Charting past, present, and future research in ubiquitous computing

TL;DR: Everyday computing is proposed, a new area of applications research, focussed on scaling interaction with respect to time, just as pushing the availiability of computing away from the traditional desktop fundamentally changes the relationship between humans and computers.

Abstract: The proliferation of computing into the physical world promises more than the ubiquitous availability of computing infrastructure; it suggest new paradigms of interaction inspired by constant access to information and computational capabilities. For the past decade, application-driven research on abiquitous computing (ubicomp) has pushed three interaction themes:natural interfaces, context-aware applications,andautomated capture and access. To chart a course for future research in ubiquitous computing, we review the accomplishments of these efforts and point to remaining research challenges. Research in ubiquitious computing implicitly requires addressing some notion of scale, whether in the number and type of devices, the physical space of distributed computing, or the number of people using a system. We posit a new area of applications research, everyday computing, focussed on scaling interaction with respect to time. Just as pushing the availiability of computing away from the traditional desktop fundamentally changes the relationship between humans and computers, providing continuous interaction moves computing from a localized tool to a constant companion. Designing for continous interaction requires addressing interruption and reumption of intreaction, representing passages of time and providing associative storage models. Inherent in all of these interaction themes are difficult issues in the social implications of ubiquitous computing and the challenges of evaluating> ubiquitious computing research. Although cumulative experience points to lessons in privacy, security, visibility, and control, there are no simple guidelines for steering research efforts. Akin to any efforts involving new technologies, evaluation strategies form a spectrum from technology feasibility efforts to long-term use studies—but a user-centric perspective is always possible and necessary

Summary

Introduction

• Key words: archival description, provenance, fonds, series, Records in Contexts Izvleček: ARHIVSKO GRADIVO V KONTEKSTIH.
• Drugi del prispevka podaja nekaj vpogledav v nov konceptualni model arhivskega popisovanja, kot ga predlaga Mednarodni arhivski svet, imenovan Arhivsko gradivo v kontekstu.
• When someone opens scopeArchiv1, as a tool for archival description, (s)he is first surprised by the rich modules and elements expected to be implied by this activity.
• Moreover, at the bottom of the screen, there is a large collection of tabs, which offers new possibilities of characterizing a certain unit of description, with new properties and relationships.

1 THE FOUR ICA STANDARDS

• As it is well-known, the International Council of Archives supported and adopted, until now, four descriptive standards.
• The standard was elaborated in order to cover the Principle 8 from Statement of Principles…, “especially in view of the increasing complexity of administrative structures, an explanation of the context in which the material was created is an important aspect of archival description”.
• Also, in order to expand the description of context, the International Standard for Description of Functions (ISDF)3 was elaborated in 2008.
• Based on my observations, the ICA standards recorded different stages of adoption.
• A close scrutiny of the standards revealed many inconsistencies in definitions, elements of description and the way standards should work together (ICA/CBPS, 2012a, pp. 3- 15).

2 A BROADER VIEW OVER ARCHIVAL WORD

• The view over the archival description universe, as seen through the lens of the four standards, was subject to some criticisms and suggestion for improvement, from minor issues to the strategic perspectives5.
• Even more, the above cited statement about ICA intentions was received with reluctance, since it did not seem to be radical enough6.
• The fact is that, despite a rather rich literature on the topic, beyond some positions, reflecting parochial views or some personal dissatisfactions, the evolution of archival discipline and the cultural and technical environment really raises some issues, making a case for improvement of the four standards.
• In the following lines, I shall review some considerations raised about the provenance, archival entities, hierarchy or multilevel description—all grounding an improved perspective over archival description, as proposed by EGAD.

3 CREATION ENVIRONMENT: PROVENANCE AND ORIGINAL ORDER

• Established since the second half of the 19th century as the basis of archival science, the Principle of Provenance (PoP) still seems today to be the main feature of archival approach (Yeo, 2010, p. 91; Mazikana, 1990), individualising archival science among other discipline in cultural or information area (Popovici B.-F. , 2007).
• 10 ”…archives do not just happen but they are consciously shaped and sometimes distorted by archivists, the creators of records and other individuals and institutions” (Cox, 2004, p. 12).
• That is, the “archive” will be poorer that the true scene (read ‘wall’), lacking exactly the networked input that is the essence of the social network.

