Natural Contextual Reasoning for End Users

Metaxas, Georgios; Markopoulos, Panos

doi:10.1145/3057860

Cited by 13 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 45 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Furthermore, end-users want clear explanations and accountability about context-sensitive behaviors of their IoT devices. More recently, researchers developed an ontology and corresponding mark-up language called context range semantics (CRS) (Metaxas & Markopoulos, 2017). The CRS does not only allow end-users to reason about the context but it can assist them (with the help of context range editor (CoRE)) to automatically construct correct logical expressions from the context.…”

Section: Lower-level Abstractionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We claim that these operators in addition to our proposed novel operators can provide more expressiveness to automation rules which could then enable less tech-savvy users to construct complex logical expression in natural language. Furthermore, these notations could further be investigated in the light of prior work in building syntactically correct and semantically meaningful logical expressions (Metaxas & Markopoulos, 2017).…”

Section: Novel Notationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To empower end-users to compose Internet of Things (IoT) applications, researchers have developed End-User Development (EUD) environments where less tech-savvy users can develop IoT applications by combining the functionalities of devices and services in a lower level of abstraction. The most commonly used EUD techniques are object composition (Desolda, Ardito, & Matera, 2017), process-oriented or rule-based (Brich, Walch, Rietzler, Weber, & Schaub, 2017), jigsaw puzzle (Danado & Paterno, 2015), interaction by demonstration (Chen, He, Anderson, Keller, & Skubic, 2006), mark-up languages and ontologies to formulate and comprehend complex logical expressions (Metaxas & Markopoulos, 2017). These lower-level abstractions prevent users from thinking of valuable applications to exploit the full range of capabilities of smart home devices and thereby create gaps between user expectations and reality; consequently halting acceptance (Clark, Newman, & Dutta, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Investigating the Crowd’s Creativity for Creating On-Demand IoT Scenarios

Abbas¹,

Markopoulos²,

Khan³

2020

International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The IoT industry supplies a plethora of Internet connected devices and services supporting smart home automation. However, end-users having little knowledge of the features and possibilities of such technologies, face difficulties in conjuring up useful application scenarios combining such devices and services, thus missing out on potential applications outside those provided by vendors. A remedy for such end-users can potentially be found in crowdsourcing IoT scenario creation. For such an enterprise to be viable it is essential to assess whether crowdsourcing can result in practical and original scenarios. This article reports two studies aiming to establish the practicality and originality of crowdsourced IoT scenarios for smart homes. In the first study, we recruited 102 crowd workers who created 306 scenarios in various categories. We then recruited a second cohort of 620 crowd workers to rate the scenarios' creativity. In the second study, we evaluated the corpus of IoT scenarios by 20-experienced smart home users recruited through a screening survey. Our results show that the crowd evaluations of originality and creativity are strongly correlated with those of smart home users. Our major IoT-specific findings in relation to creativity are: a) The number of IoT devices and the number of combination of devices impact how creative the scenarios are perceived; b) Workers with self-reported intermediate programming knowledge wrote more creative scenarios when compared to workers having expert knowledge; c) Computational metrics such as text metrics can provide the basis for automated assessment of the scenarios' creativity. Finally, an inductive thematic analysis of the scenarios revealed interesting themes (e.g., types of rules, automation styles and novel operators) which can serve as a guide for designing more expressive and intuitive end-user development solutions, in the context of IoT.

show abstract

Section: Lower-level Abstractionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Novel Notationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Investigating the Crowd’s Creativity for Creating On-Demand IoT Scenarios

Abbas¹,

Markopoulos²,

Khan³

2020

International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This relates to the "End-User Development for the Internet of Things," a topic addressed by a recent special issue [45] that offers a picture of this fast-evolving research field. Indeed, some works are addressing the problem of enabling end-users to automate the behaviors of smart devices, through paradigms simplifying the definition of Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules [2,10,12,23,30,46].…”

Section: Rationale and Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

User-defined semantics for the design of IoT systems enabling smart interactive experiences

Ardito

Desolda

Lanzilotti

et al. 2020

Pers Ubiquit Comput

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Automation in computing systems has always been considered a valuable solution to unburden the user. Internet of Things (IoT) technology best suits automation in different domains, such as home automation, retail, industry, and transportation, to name but a few. While these domains are strongly characterized by implicit user interaction, more recently, automation has been adopted also for the provision of interactive and immersive experiences that actively involve the users. IoT technology thus becomes the key for Smart Interactive Experiences (SIEs), i.e., immersive automated experiences created by orchestrating different devices to enable smart environments to fluidly react to the final users’ behavior. There are domains, e.g., cultural heritage, where these systems and the SIEs can support and provide several benefits. However, experts of such domains, while intrigued by the opportunity to induce SIEs, are facing tough challenges in their everyday work activities when they are required to automate and orchestrate IoT devices without the necessary coding skills. This paper presents a design approach that tries to overcome these difficulties thanks to the adoption of ontologies for defining Event-Condition-Action rules. More specifically, the approach enables domain experts to identify and specify properties of IoT devices through a user-defined semantics that, being closer to the domain experts’ background, facilitates them in automating the IoT devices behavior. We also present a study comparing three different interaction paradigms conceived to support the specification of user-defined semantics through a “transparent” use of ontologies. Based on the results of this study, we work out some lessons learned on how the proposed paradigms help domain experts express their semantics, which in turn facilitates the creation of interactive applications enabling SIEs.

show abstract

“…Another approach to address some of the issues that users encounter when they specify ECA (Event, Condition, Action) rules is reported in [16]. Still in this area Metaxas and Markopoulos [9] propose a context-range editor supporting end users formulate logical expressions regarding the context, define the concept of affinity regrouping heuristics, and present the mechanisms to apply it throughout the contextual ranges of the involved services. The semantic information that the services disclose lets the editor recognize this affinity and allows it to group terms in logical expressions when they refer to the same aspect (e.g.…”

Section: Trigger-action Programmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Visual Tool for Analysing IoT Trigger/Action Programming

Corcella

Manca

Paternò

et al. 2018

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Trigger-Action programming paradigm has been widely adopted in the last few years, especially in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain because it allows end users without programming experience to describe how their applications should react to the many events that can occur in such very dynamic contexts. Several end user development tools exist, in both the research and industrial fields, which aim to support the increasing need to specify such rules. Thus, it becomes important for application developers and domain experts to enrich such environments with functionalities able to monitor how users actually interact with such rule editors, and show useful information to analyse the end user activity. In this paper, we present a visual tool for monitoring and analysing how users interact with a trigger-action rule editor. The goal is to provide a tool useful to better understand what end users' personalization needs are, how they are expressed, how users actually specify rules, and whether users encounter any issues in interacting with the personalization features offered by the editors. The proposed solution supports the analysis through a dashboard and a set of timelines describing the actual use of the personalization tool, with the possibility to select specific events of interest. It moreover provides data useful for understanding the types of triggers, actions and rules actually composed by users, and whether they effectively exploit the personalization features offered.

show abstract

Natural Contextual Reasoning for End Users

Cited by 13 publications

References 45 publications

Investigating the Crowd’s Creativity for Creating On-Demand IoT Scenarios

Investigating the Crowd’s Creativity for Creating On-Demand IoT Scenarios

User-defined semantics for the design of IoT systems enabling smart interactive experiences

A Visual Tool for Analysing IoT Trigger/Action Programming

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About