Ao longo dos tempos, a produção de notícias e reportagens precisou se adaptar à modernização do jornal impresso, ao surgimento do rádio, da televisão, mais recentemente, à internet e, por último (por enquanto), aos dispositivos móveis digitais como smartphones e tablets. Cada um desses períodos foi marcado por novos formatos de produzir, distribuir e consumir jornalismo. Dentro deste caminho evolutivo está o objeto de pesquisa desta tese que envolve a busca por formatos narrativos que se adaptem de forma mais personalizada aos dispositivos móveis digitais, às suas características específicas e potencialidades e, ainda, ao jornalismo que se reconfigura a partir das transformações da contemporaneidade. A massiva adoção dos dispositivos móveis digitais entre o público e a evolução tecnológica criam possibilidades de formatação e distribuição jornalísticas mais interativas e ubíquas se comparadas ao que havia antes. Enquanto novos meios de comunicação, os smartphones oferecem qualidades importantes para a redefinição do consumo de informação na atualidade, entre elas estão a portabilidade, a ubiquidade e a sensibilidade ao contexto do usuário. A partir dessa compreensão, entendemos, neste trabalho, que o jornalismo e sua conceituação precisam acompanhar esse processo evolutivo, o que nos leva à adoção do conceito de jornalismo ubíquo e também à elaboração de categorias constituintes desse conceito. Em seguimento a isto, também adotamos o conceito de narrativa sistêmica para fazer parte de nossa compreensão do formato atual dos conteúdos. Esses dois conceitos se unem a uma fundamentação complementar ligada ao design de navegação e interface, à experiência do usuário e à usabilidade para investigar as características específicas do jornalismo ubíquo e do seu formato, e em que patamar está sua adoção pelos aplicativos para smartphones dos jornais The New York Times, The Guardian, El País e O Estado de S. Paulo. Ao final, expomos o momento atual desses produtos jornalísticos e suas diferentes soluções de apresentação para as potencialidades existentes a partir do desenvolvimento tecnológico. / Over the years, the news production has had to adapt itself to the modernization of the printed newspaper, to the emergence of radio, television, more recently to the internet, and finally (for now) to digital mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Each of these periods was marked by new formats for producing, distributing and consuming journalism. Within this evolutionary path is located the research object of this thesis that involves the search for narrative formats that adapt in a more personalized way to the digital mobile devices, their specific characteristics and potentialities and also to the journalism that is reconfigured from the transformations of the contemporaneity. The massive adoption of digital mobile devices within the public and the technological evolution create more interactive and ubiquitous possibilities of formatting and distributing journalistic media than in the past. As a new media, smartphones offer important qualities for today\'s information consumption redefinition, among which are portability, ubiquity, and user context sensitivity. From this understanding, we assume in this work that journalism and its conception need to accompany this evolutionary process, which leads us to adopt the concept of ubiquitous journalism and also to the elaboration of constituent categories of this concept. Following this, we also adopt the concept of systemic narrative to be part of our understanding of the current format of the contents. These two concepts are coupled with a complementary basis linked to navigation and interface design, user experience, and usability to investigate the specific characteristics of ubiquitous journalism and its format, and at what level it is adopted by the smartphone applications of the newspapers The New York Times, The Guardian, El País and O Estado de S. Paulo. At the end, we present the current moment of these journalistic products and their different solutions of presentation to the potentialities emerged from the technological development.

This master thesis is done in collaboration with Space and Virtuality studio of the Interactive Institute in Malmö. The project ActionBlocks, at the Space studio, relate to the requirements concerning hardware for ubiquitous computing. A system of intelligent building blocks is developed to be able to build functional HiFi prototypes fast. The building blocks are distributed in space and small, cheap web servers, called TINI, integrate the devices. ActionBlocks may be regarded as physical interfaces. The intention is that systems of different ActionBlocks (tag readers, digital cameras, loud-speakers, lamps, buttons etc.) may easily be constructed to support interaction with digital media in different projects. To be able to do this the ActionBlocks need to be assembled by a flexible architecture that can change when the needs alter. The goal with this thesis is to propose a concept for such an architecture. Except for the concept the thesis also contains an investigation of related architectures to explore what user aspect they have in the various projects and an implementation of a minor prototype to discover if the concept is valid in practice. ActionBlocks consist of an intelligent (digital) part and a physical part and it is possible to discern three different approaches towards the ActionBlocks. There are: · Physical - Action approach where the physical part and what happens in the real world is what matters. · Physical - Computational - Action approach where both parts are integrated on equal terms. · Computational approach where the intelligent part is most important and this view makes it possible for an ActionBlock to only contain an intelligent part. The approaches are entertained by three different user roles: the user, the interaction designer and the programmer. The user only interacts with the physical part of the ActionBlocks and is therefore only concerned about that part. He designs in use of ActionBlocks. The interaction designer assembles the ActionBlocks into a system. He configures the system and is concerned about the performance and the appearance of the ActionBlocks. Therefore he focuses on both the intelligent and the physical part. The interaction designer designs the interaction with the ActionBlocks. The programmer is the one that controls what can be done with an ActionBlock. He designs ActionBlocks. In development only the computational part is of interest because it is the only thing the programmer interacts with. The three ways to interact with ActionBlocks have an internal relationship. Development is needed to alter the possibilities to do configuration and use. The configuration forms a platform to use, because it provides new possibilities to customize it. This leads to a division into three aspects: Use, configuration and development. The partition makes it possible to focus on one aspect at a time. The three aspects have it counterparts in three different architectures: Pure Peer-to-Peer, Peer-to-Peer with distributed service and client-server architecture. The result is that the concept for an architecture for ActionBlocks is divided into three parts. One for each aspect. The concepts suggests that when the user interacts with the system the architecture is Peer-to-Peer and when the interaction designer interact with the system it is a Peer-to-Peer architecture with distributed service and when the programmer interacts with the system he can regard it as an client-server architecture. The concluding question is if there really is a reason to adapt the architecture to different aspects. My answer is that there is always an reason to adapt the technology to the human if it is possible.

