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The increasing complexity of the new breed of distributed intelligent systems, such as the Internet of Things, which require a diversity of languages and protocols, can only be tamed with design and programming best practices. Interest is also growing for including the human factor, as advocated by the "ambient intelligence" (AmI) research field, whose focus is on transparently and intelligently supporting people. These new design methodologies are increasingly needed in the toolbox of new electronic and computer engineers, and teaching strategies should be devised that allow students to acquire a systems-level view instead of getting lost in technology-oriented approaches. This paper describes a study carried out over two academic years, in a course in AmI at Politecnico di Torino, Italy. In the course, a project-based learning approach was adopted, in which students design and prototype an AmI system, and their progress is closely monitored throughout the semester. This paper presents the learning goals and teaching strategies, analyzes the learning outcomes from the qualitative and quantitative points of view, and highlights the lessons learned in the process.

This review aims to analyze the recent literature to find how the preattentive visual process is currently used in information visualization, particularly to improve the cognitive process in chart comprehension (i.e., perceptual effectiveness). The purpose of our literature review is to provide an overview of how concepts related to the preattentive process are used pragmatically in recent research. We searched different bibliography sources between 2010 and 2021, getting 29 articles that fit the review focus. In general, we discovered that the research work on exploiting the preattentive process in information visualization is currently not thoroughly explored. The main contribution of the paper is the analysis of the papers, from which we identified two categories of research directions according to the primary uses of preattentive concepts: "preattentive attributes as design components," and "the preattentive process as a measuring tool," with a gap between these two approaches. The review also highlighted two limitations in the current research literature: most works tend to focus on a particular chart type, only, with difficult to generalize results, and the manipulation of preattentive attributes is done implicitly, without providing to the graph designer the suitable awareness over the design decisions impact. We finally present a proposal about how to use the knowledge about the preattentive process in the first stages of design in information visualization to start closing the gap mentioned above with the graph designer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, end users can exploit end-user development (EUD) platforms to personalise their Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, typically through trigger–action rules. Unfortunately, within such platforms, users are forced to adopt a unique, vendor-centric abstraction: to define triggers and actions, they must specifically refer to every single device or online service needed to execute the intended behaviours. As a consequence, little social and practical benefits of EUD in this domain have emerged so far. In this paper, we build on the idea that other abstractions besides the vendor-centric one are possible, and that the growth of end-user personalisation in the IoT may depend on their identification. Specifically, we report on the results of a 1-week-long diary study during which 24 participants were free to collect trigger–action rules arising during their daily activities. First, we demonstrate that users would adopt different abstractions by personalising devices, information and people-related behaviours, where the individual is at the centre of the interaction. Then, we show that the adopted abstraction may depend on different factors, ranging from the user profile, e.g. their programming experience, to the context in which the personalisation is introduced. While users are inclined to personalise physical objects in the home, for example, they often go 'beyond devices' in the city, where they are more interested in the underlying information. Finally, we discuss the retrieved results by identifying new design opportunities to improve the relationship between users and the IoT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Internet of Things era, users are willing to personalize the joint behavior of their connected entities, i.e., smart devices and online service, by means of trigger-action rules such as "IF the entrance Nest security camera detects a movement, THEN blink the Philips Hue lamp in the kitchen." Unfortunately, the spread of new supported technologies makes the number of possible combinations between triggers and actions continuously growing, thus motivating the need of assisting users in discovering new rules and functionality, e.g., through recommendation techniques. To this end, we present HeyTAP2, a semantic Conversational Search and Recommendation (CSR) system able to suggest pertinent IF-THEN rules that can be easily deployed in different contexts starting from an abstract user's need. By exploiting a conversational agent, the user can communicate her current personalization intention by specifying a set of functionality at a high level, e.g., to decrease the temperature of a room when she left it. Stemming from this input, HeyTAP2 implements a semantic recommendation process that takes into account (a) the current user's intention, (b) the connected entities owned by the user, and (c) the user's long-term preferences revealed by her profile. If not satisfied with the suggestions, then the user can converse with the system to provide further feedback, i.e., a short-term preference, thus allowing HeyTAP2 to provide refined recommendations that better align with the original intention. We evaluate HeyTAP2 by running different offline experiments with simulated users and real-world data. First, we test the recommendation process in different configurations, and we show that recommendation accuracy and similarity with target items increase as the interaction between the algorithm and the user proceeds. Then, we compare HeyTAP2 with other similar baseline recommender systems. Results are promising and demonstrate the effectiveness of HeyTAP2 in recommending IF-THEN rules that satisfy the current personalization intention of the user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy consumption and performance assessment of Smart Cities must consider different levels and various sub-domains. A comprehensive energy profile of a city, in fact, should work at the city, district, and building levels. At the same time and for each level, it should take into account both electrical and thermal consumptions, and gather these information from a plethora of different sensors and from various stakeholders (i.e., citizens, utilities, policy makers, and energy providers). Current modeling approaches for this context address each level and domain separately, thus preventing a structured and comprehensive approach to a unified energy representation. Moreover, current approaches make it difficult to keep the consistency