CAREER: Improving the Development Process for Context-Aware Systems with Integrated Capture and Playback

职业：通过集成捕获和回放改进上下文感知系统的开发流程

• 批准号: 1149601
• 负责人: Mark Newman
• 金额: $ 45.48万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-07-01 至 2018-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1149601&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Improving; Development; Process; Context

Cheap sensors, high-speed wireless networks, and mobile device technologies are opening up new possibilities for human-computer interaction and are enabling important applications in areas such as health care, collaborative work, and sustainable resource use. Yet we still lack appropriate tools and methods for the design and development of applications that take advantage of these capabilities, hampering our ability to realize the technology's potential. When working with "context-aware" systems -- i.e., systems that sense and respond to the situations in which they are used, such as the user's current location, concurrent activities, or social setting -- it can be especially challenging to evaluate early-stage prototypes due to the difficulty of re-creating the anticipated context of use during development time. As a result, designers are forced to invest excessive effort into building robust, deployable prototypes early in the development process, resulting in premature commitment to inadequately explored design choices and an inability to apply best practices for user-centered design. The goal of this CAREER project is to improve user-centered software development practices for context-aware applications by providing support for the systematic capture and reuse of contextual data throughout the development process. While previous efforts to support context-aware development have sought to make it easier to take prototypes into the field for testing, this approach seeks to "bring the field into the lab" by providing continuously available representations of an application's anticipated context of use. Such representations can be used for exploring and validating design alternatives with as little effort as possible. The PI's RePlay system provides baseline support for the capture and playback of sensor traces representing an application's context, and will be extended through this research to include support for the capture and use of large sensor trace datasets; rapid, parallel prototyping of both interactive and infrastructure components of context-aware systems; and the ability to re-create complex contextual conditions during controlled user tests to an extent not currently possible. Broader impacts: The PI's educational mission is to prepare rising HCI professionals for the constantly changing world of technology they will face throughout their career. As part of this project, he will develop teachable methods for integrating data capture, context representation, and novel forms of user testing into software design and development practice. These methods will be incorporated into existing design and evaluation courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Broader impacts will be obtained by sharing course materials, along with the tools described above, with educators and practitioners via the web. The PI also plans to present tutorials and workshops on the use of capture and playback tools during design at meetings and conferences hosted by professional design organizations.

廉价的传感器、高速无线网络和移动设备技术正在为人机交互开辟新的可能性，并使医疗保健、协作工作和可持续资源利用等领域的重要应用成为可能。然而，我们仍然缺乏适当的工具和方法来设计和开发利用这些功能的应用程序，这阻碍了我们实现技术潜力的能力。当使用“情景感知”系统时--即，感知并响应使用它们的情况的系统，例如用户的当前位置、同时进行的活动或社会环境--由于在开发期间重新创建预期的使用情景的困难，评估早期原型可能特别具有挑战性。因此，设计人员被迫在开发过程的早期投入过多的精力来构建健壮的、可部署的原型，导致过早地承诺没有充分探索设计选择，并且无法将最佳实践应用于以用户为中心的设计。此职业项目的目标是通过在整个开发过程中提供对上下文数据的系统捕获和重用的支持，改进情景感知应用程序的以用户为中心的软件开发实践。虽然以前支持上下文感知开发的努力试图使原型更容易地进入现场进行测试，但这种方法寻求通过提供持续可用的应用程序预期使用上下文的表示来将现场带入实验室。这种表示法可用于探索和验证设计备选方案，所需的工作尽可能少。PI的回放系统为捕获和回放代表应用程序上下文的传感器轨迹提供了基准支持，并将通过这项研究进行扩展，以包括对捕获和使用大型传感器轨迹数据集的支持；对上下文感知系统的交互组件和基础设施组件的快速、并行原型设计；以及在受控用户测试期间重新创建复杂上下文条件的能力，达到目前无法实现的程度。更广泛的影响：PI的教育使命是为正在崛起的HCI专业人员做好准备，以应对他们在职业生涯中将面临的不断变化的技术世界。作为该项目的一部分，他将开发可教授的方法，将数据捕获、上下文表示和新颖的用户测试形式集成到软件设计和开发实践中。这些方法将纳入研究生和本科生现有的设计和评估课程。通过网络与教育工作者和实践者共享课程材料以及上述工具，将产生更广泛的影响。PI还计划在由专业设计组织主办的会议和会议上提供关于在设计过程中使用捕获和回放工具的教程和讲习班。