Innehållsförteckning

e-Home Communication Research Initiative.

User-centred technology and services for e-habitats.

1. Research Program

Objective

The objective of the e-Home Communication Research Program is to study and develop new IT-based home communication systems from a human-centered perspective with an emphasis on internet embedded residential and mobile services for the citizen. Issues for scientific study include methods for the design of intuitive interfaces for robust and reliable control of home appliances and information services, software architectures and tools for supporting internet-embedded home systems, and empirical studies of the situated interplay between technical solutions and use qualities. The research will be driven by applications, for instance intra-family communication where different generations represent a variety of needs, around-the-clock semi-animate public information services, and multimodal home helpdesk offering support for maneuvering systems and services.

The research will be undertaken in several key actions, interlinked to each other and coordinated with related activities in other projects focusing Home Communication and
e-Habitats at Linköping University and other research partners. The research is intended to produce system demonstrators, testbeds and open source software, and to develop theoretical insights combined with human-centered solutions for high quality in use, demonstrated by world-class scientific results and industrial applications.

Home Communication Home Communication is an area concerned with systems and services delivered in the home (in a wide sense including also other everyday localities and whereabouts, also mobile, inhabited by individuals and their relatives) offering

reliable and safe broadband communication with the outside world;
integration and communication between systems and appliances in the home;
robust and flexible ways for the human to interact with and control the ICT artefacts in everyday environments, resident and mobile.

Research in the area spans from communication technology and complex real-time software systems to human-machine interaction
and studies of the interplay between technology and social change.

The present proposal focuses mainly on the design, appearance and qualities of home communication services seen from an end-user perspective. Thus the technology is primarily interesting in its interaction with users and with the design of services. Further we limit our interest to resident or mobile services that can be delivered over (or connected to) the internet, as known today or in future versions. The home is to be understood not primarily as a physical location but rather as the residential habitats where family members and relatives live their everyday lives.

Key Actions The e-Home Communication Research program will embrace several linked key actions, with a co-ordinated leadership. The preliminary planning suggests four major areas for these actions. Project activities will typically relate two or more areas, though with a distinct focus in a selected key action area. Key Action 1: Intuitive Interfaces for Systems and Services in the Home This action will study the investigation, development and assessment of services that offer ubiquitous, natural and multi-faceted dialogue modes for the individuals and that evolve as an integral part of their everyday activities.

Usage scenarios will target interaction equipment integrating voice, screen, pointing and other controls that might be commercially available within a five-year perspective. Dialogue modes should cater also for "handicapped communication" in the sense that certain modalities may not be available (noisy environment, lack of glasses, hands occupied, etc). An example application is a Multimodal helpdesk, where support is offered for handling facilities in the e-Home.

An important aspect to be studied in a joint subproject with Stanford, Dept. of Communication (Cliff Nass), is cultural aspects of dialogue behavior. When more and more users are interacting with computers in a language that is not their mother tongue, we should study the effects of language proficiency and cultural background on understanding and performance.

Research topics include:

Design for disturbed and disabled communication and dialogue, where we expect to develop theoretical frameworks, design methods and empirical insights.
Requirements for systems and services for senior citizens and the next generation elderly, which is an important and challenging user group, so far little understood.
Cultural aspects of social responses to media (cooperation with Stanford), where issues in cross-cultural communication are taken into account.

Key Action 2: Convenience, robustness and reliability in Home Communication This action emphasizes the development, investigation and assessment of service engineering for control and supervision of the physical environment in the home, with a particular concern for risk assessment, modeling the costs of failure and availability of services. Additional topics of interest include cognitive task analysis for division of initiative and responsibility between human and systems, for trade-offs between adaptivity and predictivity in system behaviour, etc.

The focus on reliable, transparent ubiquitous services in the home will be linked to application scenarios of intra-family communication, where different generations represent very differing needs and with communication patterns involving also elderly family members living in separate apartments and children moving between several parent households.

Research topics include:

Cognitive modeling of joint human-machine ensembles, involving methods for the design and evaluation of systems with people and artifacts in cooperation.
Maneuvering environments for controlling home appliances, involving studies of human performance with novel equipment, inspired by studies of pilots and drivers.
Models of credibility and trust in everyday situations, and their relationship to usability engineering of e-services.

