Relieving Users from the Distractions of Ubiquity: a task-centered architectural framework

Computing environments of the future should satisfy two competing requirements: first, users should be able to take full advantage of the capabilities, devices and resources available at each location. Second, users should be free to focus on their real tasks, rather than being distracted by dealing with the configuration and reconfiguration of computer systems to support those tasks. Unfortunately, the ways in which Ubiquitous Computing systems are currently built do not address those two competing requirements satisfactorily: some approaches do a good job at addressing one of the requirements, but do a poor job at addressing the other. I propose to investigate a new approach to reconciling the two competing requirements. The approach is based on the explicit representation of user tasks and associated intent. Such descriptions are exploited at run time by an infrastructure that automatically configures the environment on behalf of the user. In this thesis I will address two central challenges entailed by this approach: first, defining a task description language for this purpose; and second, building an infrastructure that exploits such task descriptions.