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Section: Research Program
End User control of Smart Environments
End users programming, smart home, smart environment
Pervasive computing promises unprecedented empowerment from the flexible and robust combination of software services with the physical world. Software researchers assimilate this promise as system autonomy where users are conveniently kept out of the loop. Their hypothesis is that services, such as music playback and calendars, are developed by service providers and pre-assembled by software designers to form new service frontends. Their scientific challenge is then to develop secure, multiscale, multi-layered, virtualized infrastructures that guarantee service front-end continuity. Although service continuity is desirable in many circumstances, end users, with this interpretation of ubiquitous computing, are doomed to behave as mere consumers, just like with conventional desktop computing.
Another interpretation of the promises of ubiquitous computing, is the empowerment of end users with tools that allow them to create and reshape their own interactive spaces. Our hypothesis is that end users are willing to shape their own interactive spaces by coupling smart artifacts, building imaginative new functionality that were not anticipated by system designers. A number of tools and techniques have been developed to support this view such as CAMP [57] or iCAP [37] .
We are investigating an End-User Programming (EUP) approach to give the control back to the inhabitants. In our vision, smart homes will be incrementally equiped with sensors, actuators and services by inhabitants themselves. Our research programm therefore focus on tools and languages to enable inhabitants in activities related to EUP for Smart Homes :
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Installation and maintenance of devices and services. This may imply having facilities to attribute names.
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Programming and testing. This imply one or more programming languages and programming environment which could rely on the previous point. The programming language is especially important. Indeed, in the context of the Smart Homes, End-User Programms are most likely to be routines in the sens of [35] than procedure in the sense of traditionnal programming languages.
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Detecting and solving conflicts related to contradictory programs or goals.