Experience Sampling Method is a modern approach of studying human behavior. This research methodology is used in psycho-metrics to ask participant to provide feedback regarding the state of their health, opinion, etc. The collected data is then probed, analyzed and used for creating related statistical predictions. Despite the remarkable data that is produced with ESM, receiving data from the participants is not a straightforward task. It could either be via physical presence of the participant in certain labs or through special hand-held devices that are sometimes difficult to carry, maintain and use. A more advanced version of ESM is Mobile Experience Sampling Method . As mobile devices have become the de facto standard in human communication as well as ubiquitous multi-purpose portable devices, taking advantage of their features, especially their location-awareness functionality can help improve the experience sampling method. Therefore the focus of this thesis is on improving the method byimplementing a versatile mobile experience sampling toolkit that is locationaware and easy to use.

In this thesis context refers to information about the environment (the user or entity's surroundings) that can influence and determine the behavior of a computing system. Context-awareness means that the computer can adapt to the situation in which it is working. Context is a key issue in mobile computing, especially with handheld devices (such as PDAs and mobile phones), due to the fact that they can be used while on the move; hence the environment around them can change. The environment of a static device may also change and require the device to adapt. Applications and systems that exploit context by both sensing and reacting to their environment are called context-aware applications. Devices that are context-aware are able to perceive stimuli and react accordingly, with minimal interaction with the user. Providing context-aware services to users of mobile devices via context-aware applications is becoming an important and significant factor in the market and is a developing industry. In this thesis we analyze and develop an application that exploits context to provide a service that improves the interaction between humans and a computer. The thesis begins with a study of what types of sensors are available to provide information about the device's context. This is followed by the design of an appropriate way of using the selected sensor (ecompass) to provide a means of adapting a service to the user's and device's context. The focus is every day activities of a student at a university - specifically finding the location of a meeting room for a seminar; however, similar scenarios exist for other types of users. After determining that it was feasible to add a e-compass as a sensor to an existing personal digital assistant and to provide a map to the mobile user, the focus of the thesis shifted to an examination of the performance of the adaptation of the map as the user moved the device. Initially it required excessive time to render the map on the device, thus as the user moved the device the map was not updated quickly enough for the user to know their correct orientation with respect to the map. Therefore the thesis project examined how this performance could be improved sufficiently that the rendering would keep up with the change in orientation of the device. This investigation lead to a shift from server based rendering of the map as an image, followed by the transfer of the image to the device for display; to a sending a scalable vector graphics version of the map to the device for local rendering. While initially this was expected to be much faster than transferring an image for an actual map of the building where this work was taking place the local rendering was actually slower. This subsequently lead to server based pruning of the irrelevant details from the map, then a transfer of the relevant portion of the map to the device, followed by local rendering. / I den här avhandlingen hänvisar 'context' till information om miljön (i användarens eller enhetens omgivning) som kan bestämma och påverka beteendet hos ett datorsystem. Contex-awareness innebär att datorn kan anpassa sig till den situation där den arbetar. Context är en central fråga för mobila enheter, speciellt för handhållna enheter (t.ex. handdatorer och mobiltelefoner), på grund av att de kan användas på resande fot där omgivningen hela tiden förändras. Omgivningen för en statisk enhet kan också förändras och kräver att enheten kan anpassa sig. Applikationer och system som utnyttjar context genom att både känna av och reagera på sin omgivning kallas context-aware applications. Enheter som är kontextmedvetna kan uppfatta stimuli och reagera på den med minimal användarinteraktion. Att tillhandahålla kontextmedvetna tjänster till användare av mobila enheter via kontextmedvetna applikationer blir en allt viktigare och betydelsefullare faktor på marknaden och är en växande industri. I den här avhandlingen analyserar och utvecklar vi ett program som utnyttjar kontext för att tillhandahålla en tjänst som förbättrar samspelet mellan människa och dator. Avhandlingen inleds med en undersökning av vilka typer av sensorer som finns tillgängliga för att tillhandahålla information om enhetens kontext. Detta följs av en design för att på lämpligaste sätt använda den valda sensorn (e-kompass) för att tillhandahålla ett sätt att anpassa en tjänst till användaren och enhetens kontext. Fokus är vardagsaktivitieter för en student vid ett universitet - särskilt att hitta till ett konferensrum för ett seminarium, liknande scenarier finns även för andra typer av användare. Efter att ha fastställt att det var möjligt att koppla en sensor, i form av en e-kompass, till en befintlig personal digital assistant samt att visa en karta för användaren, flyttades fokus för avhandlingen till en undersökning om tjänstens prestanda när användaren flyttade enheten. Initialt krävde enheten väldigt lång tid att rendera kartan och när enheten flyttades uppdaterades kartan inte tillräckligt snabbt för att användaren skulle veta sin riktning i relation till kartan. Därför undersöktes hur prestandan kunde förbättras så att enheten skulle kunna hänga med bättre när enhetens riktning förändrades. Undersökningen ledde till att istället för att rendera en bild på servern och sedan skicka till enheten, skapa en vektorbaserad bild på servern, skicka till enheten och rendera lokalt. Även om detta initialt förväntades vara mycket snabbare än att överföra en bild av en verklig karta var den lokala renderingen faktiskt ännu långsammare. Detta ledde till en serverbaserad gallring av ovidkommande kartdetaljer samt beskärning innan kartan fördes över till enheten och renderades lokalt.

