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

廉价的传感器、高速无线网络和移动终端技术正在为人机交互开辟新的可能性，并在医疗保健、协同工作和可持续资源利用等领域实现重要应用。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，阻碍了我们实现技术潜力的能力。当使用“上下文感知”系统时--即，对于那些能够感知并响应其使用情况（如用户当前位置、并发活动或社交环境）的系统，由于在开发期间难以重新创建预期的使用环境，因此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，导致过早地承诺未充分探索的设计选择，并且无法应用以用户为中心的设计的最佳实践。这个CAREER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，来改进上下文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进入现场进行测试，但这种方法试图通过提供应用程序预期使用上下文的连续可用表示来“将现场带入实验室”。这样的表示可以用于探索和验证设计方案，尽可能少的工作。PI的RePlay系统为代表应用程序上下文的传感器跟踪的捕获和回放提供了基线支持，并将通过本研究扩展到包括对大型传感器跟踪数据集的捕获和使用的支持;上下文感知系统的交互式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到当前不可能的程度的能力。更广泛的影响：PI的教育使命是为他们在整个职业生涯中将面临的不断变化的技术世界做好准备。作为该项目的一部分，他将开发可教的方法，将数据捕获，上下文表示和新形式的用户测试集成到软件设计和开发实践中。这些方法将被纳入现有的设计和评估课程在研究生和本科生水平。将通过网络与教育工作者和从业人员沿着分享课程材料以及上述工具，从而产生更广泛的影响。PI还计划在专业设计组织主办的会议和会议上提供有关在设计期间使用捕获和回放工具的教程和研讨会。

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.