The topic for Monday is intelligent building design issues, with emphasis
on the HCI issues of interacting with a smart building. (This may not be
apparent from the readings.) While I will discuss many other areas, such
as voice/telephony interfaces, my two main points are the problem of
minimizing surface area between user and computer - a.k.a less HCI is
better HCI - and the use of natural affordances in HCI design, or designing
into the environment rather than changing the env to suit the design.
To summarize the background material:
Michael Mozer et al of the University of Colorado at Boulder are developing
a house which uses a neural network strategy. Their current focus is on
energy conservation and so their system is presently very unidirectional,
computers taking cues from users but not vice versa. Several techniques
used by Mozer's team lend themselves to self-learning systems and to
widely-distributed systems - both key points I will draw on. You can get
this and related papers off the Web in PostScript form at:
http://boulder.colorado.edu/~lucky/projects/House/
Scott Elrod at Xerox PARC wrote a long paper on the subject of responsive
office environments. I haven't yet received the long paper myself, but a
short version was published in C-ACM, July 93, and is included in the
packet. Scott touches on privacy and security issues, but a major point
here is the importance of passivity in design - i.e. the user shouldn't
have to explicitly supply information that the computer can get for itself
through remote sensing and the like. Elrod also cites a paper by Loveday,
"Artificial Intelligence for Buildings", published in Applied Energy in
1992 - but this deals almost exclusively with energy management, and has
little relevance to NGUI.
NASA/Ames has done a great deal of autonomous computing work which has
applicability to intelligent buildings. They introduce the concept of an
"immobot", or immobile robot - i.e. one with many sensors and the ability
to control its "private" world, but with little ability to move around or
interact with the outside world. (Deep space probes, while among the
fastest moving objects in the solar system, are essentially predestined and
watch the universe go by with little control over their path. Their
manipulators are limited to their own extent. Buildings are much the same
in the latter regard.) Check out:
http://fi-www.arc.nasa.gov/fia/projects/mba/index.html
And finally I invite you to explore my own website for an overview of my
house, as well as other hotlinks of interest:
http://www.mindspring.com/~jons
After the tour, there will be many pizzas, plenty of wings from Taco Mac,
lots of beverages, music, pool, and so on - hope you will attend.
See you Monday!