The very nature of mobile phones makes them ideal vehicles to study both individuals and organizations: people habitually carry a mobile phone with them and use it as a medium for much of their communication. The information available from today's phones includes the user's location, people nearby, and communication (call and SMS logs), as well as application usage and phone status (idle, charging, and so on). The main goal of this project is to combine some of the new technologies of voice over IP (VoIP) with context awareness services for mobile users and create a demonstrator for a typical routine of a student in Kista. We used context awareness together with the SIP Express Router to make a system more intelligent for the user. In this thesis the definition of CPL scripts and how they could exploit context information to provide SIP service that would be useful to a student were examined. A simple test was conducted to measure the overhead of using context awareness by the SIP proxy when processing CPL scripts. / Mobila telefoner gör dem ideala medel för att studera både individer och organisationar: personer bär ofta en mobil telefon med dem och använder den som ett medel för mycket av deras kommunikation. Informationen som är tillgänglig från dagens telefoner inkluderar användares läge, personer som är närliggande och kommunikation, såväl som applikationanvändning och telefon status. Målet av detta projekt är att kombinera som några av de nya teknologierna av röst över IP (VoIP) med kontextuppmärksamma servar för mobila användare och skapar en demonstrant för en typisk rutin av en studerande i Kista. Vi använde kontextuppmärksamma med SIP Express Router för att göra ett system mer intelligent för användare. I detta examensarbetet undersöker vi CPL skrifter och hur de skulle kunna exploatera kontext information för att ge den SIP tjänsten som är användbar till en studerande. Ett enkelt test förades för att mäta det över huvudet av att använda kontextuppmärksamma av den SIP proxyen när det arbetar med CPL skrifter.

The master thesis project - Personal video: An Intelligent Presentation System (IPS) - was conducted at the Department of Communication Systems, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden. The focus of this thesis is designing, building, and evaluating an intelligent environment for giving presentations which makes all the technologies of the existing devices invisible to the presenter, i.e., to remove difficulties of configuration, compatibility, etc. from hindering the user from being able to give their presentation. IPS is an application in a hot research field - Ambient Intelligence (AmI) which is influenced by user – centered design. Therefore, the goal of IPS is to improve the user’s experience. As compared to a traditional presentation system, IPS integrating several independent applications hence improving the user’s efficiency and offering greater user friendliness. In this thesis, a prototype of IPS was designed which combines an online presentation room booking system (running on a context server), a CGI presentation control module (running on a presentation server), and a cross platform control panel (which could be running on a PC, laptop, PDA, cellular phone, etc.). This prototype realized our goals of providing an intelligent and comfortable environment for both the presenters and the system a dministrators.

