Advances in artificial intelligence, sensors and big data management have far-reaching societal impacts. As these systems augment our everyday lives, it becomes increasing-ly important for people to understand them and remain in control. We investigate how HCI researchers can help to develop accountable systems by performing a literature analysis of 289 core papers on explanations and explaina-ble systems, as well as 12,412 citing papers. Using topic modeling, co-occurrence and network analysis, we mapped the research space from diverse domains, such as algorith-mic accountability, interpretable machine learning, context-awareness, cognitive psychology, and software learnability. We reveal fading and burgeoning trends in explainable systems, and identify domains that are closely connected or mostly isolated. The time is ripe for the HCI community to ensure that the powerful new autonomous systems have intelligible interfaces built-in. From our results, we propose several implications and directions for future research to-wards this goal.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3173574.3174156

Trends and Trajectories for Explainable, Accountable and Intelligible Systems: An HCI Research Agenda

http://www.eislab.fim.uni-passau.de/files/publications/2012/pmc_preprint.pdf

The mobile fitness coach: Towards individualized skill assessment using personalized mobile devices

The advancement of ubiquitous computing technologies has greatly improved the availability of digital resources in the real world. Here, the authors investigate mobile interaction with tagged, everyday objects and associated information that's based on the Internet of things and its technologies. Their framework for integrating Web services and mobile interaction with physical objects relies on information typing to increase interoperability. Two prototypes for mobile interaction with smart posters build upon this framework to realize multi-tag interaction with physical user interfaces. The authors' evaluation identifies usability issues regarding the design of physical mobile interactions, interfaces, and applications.

/pdf/perci-pervasive-service-interaction-with-the-internet-of-341qf5sodq.pdf

Perci: Pervasive Service Interaction with the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to interconnect our everyday life items. It provides them with information processing capabilities to enable computers to sense, integrate, present, and react to all aspects of the physical world. This move from “interconnected computers” to “interconnected things” requires simplifying the development of new applications and services by supporting interoperability among heterogeneous devices; so that the programmer can focus on the development of applications enabled by the infrastructure of IoT. Middleware is a software layer interposed between the infrastructure and the applications using it [1] that basically aims to support important requirements for these applications. This paper surveys existing middleware designed for IoT and focuses on various technical challenges in this domain.

Challenges in middleware solutions for the internet of things

In this paper, we show that Web protocols and technologies are good candidates to design the Internet of Things. This approach allows anyone to access embedded devices through a Web application, via a standard Web browser. This Web of Things requires to embed Web servers in hardware-constrained devices. We first analyze the traffics embedded Web servers have to handle. Starting from this analysis, we propose a new way to design embedded Web servers, using a dedicated TCP/IP stack and numerous cross-layer off-line pre-calculation (where information are shared between IP, TCP, HTTP and the Web application). We finally present a prototype -- named Smews -- as a proof of concept of our proposals. It has been embedded in tiny devices (smart cards, sensors and other embedded devices), with a requirement of only 200~bytes of RAM and 7~kilo-bytes of code. We show that it is significantly faster than other state of the art solutions. We made Smews source code publically available under an open-source license.

/pdf/the-web-of-things-interconnecting-devices-with-high-nbk4wzdtx7.pdf

The Web of Things: Interconnecting Devices with High Usability and Performance

Although mobile services can be used ubiquitously, their employment and the interaction with them are still restricted by the constraints of mobile devices In order to facilitate and leverage mobile interaction with services, we present a generic framework that combines semantic Web service technology and physical mobile interaction This interaction paradigm uses mobile devices to extract information from augmented physical objects and use it for a more intuitive and convenient invocation of associated services For that purpose, the presented framework exploits Web service descriptions for the automatic and dynamic generation of customizable user interfaces that support and facilitate physical mobile interaction This generic approach to mobile interaction with services through the interaction with physical objects promises to meet the complementary development of the Internet of things A user study with a prototype application for mobile ticketing confirms our concept and shows its limits

/pdf/supporting-mobile-service-usage-through-physical-mobile-3c6j5og5wj.pdf

Supporting Mobile Service Usage through Physical Mobile Interaction

Context-aware mobile applications and systems have been extensively explored in the last decade and in the last few years we already saw promising products on the market. Most of these applications assume that context data is highly accurate. But in practice this information is often unreliable, especially when gathered from sensors or external sources. Previous research has argued that the system usability can be improved by displaying the uncertainty to the user. The research presented in this paper shows that it is not always an advantage to show the confidence of the context-aware application to the user. We developed a system for automatic form filling on mobile devices which fills in any web form with user data stored on the mobile device. The used algorithm generates rules which indicate with which probability which input field of a form should be filled in with which value. Based on this we developed two versions of our system. One shows the uncertainty of the system and one not. We then conducted a user study which shows that the user needs slightly more time and produces slightly more errors when the confidence of the system is visualized.

/pdf/visualization-of-uncertainty-in-context-aware-mobile-37a1enxws0.pdf

Visualization of uncertainty in context aware mobile applications

http://www.medien.ifi.lmu.de/pubdb/publications/pub/deluca2007pmc/deluca2007pmc.pdf

Automatic form filling on mobile devices

The interaction between mobile devices and physical objects in the real world is gaining more and more attention as it provides a natural and intuitive way to request services associated with real world objects. We currently see several approaches for the provision of such services. Most of them are proprietary, designed for a special application area or interaction technique and provide no generic concept for the description of real world services. On the other hand the Internet of Things provides a set of standards and methods to tag objects in the real world. We think that the combination of these two technologies can support the development and dissemination of mobile interactions with the real world. Therefore, in this paper we present a concept, an architecture and an early prototype currently under development for mobile interactions with the Internet of Things. Hereby we use Semantic Web services for the description of services provided by the physical objects. This service description is then used for the automatic generation of user interfaces rendered by the mobile device.

/pdf/mobile-interaction-with-the-internet-of-things-33rof0zwf0.pdf

Mobile Interaction with the Internet of Things

A method for executing an interaction between a mobile device of a user and a Web service corresponding to a tag attached to a physical object, said method comprising: 
reading the tag information contained in a tag attached to a physical object by a tag reading module of said mobile device, whereas said tag information contains a link to a storage location where a description of said Web service is stored; 
accessing said storage location by said mobile device to download said description of said Web service; 
generating an interaction manager which comprises a service client based on said downloaded Web service description to enable said user's device to interact with the Web service corresponding to said tag.

John Hamard

Papers

Supporting Mobile Service Usage through Physical Mobile Interaction

Visualization of uncertainty in context aware mobile applications

Automatic form filling on mobile devices

Mobile Interaction with the Internet of Things

Method and apparatus for interacting with a web service