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设备技术为人机交互开辟了新的可能性，并使医疗保健、协同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，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，感知并响应它们所使用的情况的系统，例如用户的当前位置、并发活动或社会环境——由于在开发期间重新创建预期的使用环境的困难，评估早期阶段的原型尤其具有挑战性。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，导致过早地承诺不充分探索设计选择，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获取和重用的支持，来改进以用户为中心的软件开发实践，以用于上下文感知应用程序。虽然以前支持上下文感知开发的努力是为了使原型更容易进入测试领域，但这种方法通过提供应用程序预期使用环境的连续可用表示来寻求“将领域带入实验室”。这样的表示可以用于尽可能少地探索和验证设计备选方案。PI的RePlay系统为代表应用程序上下文的传感器轨迹的捕获和回放提供基线支持，并将通过本研究扩展到包括对捕获和使用大型传感器轨迹数据集的支持；上下文感知系统的交互组件和基础架构组件的快速并行原型；在受控的用户测试期间重新创建复杂的上下文条件的能力，在某种程度上是目前不可能的。更广泛的影响：PI的教育使命是为新兴的HCI专业人士做好准备，以应对他们在整个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。这些方法将被纳入研究生和本科生现有的设计和评价课程。通过网络与教育工作者和从业人员分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。

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.