As mobile devices still have limited battery life, processing power, memory, and display size, they cannot yet execute gaming applications with the same fidelity and quality as their PC counterparts. In response, researchers have recently performed research with the goal of the real-time delivery of game content specifically to fit within mobile devices’ limitations. In this thesis, we present a novel approach to tackling the streaming of objects to mobile devices. Our goal is to reduce the number of objects subject to streaming from the server to the target devices, while not violating the user-defined limitations through an efficient, context-aware 3D object selection and prioritization scheme. We take advantage of the game context to stream only the most relevant objects. Our evaluations have shown that this technique not only leads to better performance in general, but also increases the gameplay experience by helping the player to achieve a higher score.

Människan har genom tiderna använt sig av många hjälpmedel för navigering, från attfölja stjärnorna till dagens användning av “Global Positioning System” (GPS).Föreliggande studie inriktar sig på kontextmedvetna ljudvandringar, exempelvis i formav en guidad tur genom en stad där rösten i ljudklippet berättar om sevärdheter ianvändarens närhet. Att spela upp ett enda sammanhängande ljudklipp för en helljudvandring ger utrymme för komplikationer. Ett problem som kan uppstå är attanvändaren går för fort eller för långsamt genom sträckan, resulterande i attanvändarens position inte överensstämmer med det ljudspåret berättar om. Med syfteatt skapa en kontextmedveten ljudvandring presenterar studien förslag på enapplikation som erbjuder en lösning på förevarande problem. Applikationen utveckladesi Android studio och tillämpar GPS-koordinater samt geofencing-teknik för att lokaliseraanvändarens position. Varje geofenceområde har storleken 50x40 meter och konstruerassom en vandring. Områdena tilldelas ett specifikt ljudklipp som spelas upp näranvändaren befinner sig inom området. För att evaluera vår applikation utfördesanvändartester på en testvandring som placerades utanför Malmö universitet.Resultaten av användartesterna visar att deltagarna upplevde att ljudet stämde överensmed den plats de befann sig på. / The humankind has used many tools to navigate, from following stars to using theGlobal Positioning System (GPS). This study focuses on context-aware soundwalks, e.g.it could be a guided tour through a city where the voice in the audio describes touristattractions in the user’s surroundings. Complications can arise when playing onecontinuous sound clip through an entire soundwalk. For instance, if the user is walkingthe distance too fast or too slow, resulting in the user’s position not corresponding withthe content in the audio track. In this paper we introduce an application that serves as asolution to the problems that may arise when creating context-aware soundwalks. Theapplication was developed in Android studio and uses GPS coordinates and geofencingtechnology to determinate the user’s location. Each geofence was given the size of 50x40meters and together they form a soundwalk. The geofences were also assigned a specificaudio clip that started playing when the user entered the geofence. To evaluate ourapplication user tests were designed. The tests were conducted on a soundwalk locatedoutside of Malmö University. Based on the results of our user tests the participantsfound that the sound was consistent with the place they were located.

