Digital Simplicity

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Digital Simplicity

• James A. Landay
• Professor, University of Washington
• Director, Intel Research Seattle
• UW CSE Affiliates Meeting
• November 4, 2004

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One Vision of the Digital Home Moving Digital
Media Around
Think of the digital home as media file access
from anywhere to anywhere Intel ad
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One Vision of the Digital Home Autonomous
Intelligent Appliances
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Digital Simplicity

• Technology seen as speeding up complicating
  our lives
• PCs, Blackberrys, email, are at root of this
• leads many to avoid it (no PC, no cell phone...)
• research especially suffers from this focus on
  new functionality in return for added complexity
  in your life
• Develop ubicomp technologies that simplify our
  lives
• Focus on the home our lives outside of work
• long lasting, unstructured physical activities
  information
• more difficult than typical office scenarios
• info technology adoption limited in these domains

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Digital SimplicityWhats in Whats out

• Out
• Home-versions of office-based productivity tasks
• Finance, taxes, word processing, email
• Exceptions family scheduling?
• In
• Health wellness
• Relationships/communication
• Entertainment
• Monitoring resource consumption conservation
• Dimensions physical vs. virtual, office vs.
  home, productivity vs. simplicity

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Digital Simplicity Research Directions

• Applications
• health fitness use sensing to track physical
  activity throughout the day make it easier to
  meet goals
• help boomers care for aging loved ones
• Technology
• use natural multimodal input to control apps
  activities
• configuring home environments by simple
  demonstrations
• Design
• sensors/actuators that can be easily installed
  maintained
• user interaction language for ubicomp in the
  digital home
• design patterns to communicate reuse design
  knowledge

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Digital Simplicity Applications ResearchHealth
Fitness

• Tracking journaling activity, weight,
  nutrition have been shown to be keys to achieving
  fitness
• unfortunately, many find this hard to do
• Finding time to be healthy also difficult
• Automatically track activity throughout the day
• walking, running, bicycling, going up stairs,
  etc.
• weight at regular times (e.g., brushing your
  teeth)
• Give users ways to meet goals by getting credit
  for what they already do encourage to do more
• tracking prompting
• ambient jewelry (e.g., ring with LEDs)
• Communicate results with others
• compete, support, coach (PT in the phone)

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Digital Simplicity Technology ResearchReliable
Natural Multimodal Input

• Speech, gesture, direct manipulation
• Natural for control of applications
• Multiple modalities reduce ambiguity adapt to
  situations
• e.g., quiet time
• Speech language understanding can be made more
  reliable given context of use
• location (Place Lab)
• RFID-tagged objects in current room
• state of computing equipment
• recent activities (SHARP)

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Aiding Speech RecognitionHuman Activity
Inferences

• Sam is cooking turns on the exhaust fan
• He can barely hear the TV
• He says Turn it up
• House is confident turn it up was said
• Historically volume up has been the correct
  interpretation during this activity
• House correctly interprets Sams intention
  turns up the volume on the TV

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Digital Simplicity Design ResearchSimple Sensors
Actuators

• Easily installed in existing homes by end-users
• Desirable to install (aesthetic, simplifies an
  activity, etc.)
• Reliable self healing, self configuring, etc.
• Our first cut at this (home energy tutor) was a
  success

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Digital Simplicity Design ResearchUser
Interaction Language for Ubicomp
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The GUI Interaction Language
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The GUI Interaction Language
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What is the Ubicomp Interaction Language?
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What is the Ubicomp Interaction Language?
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Digital Simplicity Status

• Just starting to explore the research agenda
• working on multimodal/speech UI
• continuing work on design pre-patterns
• Building a prototype home environment

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Conclusions

• Digital Simplicity is an effort to create useful
  technology that simplifies our hurried lives
• Our research agenda encompasses
• Applications
• health fitness
• Technology
• multimodal input end-user configuration
• Design
• sensors, interaction language, design patterns
  (poster in 603)

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Digital Simplicity Technology ResearchEnd-User
Configuration of Ubicomp Environments

• Examples
• save all songs I listen to on the radio, except
  for classical
• record all football to Tivo, but save all Cal
  games to disk
• End-users have a hard time configuring, let alone
  programming
• people cant program home heating systems
  Blackwell
• Possible solutions to configuration problem
• use simple physical electronic demonstrations
• end-user programming made easier by
• computer vision informed by same context as in
  multimodal case
• manipulation of RFID-tagged objects