Addressing Fluidity through Mixed Technical - Design Practices

Ubicomp systems commonly rely on sensing and recognition capabilities to understand their context. While increasingly successful in simple environments, they face significant challenges addressing the fluid nature of less constrained, human settings. My thesis examines the construction of an interactive, mobile, sensor-based recognition system designed specifically for unconstrained settings. Based on the technical experiments and design explorations required to build such a system, my research makes three key contributions to ubicomp: 1) examines the context independence of statistical inference methods in unconstrained settings, 2) identifies challenges posed by dynamic settings to sensing and recognition technologies, and 3) proposes mixed technical-design approaches to advance ubicomp beyond simple environments.