Section: Research Program

Building relevant abstraction for new interactions

The pervasive applications are often designed in an ad hoc manner depending on the targeted application area. Ressources (sensors / actuators, connected objets etc.) are often used in silos which complexify the implementation of rich pervasive computing scenarios. In the second research axis, we want to get away from technical aspects identifying common and reusable system mechanisms that could be used in various applications.

Tagging the environment. Information relative to environment could be stored by the application itself, but it could be complex to manage for mobile application since it could cross a large number of places with various features. Moreover the developer has to build its own representation of information especially when he wants to share information with other instances of the same application or with other applications. A promising approach is to store and to maintain this information associated to an object or to a place, in the environment itself. The infrastructure should provide services to application developers: add/retrieve information in the environment, share information and control who can access it, add computed properties to object for further usage. We want to study an extensible model to describe and augment the environment. Beyond a simple distributed storage, we have in mind a new kind of interaction between pervasive applications and changing environment and between applications themselves.

Taking advantages of the spatial relationships. To understand the world they have to interact with, pervasive applications often have to (re)built a model of it from the exchange they have with others or from their own observations. A part of the programmer's task consists in building a model of the spatial layout of the objects in the surrounding. The term layout can be understood in several ways: the co-location of multiple objects in the same vicinity, the physical arrangement of two objects relative to each other, or even the crossing of an object of a physical area to another, etc. Determining remotely these spatial properties (see figure 1-a) is difficult without exchanging a lot of information. Properties related to the spatial layout are far easier to characterize locally. They could be abstracted from interaction pattern without any complex virtual representation of the environment (see figure 1-b). We want to be able to rely on this type of spatial layout in a pervasive environment. In the prior years, the members of Ease already worked on models for processing object interactions in the physical world to automatically trigger processing. This was the case in particular of the spatial programming principle: physical space is treated as a tuple-space in which objects are automatically synchronized according to their spatial arrangement. We want to follow this approach by considering richer and more expressive programming models.