Project Aura: toward distraction-free pervasive computing

Abstract

A s the effects of Moore's law cause computing systems to become cheaper and more plentiful, a new problem arises: increasingly, the bottleneck in computing is not its disk capacity, processor speed, or communication bandwidth, but rather the limited resource of human attention. Human attention refers to a user's ability to attend to his or her primary tasks, ignoring system-generated distractions such as poor performance and failures. By exploiting plentiful computing resources to reduce user distraction, Project Aura is creating a system whose effectiveness is considerably greater than that of other systems today. Aura is specifically intended for pervasive computing environments involving wireless communication, wearable or handheld computers, and smart spaces. Human attention is an especially scarce resource in such environments, because the user is often preoccupied with walking, driving, or other real-world interactions. In addition, mobile computing poses difficult challenges such as intermittent and variable-bandwidth connectivity, concern for battery life, and the client resource constraints that weight and size considerations impose.To accomplish its ambitious goals, research in Aura spans every system level: from the hardware, through the operating system, to applications and end users. Underlying this diversity of concerns, Aura applies two broad concepts. First, it uses proactivity, which is a system layer's ability to anticipate requests from a higher layer. In today's systems, each layer merely reacts to the layer above it. Second, Aura is self-tuning: layers adapt by observing the demands made on them and adjusting their performance and resource usage characteristics accordingly. Currently, system-layer behavior is relatively static. Both of these techniques will help lower demand for human attention.

The APEX Framework: Prototyping of Ubiquitous Environments Based on Petri Nets

“…The first is that it should enable the rapid development of both prototypes and target systems. While there are several existing platforms for ubiquitous computing ( [3,8,10] are examples), a software tool is required that facilitates the development of prototypes, while simultaneously providing the hooks for the target system.…”

An Application Framework for a Situation-Aware System Support for Smart Spaces

“…There are a few ambitious middleware systems that were proposed as metaoperating systems capable of providing an integrated programming model for application developers [6,13,3,4,1]. Despite this considerable research effort, in recent years we have been witnessing a growing perception about a persistent gap between the promises of the area and its real achievements.…”

“…Particularly, the application programming model [3,5,10] (context-aware, service-oriented, user-centric, environment-centric, taskoriented, etc) is important for software planning and development phases. Roman et al [12] have identified six patterns that were required for all applications: multi-device utilization, user-centrism, run-time adaptation, mobility, contextsensitivity, and ubiquitous computing environment independence; and have identified five design guidelines: low-level system support, boot-strapping, scripting, application development and management support, and end-user support, which were considered essential to support ubiquitous computing environments and to increase number of application developers.…”

A Privacy-Aware Service Protocol for Ubiquitous Computing Environments

“…In ubiquitous computing environment, every service should have the characteristic of context-awareness [14]. In order to support this characteristic, the service provider is able to keep track the usage of a user.…”