Defining and Investigating Device Comfort

Abstract

Device Comfort is a concept that uses an enhanced notion of trust to allow a personal (likely mobile) device to better reason about the state of interactions and actions between it, its owner, and the environment. This includes allowing a better understanding of how to manage information in fine-grained context as well as addressing the personal security of the user. To do this, it forms a unique relationship with the user, focusing on the device's judgment of user in context. This paper introduces and defines Device Comfort, including an examination of what makes up the comfort of a device in terms of trust and other considerations, and discusses the uses of such an approach. It also presents some ongoing developmental work in the concept, and an initial formal model of Device Comfort, its makeup and behaviour.

The Wisdom of Being Wise: A Brief Introduction to Computational Wisdom

“…Wisdom has certain principles (or behavioural and reasoning patterns) associated with it. As in previous work [13,15,11] we believe that it is possible to isolate these principles and, furthermore, use them in computational settings. In this section of the paper, we begin the former.…”

“…In our other work to date, and in our concept of Computational Wisdom, we acknowledge the affective as a very important aspect of the whole. Knowledge and cognition (as in the Berlin Wisdom framework [1], for instance) are vital, as is metaknowledge, but the relationship between observer, actor, 'user' (in the sense of a person using' a computer), system and environment are the key, as can be seen in our Device Comfort work, for instance [15]. Wisdom has also been applied in educational settings, and in Suarez's thesis [25] we find the concept of Wisdom "by design", which discusses the notion of artificial wisdom briefly by examining how to design complex social systems that embody wisdom.…”

“…Computational Wisdom is seen here as a system of systems, where the technology augments the human in one direction, whilst being augmented by the human in another, and finally where different technological systems, such as the computational trust [13,16,14] comfort [15,5] slow computing [10] and socially adept or intelligence technological systems [2] we and others have already postulated and built, build what wisdom is possible between them. There are, we conjecture, two main questions to answer on the journey to this system of wisdom.…”

Anomaly Detection for Soft Security in Cloud based Auditing of Accounting Systems

“…Related work on anomaly detection by tracking behavioural patterns for soft security include that of Device Comfort [Marsh et al, 2011]. Device Comfort has been developed to detect a mobile device's level of comfort on its user.…”

Context informed intelligent information infrastructures for better situational awareness

“…Recently, designers have used this human-computer symbiosis for social engineering purposes, creating persuasive technologies where the user 'tends' the computer, with examples including the UbiFit Garden (a digital garden that blooms on a mobile phone in response to the user undertaking target levels of exercise) or anthropomorphic proxies of various kinds that evoke nurturing behavior in the human 'owner' such as the e-pet [16] or the Biometric Daemon [17]. Marsh et al [18] have taken this one step further in describing a new concept, Device Comfort, which is "the feeling of comfort that a device should be able to draw on from its current context" and is a means of dynamically sensing the environment and making a trust judgment in respect of that environment. Comfort levels can then be communicated to a user who will seek a means of repair if the system is uneasy.…”