Smart speakers, such as the Amazon Echo or Google Home, have become ubiquitous in our daily lives due to their convenience, which offers interactive actions through the use of simple voice commands. These devices allow users to issue a wide range of commands for a variety of services. Users can ask in natural language questions about the weather, stock market, online shopping orders, and other general information. These devices can also be used to control lights, and heating systems, and set timers and alarms in the smart home. However, as smart speaker systems become more prevalent, new security and privacy, usability, and context awareness concerns will need to be explored and addressed. In this dissertation, we carry out the effort to understand and mitigate privacy leaks from third-party applications, improve usability testing using interactability metrics, and improve context-awareness in a multi-occupant home using background sounds. We first study the privacy risks resulting from smart speaker apps developed by third-party developers. Having a device permanently on and always listening led to concerns over user privacy. In addition, the use of the third-party app on smart speaker platforms introduces arguably more serious privacy risks than using only the platform's built-in apps, due to the open nature of the app marketplaces. We explore how an adversary can efficiently create a valid smart speaker app to eavesdrop on users. We developed three different strategies for implementing a malicious app. To mitigate this threat, we propose a strategy for users to limit the success of this adversary. We designed a measurement app to look at the effect of various environmental factors in the home impacting what the third party can hear, and therefore provide users with a recommendation to place their smart speaker in locations that limit the success of this adversary. Next, we propose the idea of an interactability score to quantify how well a smart speaker app can accept potentially different ways a user may express their commands. However, voice-generated input data creates many unpredictable test cases since there are many different ways of how someone will express the same intention. In addition, each third-party developer could implement their own voice commands, making it difficult for users to remember what commands a particular app can process. The architecture of current smart speaker apps further complicates the testing process since the app is hosted on the smart speaker platform as a black-box. Therefore, we develop a testing framework to automatically and systematically evaluate the interactability of the smart speaker applications. It measures how well an app has been implemented to accept different kinds of user interaction. We also focus on improving context-awareness access control for smart speakers. The convenience of these devices is tempered by the possibility of performing unintended or intended actions. At home, the device is usually placed in a fixed location and accessed by multiple people with complex relationships between them, and these complex relationships can lead to complex access control requirements, where the context factors and interpersonal relationships should play a significant role. We design a system to be run on a smart speaker that makes use of the sounds in the home to estimate the current state of the house, e.g. number of occupants, activities being engaged, social relation of occupants, etc. This context information is used to decide whether to execute the command, prompt for confirmation or reject the command entirely. We also designed a simple pictorial configuration utility to help non-expert users configure their access rules. / Computer and Information Science

Over the last two decades, mobile computing has gone from being a mere vision to becoming a reality, ubiquitously present in our everyday lives. There are different types of mobility, from user and terminal mobility, to mobility of services and sessions. This thesis is mainly about application mobility { the ability for an application to migrate between different host devices during its execution. The aim of this thesis work is to explore and advance the area of application mobility. The thesis approaches this goal through focusing on three research issues: Architectural considerations for application mobility; Context-awareness support and application adaptability; and Concept exploration.The contributions of this thesis include the identification of requirements for application mobility and a proposal for a decentralized, global scale architecture for application mobility, building on the peer-to-peer paradigm. Several prototypes of systems allowing application mobility are deployed, manifesting concepts such as decentralized system layout, context-awareness, context quality and global scope. Evaluations are both quantitative and qualitative. Other contributions of this thesis are the design and evaluation of a framework building on cloud and peer-to-peer technology to enable mobile sessions and an exploration of the concept of application mobility. / Sense Smart City, MOSA - mobil och öppen tjänste-access, NIMO - Nordic Interaction and Mobility Research Platform

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The number and types of input devices and related interaction technique types are growing rapidly. Innovative input devices such as game controllers are no longer used just for games, propriety consoles and specific applications, they are also used in many distributed virtual environments, especially the so-called serious virtual environments. In this dissertation a distributed, service based framework is presented to offer context-sensitive interaction interoperability that can support mapping between input devices and suitable application tasks given the attributes (device, applications, users, and interaction techniques) and the current user context without negatively impacting performances of large scale distributed environments. The mapping is dynamic and context sensitive taking into account the context dimensions of both the virtual and real planes. What device or device component to use, how and when to use them depend on the application, task performed, the user and the overall context, including location and presence of other users. Another use of interaction interoperability is as a testbed for input devices, and interaction techniques making it possible to test reality based interfaces and interaction techniques with legacy applications. The dissertation provides a description how the framework provides these affordances and a discussion of motivations, goals and the addressed challenges. Several proof of the concept implementations were developed and an evaluation of the framework performance (in terms of system characteristics) demonstrates viability, scalability and negligible delays. / Ph. D.