Automated Generation of Information Presentation for Pervasive Environments

One of the most challenging but largely unaddressed problems in pervasive computing is that of efficiently creating interactive information summaries that are individually tailored to a wide variety of pervasive devices and contexts. We are developing a new software entity to address this problem that will dynamically generate appropriate interactive information summaries that can be communicated by various devices in different contexts. Here we give a summary of our approach in the perspective of software engineering and stress several fundamental issues encountered in our research endeavor. RESEARCH FOCUS & AN EXAMPLE SCENARIO While other research in pervasive computing generally focuses on building hand-crafted information presentation for a specific environment [4], our work is unique in its emphasis on automating the creation of interactive information summaries tailored to a wide variety of pervasive devices. In particular, we employ pervasive devices individually or in a group to create a coordinated, interactive multimedia environment where users can take full advantage of their perception in information processing abilities. Before describing our approach, we first present an example scenario to illustrate how our system will work. Policeman Bob was on his routine patrol in his car, when the monitor near the front seat alerted him about a possible home invasion nearby. While the car navigator automatically displayed the route to the location, Bob asked for more information about the neighborhood (e.g., residents’ information). Upon Bob’s request, our system found the neighborhood information and summarized it using a geographical format (e.g., information overlaid on a map). When approaching the destination, Bob noticed a suspicious vehicle parked in the driveway. To read the car license plate, Bob got out of his car with his radio-PDA. Nobody was in the car, and Bob used his radio to request a license plate check and indicated that the result be sent to his wrist watch. Bob input the plate number and also silenced his radio so as not to alert the suspect. By sending only visual alarms to his wrist watch, our system alerted Bob that the car was reportedly stolen by an extremely dangerous suspect. Since our system also knew that Bob sent the request using his radio, it notifies Bob that the suspect’s picture can now be seen on his radio PDA. In addition, our system also knew that Bob has a desk-top computer in his office, so it then prepared a detailed multimedia information summary about the suspect and sent it to his office computer. In the meantime, Bob examined the suspect’s picture on his radio-PDA and used his wrist watch to request backups silently. Since Bob and his backups could not find the suspect nearby, he went back to the police station. To finish his paper work, Bob reviewed the multimedia summaries about the suspect sent earlier by our system.