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Human Control in Daily Environment Automations

Human Control in Daily Environment Automations

Speaker: Fabio Paternò – Pisa, Italy
Topic(s): Human Computer Interaction , Society and the Computing Profession

Abstract

How people interact with digital technologies is currently caught between the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. Such technological trends provide great opportunities, new possibilities, but there are also risks and new problems. There can be intelligent services that eventually generate actions that do not match the real user needs. The introduced automations can generate unwanted effects. People may have difficulties in understanding how to customise the automatically generated automations. Thus, a fundamental challenge is how to provide tools that allow users to control and configure smart environments consisting of hundreds of interconnected devices, objects, and appliances. This means to design tools that allow people to obtain “humanations” (automations that users can understand and modify).

This talk will discuss concepts and methods that can be useful to address the core challenges of human control over automations involving people, objects, devices, and intelligent services. The goal is to identify innovative approaches to support end users, even without programming experience, to understand, create or modify the automations in their daily environments, augmenting the human capacity to manage automations through effective interaction modalities, relevant analytics, understandable explanations, and intelligent recommendations.

In this perspective, I will discuss how trigger-action programming can be a useful connection point between the wide variety of technologies and implementation languages considered and people without programming experience. However, it also presents nuances that may become apparent and critical in complex and realistic cases generating undesired effects. In particular, three types of aspects must be considered carefully. Dealing with temporal aspects associated with triggers (events vs conditions) and actions (instantaneous vs prolonged vs sustained), which may not execute according to the user's expectations. Configuring smart environments with multiple active automations may result in unexpected effects. Security and/or privacy issues arising from the resulting automation should be understandable for the users.

I will review the state of art in this area both in terms of commercial and research tools, and I will also discuss some experiences in different application domains (ambient assisted living, smart home, industry), and possible future research directions.

About this Lecture

Number of Slides: 40
Duration: 45 minutes
Languages Available: English, Italian
Last Updated:

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