4 REPRESENTATION ENVIRONMENT: HIERARCHIES AND LEVELS

• “By default”, ISAD(G) assumes that relationships between units of description are hierarchical.
• Today there are more technical possibilities and more needs of networked descriptions, as to make room for an ISAD(G) improvement.
• Into account the moment in time when the Statement of Principles was adopted (1992), one can notice the IT experience in Archives was still limited (Horsman, 2002, p. 16; Eastwood, 1990, pp. 10-11), both in development and technologies, and this led to a rather simple view of “what computers can do for creating finding aids”16.
• Somehow fuzzy, but still present, there are other criteria than provenance and original order in making a description.
• And, despite the fact they are pertinent in ISAD(G) mind-set, it has to be noticed, if relationships among archival entities would be more flexible, it would mean that each entity should be self-sufficient, meaning, furthermore, information would be in a certain amount, repetitive20.

5 ARCHIVAL DESCRIPTIVE ENTITIES

• At the beginning of ICA standards development of, ISAD(G) was the central element, implying that the archival description should focus on records, the true archival objects.
• “What appears to be needed—noted G. Yeo—is a richer framework that does not require us to impose a single set of boundaries (…).
• Each archival entity is characterised by a set of properties, some specific, some shared.
• Activity is “a transaction or set of interrelated transactions employed in realizing the objective or objectives of a Function.

7 CONCLUSIONS

• I dare to say it will be the four standards and much more.
• It will allow a greater possibility of exploitation of the rich network of relations between entities, accommodating various perspectives, from pertinence to provenance, from official to participatory descriptions.
• Well, I would say that scopeArchiv is a fake representation of ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF).
• Therefore, nothing to be scared of: RiC will be ISAD(G) and much more.

Figures

Fig. 3. In the design of Flatland, we used observations of whiteboard use to inform our design. Here whiteboard drawings ont wo different boards are used as the basis for discussing the complex concepts illustrated with more detail in the bottom slide.

Fig. 1. In Rekimoto and Naga’s [1995] NaviCam system, a handheld device recognizes tagged objects and then overlays context-sensitive information.

Fig. 2. In the KARMA system (on the left) augmented views required heavy, clunky, headmounted displays [Feiner et al. 1993]. Now lightweight glasses, such as the ones shown on the right above from MicroOptical, provide similar display capabilities.

Fig. 4. In the Classroom 2000 project, we have had the ability to learn from long-term actual use in the Georgia Tech educational environment.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "Charting past, present, and future research in ubiquitous computing" ?

To chart a course for future research in ubiquitous computing, the authors review the accomplishments of these efforts and point to remaining research challenges. 

Q2. What are the main features of the streaming products?

Commercial streaming products, such as RealNetworks G2/SMILy and Microsoft’s MediaPlayer/ASFy, are emerging standards to allow for powerful synchronization of programmer-defined media streams. 

Q3. What are the main reasons why associative models of information are needed?

—Associative models of information are needed: Hierarchical models of information are a good match for well-defined tasks, while models of information for activities are principally associative, since information is often reused on multiple occasions, from multiple perspectives. 

Q4. What are the two systems that were successful using?

The two systems, PhoneSlave and Xcapture, treated audio as uninterpreted data and were successful using simple techniques to provide informative overviews of live conversations. 

Q5. What is the first reaction of system designers when recognition errors occur?

When recognition errors occur, the initial reaction of system designers is to try to eliminate them, e.g., by improving recognition accuracy. 

Q6. What is the role of the tools in the long-term?

As computing becomes more ubiquitously available, it is imperative that the tools offered reflect their role in longer-term activities. 

Q7. What is the key to a believable experience with context-aware interfaces?

Mynatt et al. [1998] point to the common design challenge of creating a believable experience with context-aware interfaces noting that the responsiveness of the interface is key to the person associating additional displays with their movements in the physical world. 

Q8. How much is the absolute error rate needed to reduce a speech recognition system?

Van Buskirk and LaLomia [1995] found that a reduction of 5–10% in the absolute error rate is necessary before the majority of people will even notice a difference in a speech recognition system. 

Q9. What are the challenges in synchronizing multiple versions of captured material?

Although versioning is not a new problem to computer scientists, there are numerous challenges in providing an intuitive interface to multiple versions of captured material, especially when some of the material is already time-based such as audio and video. 

Q10. What is the main reason for the emergence of low-cost capture hardware?

The emergence of low-cost capture hardware, such as the CrossPady and the mimioy from Virtual Ink, will lead more researchers to work in this area.