The web browser has emerged as a central workspace for information workers, where they make use of cloud-based applications to access their information. While this solution nicely supports access to their data from multiple devices, it presents a nightmare for organizing and coordinating data between tools for a single project. Information is typically scattered between various online tools, where storage and organization structures are replicated. Information workers are interrupted and have to switch between projects frequently. Once interrupted, resuming work on a project can be hard. To address this information fragmentation and the impact of work interruptions, I created Contextinator, a personal information manager for the web browser that lets information workers organize their work activity and information into projects. Contextinator assists in coordinating information for projects, thereby ameliorating information fragmentation for projects that live on the cloud. It assists information workers in context switching and resuming work after interruptions. In my the- sis, I describe the problem of information fragmentation in the cloud. I discuss the different areas of related work of Personal Information Management, the design of Contextinator and how it is grounded in previous research. I briefly discuss how Contextinator is implemented. I then present the results from my field-evaluation of Contextinator. Finally, I conclude by discussing future work in this research. / Master of Science

Ambient intelligence refers to the vision of computationally augmented everyday environments that are sensitive, adaptive and responsive to humans and intelligently support their daily lives. Ambient ecologies are the infrastructures of ambient intelligence. To enable system developers to frame and manage the dynamic and complex interaction of humans with ambient ecologies consisting of a mixture of physical (real) and virtual (digital) objects, novel interaction paradigms are needed. Traditional interaction paradigms like the WIMP (windows, icon, menus, and pointing devices) paradigm for desktop computing operate in a closed world, unaware of the physical, social and cultural context. They restrict human perception and action to screen, mouse and keyboard with the assumption that human attention will be fully devoted to interaction with the computer. Emerging interaction paradigms for ambient intelligence are typically centered on specific devices, specific computing environments or specific human capabilities. Also, many of them are driven by technological advancements rather than viewing the human agent as their starting point. A principled, theoretical approach centered in the individual human agent, their situation and activities that are comprehensive and integrated while at the same time instrumental in the design of ambient ecologies has been lacking. This thesis introduces egocentric interaction as an approach towards the modeling of ambient ecologies with the distinguishing feature of taking the human agent’s body, situation and activities as center of reference, as opposed to the more common device-centric approaches in facilitating human-environment interaction. Egocentric interaction is encapsulated in a number of assumptions and principles such as situatedness, the proximity principle, the physical-virtual equity principle, perception and action instead of “input” and “output,” and activity-centeredness. A situative space model is proposed based on some of these principles. It is intended to capture what a specific human agent can perceive and not perceive, reach and not reach at any given moment in time. The situative space model is for the egocentric interaction paradigm what the virtual desktop is for the WIMP interaction paradigm: more or less everything of interest to a specific human agent is assumed and supposed to happen here. In addition, the conception and implementation of the easy ADL ecology based on egocentric interaction, comprising of smart objects, a personal activity-centric middleware, ambient intelligence applications aimed at everyday activity support, and a human agent literally in the middle of it all is described. The middleware was developed to address important challenges in ambient intelligence: (1) tracking and managing smart objects; (2) tracking a human agent’s situative spaces; (3) recognizing human activities and actions; (4) managing and facilitating human-environment interaction; and (5) to ease up the development of ambient intelligence applications. The easy ADL ecology was first simulated in immersive virtual reality, and then set up physically as a living laboratory to evaluate: (1) the technological and technical performance of individual middleware components, (2) to perform a user experience evaluation assessing various aspects of user satisfaction in relation to the support offered by the easy ADL ecology, and (3) to use it as a research test bed for addressing challenges in ambient intelligence. While it is problematic to directly compare the “proof-of-concept” easy ADL ecology with related research efforts, it is clear from the user experience evaluation that the subjects were positive with the services it offered. / easy ADL project

The venerable desktop metaphor is beginning to show signs of strain in supporting modern knowledge work. Traditional desktop systems were not designed to support the sheer number of simultaneous windows, information resources, and collaborative contexts that have become commonplace in contemporary knowledge work. Even though the desktop has been slow to evolve, knowledge workers still consistently manage multiple tasks, collaborate effectively among colleagues or clients, and manipulate information most relevant to their current task by leveraging the spatial organization of their work area. The potential exists for desktop workspaces to better support these knowledge work practices by leveraging the unifying construct of activity. Semantically-meaningful activities, conceptualized as a collection of tools (applications, documents, and other resources) within a social and organizational context, offer an alternative orientation for the desktop experience that more closely corresponds to knowledge workers' objectives and goals. In this research, I unpack some of the foundational assumptions of desktop interface design and propose an activity-centered model for organizing the desktop interface based on empirical observations of real-world knowledge work practice, theoretical understandings of cognition and activity, and my own experiences in developing two prototype systems for extending the desktop to support knowledge work. I formalize this analysis in a series of key challenges for the research and development of activity-based systems. In response to these challenges, I present the design and implementation of a third research prototype, the Giornata system, that emphasizes activity as a primary organizing principle in GUI-based interaction, information organization, and collaboration. I conclude with two evaluations of the system. First, I present findings from a longitudinal deployment of the system among a small group of representative knowledge workers; this deployment constitutes one of the first studies of how activity-based systems are adopted and appropriated in a real-world context. Second, I provide an assessment of the technologies that enable and those that pose barriers to the development of activity-based computing systems.

