collaborative learning

“…Cyberdesk (36); or people known as friends and classmates of the user, e.g. MyCampus (37). The social context in the context model shown in Figure 4 is based on an individual's roles, i.e.…”

“…Artefacts represented in the environment may also offer services to the learner. Examples of such artefacts in the environment include context tags providing localised information (40) and location-based digital posters that are available via a user's mobile device (37). Other types of information for the environmental context include characteristics of objects that are nearby, e.g.…”

PALTA: Peer-to-peer AdaptabLe Topology for Ambient intelligence

“…AmI applications have been proposed for a diverse number of everyday situations ranging from small and close applications (e.g. home and office applications [12,19]), to those large and open (e.g. traffic and massive-events applications [3]).…”