between the energetic data through levels, sub-domains, and across stakeholders. Starting from an analysis of ontologies at the state-of-the-art, this paper shows how DogOnt can be used as a foundation towards a shared and unified model for such a context. DogOnt was firstly developed in 2008 and withstands over 8 years of usage without major failures and shortcomings. We discuss successful design choices and adaptations, which kept the model up-to-date and increasingly adopted in such a mid-term time frame for energy representation in Smart Cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing - yet debated - discussion around the negative aspects of overusing technology led researchers and practitioners to consider a new kind of psychological digital wellbeing, giving rise to the flourishing of digital self-control tools (DSCTs). As many people nowadays own and use several devices, there is a need to understand better their overlapping use (and non-use) and the relationships to digital wellbeing. This special issue aims to provide the academic and industry research communities a venue for work at the state-of-the-art on digital wellbeing and DSCTs, with a particular focus on digital wellbeing within complex technological and social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increase of connected devices and online services, the number of notifications received by each person is growing. Although notifications are useful to inform users about important information such as new messages and events, the continuous interruptions, the notification duplication, and the rigid delivery can be sources of discomfort. To overcome these issues, we present AwareNotifications, an intelligent system based on user-defined preferences to manage multi-device notifications. AwareNotifications is powered by Semantic Web technologies. By directly exploiting user preferences in the semantic reasoning process, the system is able to identify suitable device(s), modality, and moment(s) to deliver the incoming user notifications. We evaluated AwareNotifications in a user study with 15 participants, in which we compared our system with the “traditional” notification delivery system. The study confirms the perceived effectiveness of AwareNotifications, and provides insights to further improve the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing complexity of the new breed of distributed intelligent systems, such as the Internet of Things, which require a diversity of languages and protocols, can only be tamed with design and programming best practices. Interest is also growing for including the human factor, as advocated by the ambient intelligence (AmI) research field, whose focus is on transparently and intelligently supporting people. These new design methodologies are increasingly needed in the toolbox of new electronic and computer engineers, and teaching strategies should be devised that allow students to acquire a systems-level view instead of getting lost in technology-oriented approaches. This paper describes a study carried out over two academic years, in a course in AmI at Politecnico di Torino, Italy. In the course, a project-based learning approach was adopted, in which students design and prototype an AmI system, and their progress is closely monitored throughout the semester. This paper presents the learning goals and teaching strategies, analyzes the learning outcomes from the qualitative and quantitative points of view, and highlights the lessons learned in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The design of smart homes, buildings and environments currently suffers from a low maturity of available methodologies and tools. Technologies, devices and protocols strongly bias the design process towards vertical integration, and more flexible solutions based on separation of design concerns are seldom applied. As a result, the current landscape of smart environments is mostly populated by defectively designed solutions where application requirements (e.g., end-user functionality) are too often mixed and intertwined with technical requirements (e.g., managing the network of devices). A mature and effective design process must, instead, rely on a clear separation between the application layer and the underlying enabling technologies, to enable effective design reuse. The role of smart gateways is to enable this separation of concerns and to provide an abstracted view of available automation technology to higher software layers. This paper presents a blueprint for the information technology (IT) architecture of smart buildings that builds on top of established software engineering practices, such as model-driven development and semantic representation, and that avoids many pitfalls inherent in legacy approaches. The paper will also present a representative use case where the approach has been applied and the corresponding modeling and software tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever-increasing energy costs and saving requirements, especially in enterprise contexts, are pushing the limits of enterprise resource planning (ERP) to better account for energy, with component-level asset granularity. The authors use an application-oriented approach to explore the aspects involved in designing energy-aware ERPs and describe a prototypical open source implementation based on the Dog Domotic Gateway and the Oratio ERP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information related to smart environment research, highlighting a thesis which aims to improve the interaction between users and smart environments. It explores emerging trends including distributed user interfaces, systems to promote users' behavior changes, and natural interactions. Several approaches which are associated to a specific software application are presented including universal access, wearable computing, and activity delegation.

Abstract: Buildings account for a relevant fraction of the energy consumed by a country, up to 20-40% of the yearly energy consumption. If only electricity is considered, the fraction is even bigger, reaching around 73% of the total electricity consumption, equally divided into residential and commercial dwellings. Building and Home Automation have a potential to profoundly impact current and future buildings’ energy efficiency by informing users about their current consumption patterns, by suggesting more efficient behaviors, and by pro-actively changing/modifying user actions for reducing the associated energy wastes. In this paper we investigate the capability of an automated home to automatically, and timely, inform users about energy consumption, by harvesting opinions of residential inhabitants on energy feedback interfaces. We report here the results of an on-line survey, involving nearly a thousand participants, about feedback mechanisms suggested by the research community, with the goal of understanding what feedback is felt by home inhabitants easier to understand, more likely to be used, and more effective in promoting behavior changes. Contextually, we also collect and distill users’ attitude towards in-home energy displays and their preferred locations, gathering useful insights on user-driven design of more effective in-home energy displays. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]