Specification and Verification of Complex Location Events with Panoramic

Abstract

Abstract. We present the design and evaluation of Panoramic, a tool that enables end-users to specify and verify an important family of complex location events. Our approach aims to reduce or eliminate critical barriers to deployment of emerging location-aware business activity monitoring applications in domains like hospitals and office buildings. Panoramic does not require users to write code, understand complex models, perform elaborate demonstrations, generate test location traces, or blindly trust deterministic events. Instead, it allows end-users to specify and edit complex events with a visual language that embodies natural concepts of space and time. It also takes a novel approach to verification, in which events are extracted from historical sensor data traces and then presented with intelligible, hierarchical visualizations that represent uncertainty with probabilities. We build on our existing software for specifying and detecting events while enhancing it in non-trivial ways to facilitate event specification and verification. Our design is guided by a formative study with 12 non-programmers. We also use location traces from a building-scale radio frequency identification (RFID) deployment in a qualitative evaluation of Panoramic with 10 non-programmers. The results show that end-users can both understand and verify the behavior of complex location event specifications using Panoramic.

Evaluating Intelligibility Usage and Usefulness in a Context-Aware Application

“…To counter this, context-aware applications should be intelligible (also called transparent, comprehensible, scrutable) by providing explanations of their behavior [1]. Indeed, there have already been several contextaware applications that support some level of intelligibility (e.g., [2,17,18,19,22]). These systems support a limited set of explanations users can ask for: What, Certainty, Inputs, Why, and Why Not.…”

“…However, regarding explanations, their evaluation focused on eliciting user preference about visualization format, and not on their impact. Welbourne et al [22] investigated the use of Panoramic that is able to explain location with timeline visualizations. However, their evaluation involved participants investigating realistic, but fictitious, data.…”

EXCITE: EXploring Collaborative Interaction in Tracked Environments

“…VisTACO [8] records interaction sequences of multiple remote-located people with digital tabletops, providing touch trace visualizations, and allowing insights into the spatial and temporal distribution of tabletop interaction [9]. Panoramic is an evaluation tool for ubicomp applications, providing historical sensor data visualizations [11]. Finally, the Proximity Toolkit allows recording and playback of tracked interaction sequences of multi-entity relationships (multiple people and devices) [5].…”

Ubicorder: A Mobile Device for Situated Interactions With Sensor Networks

“…In particular, Li et al's Topiary [27] allows users to prototype locationaware applications by creating storyboards that describe the interaction sequences (involving people, places and things) on a map. More recently, the Panaromic system [28] also employs a storyboard metaphor for specifying location-based events. Unlike the general-purpose nature of EDITY, such systems target a particular sensing modality, i.e.…”