Submitted by Silvana Teresinha Dornelles Studzinski (sstudzinski) on 2016-05-04T15:21:39Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Vinícius Tocantins Marques_.pdf: 1798612 bytes, checksum: 644619b1572a14e55b710812ab705ff0 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-05-04T15:21:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Vinícius Tocantins Marques_.pdf: 1798612 bytes, checksum: 644619b1572a14e55b710812ab705ff0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-03-10 / Nenhuma / O uso de aplicações que padronizam as informações utilizadas em emergências médicas é uma das grandes ferramentas de apoio para as equipes de médicos plantonistas neste novo século. A Computação Ubíqua e a Ciência de Situação são elementos de evolução para aplicações computacionais em hospitais. Mais especificamente, a aplicação que consegue correlacionar dados de redes heterogêneas em prol do sucesso do atendimento médico, produz uma ampla rede de colaboração. Sustentado nesse conceito, o paciente em atendimento poderá usufruir de opiniões de uma ampla gama de médicos especialistas, todos a favor do seu bem estar. No geral o que se tem de resultado das buscas são trabalhos que abordam os conceitos de formas separadas. Nesse âmbito, o presente trabalho propõe o desenvolvimento de um modelo colaborativo com suporte à troca de informações entre equipes médicas plantonistas utilizando Ciência de Situação. O modelo visa utilizar recursos de computação ubíqua para melhorar a inserção de dados relevantes na aplicação, bem como otimizar a saída de dados em dispositivos móveis. Como contribuição científica, o modelo proposto emprega inferências computacionais mediante o uso de ciência de situação no intuito de melhorar a tomada de decisão médica e suportar a colaboração entre as equipes médicas. O modelo proposto realizou duas avaliações, sendo uma através de estudo de caso e a outra referente à usabilidade. As avaliações atestaram que o Doctor Collab alcançou uma média de aceitação de 86,9% utilizando o modelo TAM para verificar o grau de assentimento da aplicação frente aos médicos plantonistas. Desta maneira pode-se indicar que o modelo proposto é coerente com as Hipóteses identificadas. / Technological applications used in medical emergencies is one of the greatest support tools for attending physicians teams in this new century. The Ubiquitous Computing and the Situation Awareness are evolving elements for computer applications in hospitals. Specifically, the application that is able to correlate data from heterogeneous networks to improve the success of health care, produces a wide collaboration network. Beside that, the patient can benefit from various views of a wide range of medical specialists, all in favor of their welfare. Overall the results of researches are works that address the topics of different forms. One of the articles did not apply the concepts of ubiquitous computing in order to minimally interfere with the day-to-day medical team. In this context, this paper proposes the development of a collaborative model that supports the exchange of information between physicians medical teams using the Situation Awareness. The model aims to use ubiquitous computing resources to improve the inclusion of relevant data in the application, as well as optimize the data output on mobile devices. As scientific contribution, the proposed model employs computational inferences by using Situation Awareness in order to improve medical decision making and support collaboration between medical teams. The proposed model had two evaluations, one through case study and the other regarding the usability of the model. Evaluations show that the Doctor Collab reached an average of 86.9% acceptance using the Technical Architecture Modelling model to check the assent of application to the attending physicians. In this way it way be indicated that the proposed model is consistent with the identified assumptions.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / In despite of the great advantages of adopting computer systems for storing patient's information in hospitals and clinics, such systems are adopted with restrictions in these institutions. Some studies indicate that the rejection of such systems by the clinicians is greats due to computing not consider the particularities of the activities performed by the user in the clinical field. Considering this background, the project ClinicSpace aims to build a prototype tool to help health professionals in performing of their activities, using concepts and technologies of ubiquitous computing, which suggests that the computation must be fully integrated into the environment, disappearing from the user's consciousness and assisting him in their daily activities. This paper proposes an architecture called pEHS - Pervasive Electronic Healthcare System - a electronic health system inserted in the ClinicSpace's proposal, where the computing is oriented to clinical activities and the applications do interact with the ubiquitous environment through context information. The contribution of this paper is the proposal of a new software architecture in which pEHS modular applications follows the medical activities, making the system to adapt to the clinician's activities. In the architecture there are two points in evidence: the possibility of access to any information from the patient's health history and the adaptation of pEHS applications to the context information at runtime. The prototyped architecture will be used in the ClinicSpace project to build the applications needed for the clinicians helping them to carry out their activities. / Apesar das grandes vantagens existentes na adoção de sistemas computacionais para armazenamento das informações do paciente em ambientes hospitalares, tais sistemas são adotados com restrições em hospitais. Estudos indicam que a rejeição destes pelos clínicos é grande devido à computação não levar em consideração as características das atividades desempenhadas pelo usuário e sua forma particular de o fazê-lo. Tendo em vista essa necessidade, o projeto ClinicSpace tem por objetivo prototipar uma ferramenta para auxílio ao profissional de saúde na realização de suas atividades, utilizando conceitos e tecnologias da Computação Ubíqua, a qual propõe que a computação deve ser totalmente integrada ao ambiente de forma a desaparecer da consciência do usuário e auxiliá-lo na realização de suas atividades diárias. Este trabalho propõe uma arquitetura chamada pEHS Pervasive Electronic Healthcare System sistema eletrônicos de saúde inserido na proposta do ClinicSpace, onde a computação é orientada a atividades clínicas e as aplicações interagem com o ambiente ubíquo através das informações de contexto. A contribuição deste trabalho é uma proposta nova de arquitetura de software na qual as aplicações modulares do pEHS acompanham as atividades médicas, fazendo com que o sistema adapte-se às atividades do profissional. Destacam-se dois pontos da arquitetura:a possibilidade de acesso a qualquer informação do histórico de saúde do paciente e a adaptação das aplicações pEHS às informações de contexto em tempo de execução. A arquitetura prototipada será utilizada no andamento do projeto ClinicSpace para a construção das aplicações necessárias aos profissionais de saúde para a realização de suas atividades de forma personalizada.