Key Action 3: Networked Public Information and Edutainment Services This action focuses on IT-supported services and systems for information access and communication with the citizens. Applications will in particular include home healthcare and public sector services, with an emphasis on the empowered citizen/service user. But also new patterns of distribution and consumption of commercial offerings for news media, entertainment, education, digital libraries, etc will be concerned.

An example application is around-the-clock public information services (in Swedish
"24-timmarsmyndigheten"). The user may call the concerned authority from, say, a PDA-type information appliance, entertain in a synthetic dialogue combining text, voice and other modalities while waiting for being connected to the required expertise. Access mechanisms should support also complicated information needs, where the user may progress seamlessly from simple queries to qualified advice, involving also connecting to human specialists. A special issue of interest is multiparty dialogues, where several individuals are simultaneously involved in the interaction, such as is the situation when a family is actively using interactive TV.

Research topics include:

Use quality in social interaction and multi-party dialogue with infotainment services.
Data mining of internet information resources, e.g. for medicare which is an area of immense attraction on the internet with highly motivated users.
Intelligent agents and expert systems for knowledge discovery and user support, employing also commenting and critiquing approaches.

Key Action 4: Open Source Architectures for Home Systems and Services This action supplements the others by providing the software tools and architectures for the study and development of home systems and services. Among the goals are to develop models for cumulative build-up of commonly usable software components, preferably in conjunction with initiatives for commercial standards. This action is expected to be smaller than the others, since we anticipate cooperation with other local groups, e.g. on Software Individuals Technology. Still, it is important that the e-Home research also delivers result in the form of reusable software components and systems.

Research topics include:

Open source libraries and generic tools for application software components, such as e.g. national language interface tools and modules.
Support for ontology management and internet knowledge representation based on, for instance, semantic web techniques, XML and OSGi platform tools.

2. Organization and budget

Implementation

The program will be organized in tentatively four key actions, focusing different aspects of e-habitats and home communication. Projects will be formed that combine aspects of two or more of the key actions identified as instrumental for the program In addition, each participating group will contribute related research, sponsored from other sources, ensuring critical-mass efforts in the key action areas.

We thus expect that each key action can be initiated with a budget starting at approximately 1.5 MSEK/year, which will allow about four doctoral students per action, funded by SSF on the average 50%, to be engaged in the research.

The program will in part build upon results from the presently ongoing e-Society research project, funded by The KK Foundation and industry through SITI, the Swedish IT Institute. As known by now, SITI will not be able to offer any funding for basic research from January 2002. Thus we expect that several of the researchers now engaged in the e-society program areas Systems and services in the home and Public sector services and home healthcare, will be available for participation in the new research efforts proposed here. Applied projects together with industry and the public sector is expected to continue with separate funding and to serve as inspiration and testing ground for the more basic and long-term research proposed in this application.

A special feature of the program is that we plan to organize an Industry Research School in cooperation with Santa Anna IT Research Institute. From our current experience, such a research school in the IT area should offer shorter contract periods for industry than a full PhD education. We thus intend to design and admit preparatory programs for full-time studies from licentiate level to PhD, which means that we can intensify the support for the industry doctoral dissertation work lasting 2 to maximally 3 years. The established cooperation with Ericsson, Telia Research and Nokia Home Communications within the
e-Society program, as well as with several smaller companies, is central also for the industry doctoral student program.

Participating researchers The following research groups in the Human-Centered Systems Division at Linköping University will be the main contributors in the proposed e-Home research program:

The Application Systems Laboratory: Prof Sture Hägglund, Prof Hans Marmolin, Doc Henrik Eriksson. The laboratory has research groups working working with HCI and usability engineering, Cognition and communication, and Web software engineering and knowledge-based systems. Issues of particular interest in current research include generic web-based tools for ontology management and knowledge acquisition, expert critiquing systems and programming paradigms for children and lay users.

The Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory. Prof Erik Hollnagel, Prof Kjell Ohlsson, Dr. Rita Kovordanyi. The laboratory studies natural and artificial cognitive systems and how they perform in their physical and social environments, The study involves the analysis, modeling, design and evaluation of cognitive systems and joint human-artifact cognitive systems, risk and reliability analysis methods and support for creative problem solving.

The Natural Language Processing Laboratory: Prof Lars Ahrenberg, Prof Bertil Lyberg, Doc Arne Jönsson, Dr Nils Dahlbäck, Dr Lars Degerstedt, Dr Magnus Merkel. The laboratory studies language engineering and linguistic processing systems from computational, linguistic and behavioral perspectives, in particular natural-language and multi-modal dialogue systems, animated speech generation, dialogue discourse, text mining and language engineering tools for Swedish and cross-language information services.

The Laboratory for Everyday-Life Informatics: Prof Toomas Timpka, Doc Ankica Babic, Dr Vivian Vimarlund. The laboratory develops and studies information systems in working-life contexts, with a focus on applications in service organizations. The research has an interdisciplinary character, spanning from Computer Science to Health Informatics. Areas of interest include computer-supported cooperative work, inter-organizational networks, data mining and knowledge discovery, economic evaluation of information systems and participatory design.

Other partners. The potential for cooperation with research groups from other divisions in the Computer Science department is obvious, in particular with respect to the important issues of security and trust, software engineering and intelligent systems architecture. In addition, we anticipate contributions from and cooperation with current research partners from Communication Studies (Prof Yvonne Waern), Information Coding (Doc Robert Forchheimer), Medical Informatics (Doc Hans Åhlfeldt) and Computer Science, Blekinge Institute of Technology (Prof Rune Gustavsson).

Expected results The program will produce results that are important both for academia and industry, in particular:

Scientific analyses and theoretical studies published in international journals and major conferences.
Prototypes and demonstrators implementing and testing new concepts.
Empirical studies employing quantitative and qualitative methods illuminating the interplay between new technical solutions and patterns of use.

Economy The budget estimations are calculated as follows:

Salaries KSEK/year
4 supervisors, prof/doc 20% 635
3 doctoral students (lic), 80% 1 096
3 doctoral students (senior, not lic), 80% 1 008
2 doctoral students (new), 80% 650
Technical and administrative support 212

Expenses
Travel 200
Materials 263
Equipment (projects) 200

University overhead 1 274

Tax (moms compensation) 482

Total 6 019

3. Strategic relevance

The Vision

"The e-Home Communication research will provide Swedish industry and the public sector with a competitive edge in advancing the networked information society with enhanced residential and mobile services and concern for all citizens. " Rationale The program rests upon the assumptions that:

Swedish IT and service industry has an exceptional potential in leading and implementing the transition into the electronic service society. In particular, the Linköping area has a world-class industrial cluster in Home Communication platforms, with Nokia, Ericsson and Kreatel development units.
Linköping University is prioritizing research in the area of Home Communication and studies of e-habitats, i.e. environments where people live, work or commute supported by advanced information and communication technologies.
IT research in Linköping has an established national and international reputation, both with respect to Computer Science research and education, interdisciplinary co-operation and human-centered approaches.

Strategy for research The program will employ two overall strategies in order to promote creativity and innovation:

Pursuing synergies . . .

Project clustering, where priority is given to applications and research problems which allow overlapping interests and approaches between different projects.
Joining commercial prospects and creative scientific ideas, which means that each project should build upon a commercial challenge and clear research idea.
Linking research environments, in the sense that the program will support the combining of interdisciplinary research competence from participating groups.
Investigate transfer of findings, where results from one project or application domain can be evaluated or generalized in neighbouring projects.

. . . and challenging dichotomies:

Home services vs. vocational support. E-services will be studied both from the perspective of services in the home and the interaction with work life.
Professional users vs. layman/novices. Trade-offs in the design of services and user interfaces present major challenges.
Market mechanisms vs. public service. Potential conflicting interests are studied in solutions which observe both perspectives.
Service providers vs. service consumers. Media convergence is studied from both the producer's and the consumer's perspective.
Personalized solutions vs. economy of scale. The interesting potential for individualized solutions in the e-Society will be contrasted with the prospects for economy of scale and other possible drawbacks with personalized e-services.