2015/10/22 by Pamela Zave, Zave, Pamela, Eric Cheung +3 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Context-Aware Activity Recognition Systems #Data Management and Algorithms #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #cs.CY #cs.HC
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1510.06714
11 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2015/10/22 · openalex publication_date 2015/10/22 · arxiv updated 2015/10/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Many user studies of home automation, as the most familiar representative of the Internet of Things, have shown the difficulty of developing technology that users understand and like. It helps to state requirements as largely-independent features, but features are not truly independent, so this incurs the cost of managing and explaining feature interactions. We propose to compose features at runtime, resolving their interactions by means of priority. Although the basic idea is simple, its details must be designed to make users comfortable by balancing manual and automatic control. On the technical side, its details must be designed to allow meaningful separation of features and maximum generality. As evidence that our composition mechanism achieves its goals, we present three substantive examples of home automation, and the results of a user study to investigate comprehension of feature interactions. A survey of related work shows that this proposal occupies a sensible place in a design space whose dimensions include actuator type, detection versus resolution strategies, and modularity.