Master Thesis

Management and Deployment of Ubiquitous Computing Environment

Summary

Author: Riad Lemhachheche
Degree: Master of Science in Industrial Engineering, Oregon State University, June 7, 2006

Master of Science - Riad Lemhachheche -Oregon State University

Thesis Master of Science - Riad Lemhachheche -Oregon State University, Ubiquitous Computing

Master-Science-Riad-Lemhachheche-OregonStateUniversity-UbiquitousComputing.pdf

4 MB

This research addresses the challenge of designing, deploying, and maintaining ubiquitous computing (Ubicomp) environments, where computing devices and services are seamlessly integrated into everyday life. It emphasizes that successful Ubicomp design requires a multidisciplinary framework that goes beyond technology, incorporating social, legal, and economic perspectives to enhance user experience.

The thesis develops a comprehensive framework synthesizing key design requirements—context awareness, privacy, and adaptation—drawn from literature and real-world projects. This framework is applied to a wireless local area network (WLAN) as a case study, and validated through an online survey of Wi-Fi users. The survey revealed issues such as confusion between privacy and security, insufficient user information, and unclear legal implications of open Wi-Fi access.

Key contributions:

A structured design framework for Ubicomp systems, integrating user experience, legal, economic, and social factors.
Empirical evidence from a Wi-Fi case study and user survey supporting the framework.
Identification of critical issues—such as privacy controls, user information, and policy management—that must be addressed for successful Ubicomp deployment.

The thesis concludes by highlighting the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration and suggests future work should apply the framework to other environments and implement the proposed design concepts for further validation.

Extracted Examples

Needs-Satisfaction Curve:
“Computing has reached a stage of maturity in terms of technology and therefore research should shift to improving the user experience associated to computing activities. This shift implies a complete reconsideration of the relationship between users and computing resources.” (p.5)
Forces Affecting a Computing System:
“All of the forces depicted in Figure 2 have an important impact on how the field of Ubicomp will develop and how an Ubicomp system will be designed.” (p.6)
Major Projects Table:
Table 1 lists pioneering projects such as PARCTab, Active Badge, Classroom 2000, AURA, Cooltown, Oxygen, and Labscape, each with distinctive goals and technological approaches.
“Despite the fact that each of the projects shown in Table 1 has different goals and follows specific procedures to reach these goals, they all emphasize the user experience.” (p.9)
Privacy in Early Ubicomp Projects:
“One of the factors that became critical in both of these projects was the privacy concern associated with the availability of real-time localization. ... Centralized architectures require users to trust the operators of the service, both to properly use location data and to sufficiently protect it.” (p.11)
Context-Awareness and User Control:
“The balance between the intelligence of the environment and user involvement cannot be set globally. Mechanisms to link context acquisition and context use should also be designed since there is a need to agree on representations of context.” (p.17)
Face Properties in Privacy Interfaces:
The thesis references a UC Berkeley project that lets users define "faces" for privacy:
“The interface for the Everyday Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing project at the University of California Berkeley introduced the concept of face that summarizes these types of disclosure.” (p.25)
Folksonomy and User-Generated Metadata:
“One of the most famous examples of folksonomy is the online application del.icio.us where the metadata is called tags. ... The webpage is linked based on its URL, which is augmented with information such as keywords (tags), notes and descriptions that are personalized for this user.” (p.37)
Wi-Fi Case Study and Survey:
“The survey was taken by 536 people and the distribution of respondents based on self-reported Wi-Fi expertise is shown in Figure 24. A majority of respondents considered themselves as experts (55.1%) or familiar (33.3%) with the Wi-Fi technology.” (p.87)
Connect Commons License:
“ Connect Commons license could be provided by the producers of the connectivity to inform the consumers of the rights and privileges available through a particular connection. ... A license, both machine- and user-readable, could facilitate the access to this kind of information.” (p.79)
Information Provided by Wi-Fi Infrastructure:
“Our design incorporates three major components: a network facts module, a network stats module and a connect commons license.” (p.58)

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Each entry is listed with a publication link at the end.

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