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Personalization of Context-Dependent Applications Through Trigger-Action Rules

Published: 27 April 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Our life is characterized by the presence of a multitude of interactive devices and smart objects exploited for disparate goals in different contexts of use. Thus, it is impossible for application developers to predict at design time the devices and objects users will exploit, how they will be arranged, and in which situations and for which objectives they will be used. For such reasons, it is important to make end users able to easily and autonomously personalize the behaviour of their Internet of Things applications, so that they can better comply with their specific expectations. In this paper, we present a method and a set of tools that allow end users without programming experience to customize the context-dependent behaviour of their Web applications through the specification of trigger-action rules. The environment is able to support end-user specification of more flexible behaviour than what can be done with existing commercial tools, and it also includes an underlying infrastructure able to detect the possible contextual changes in order to achieve the desired behaviour. The resulting set of tools is able to support the dynamic creation and execution of personalized application versions more suitable for users’ needs in specific contexts of use. Thus, it represents a contribution to obtaining low threshold/high ceiling environments. We also report on an example application in the home automation domain, and a user study that has provided useful positive feedback.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction  Volume 24, Issue 2
Special Issue EUD for IoT
April 2017
284 pages
ISSN:1073-0516
EISSN:1557-7325
DOI:10.1145/3077620
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 27 April 2017
Accepted: 01 January 2017
Revised: 01 December 2016
Received: 01 April 2016
Published in TOCHI Volume 24, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. End-user development
  2. internet of things
  3. trigger-action programming

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  • (2024)Hybrid Prompt Learning for Generating Justifications of Security Risks in Automation RulesACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/367540115:5(1-26)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
  • (2024)laTAPE: Location-Aware Programming and Executing Trigger-Action RulesProceedings of the 15th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware10.1145/3671016.3672579(503-506)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
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  • (2024)"This Sounds Unclear": Evaluating ChatGPT capability in translating end-user prompts into ready-to-deploy Python Code.Proceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces10.1145/3656650.3656693(1-4)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
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