Ubiquitous Computing can be described as the third stage in the computing history where every user is surrounded by many “computers”. This paper provides an evaluation of a number of multi-agent platforms to decide their appropriateness as an infrastructure for ubiquitous computing. / Ubiquitous Computing kan beskrivas som det 3:e steget i datorns utveckling där varje användare omges med många "datorer". Denna uppsats tillhandahåller en utvärdering av multi-agent platformar för att undersöka deras lämplighet inom Ubiquitous Computing

This thesis is about Personal Identification challenges towards Ubiquitous Computing world as targeted in 2020. The study starts by defining the problems that how diversity of tools for personal identification as an always-foreground activity is problematic in order to become a pervasive interaction. The thesis is divided into three parts. Part one is introduction, background and related works. Part two will describe the empirical study—Triangulation— that is supported by qualitative and quantitative methods. Observation and the analysis over collected data, also the result of informal interviews will cover the qualitative part. The informal interview consists of pre-determined questions that some answers have been analyzed by graphs and the last part of interview was the open discussion that ascertain what values the interviewees counts in today’s identification designs and what challenges or improvements they believe for future of personal identification. Last part is the future works and conclusion. The result of empirical study was applied on new technologies like RFID, Mobile identification and Biometrics, to investigate whether new identification tools and techniques cover the challenges on today’s identification and what future works they might need to focus on. / This thesis starts with thinking about the problems of the today’s identification; why we need to carry dozens of different magnetic cards, bunches of keys, or memorizing many digital pins and pass code? To do the study, I observed people at shopping and traveling to find out what and how people interact with tools, what are their behaviors, experiences, or reactions when they need to approve their identity. and what problems they encounter. Informal discussion with designers was the next step of empirical study. The analysis over collected data guided us into problems in today’s identifications: ‘Foreground activity’, ‘Diversity of tools and interactions’, ‘security’, ‘trust’ and ‘being economical’. Last section of the thesis is the investigating on current designs; RFID can be good solution for pervasive identification if the security and privacy of people respected. Mobile will be an inevitable part of every design in future. However, mobile phone designers should think about diversity of interface layouts that may be a barrier for unified identification interactions. Biometrics also seems the inevitable part of future of identification. Apart from technology, social engagement and supports, especially in terms of privacy is one of the most noticeable concerns. Information forensics, and level of awareness should be specified before the benefits of pervasive identifications threaten people’s privacies.

Recent developments in modern computing and wireless networks allow mobile devices to be connected to the Internet regardless of their physical location. These mobile devices, such as smart phones and PDAs, have turned into powerful multimedia units allowing users to become producers of rich media content. This latest development contributes to the ever-growing amount of digital material existing on the World Wide Web, and at the same time creates a new information landscape that combines content coming from both, the wired and mobile Internet. Thus, it is important to understand the context or settings in which mobile devices are used, and what is the digital content produced by the different users. In order to gain more knowledge about this domain, we have investigated how to extend the standard metadata related to content with a metadata domain describing the context, or settings in which the content has been created. In order to limit the scope of our work, we have focused our efforts in a specific case taking place in a project called AMULETS. The AMULETS-project contains all of the elements we need in order to resemble the contextual setting in a metadata model. Combined with the technical metadata associated to the digital content, we try to display the benefits of capturing the different attributes of the context that were present when the content was generated. Additionally, we have created a proof-of-concept Entity Relation (ER)-diagram which proposes how the metadata models can be implemented in a relational database. As the nature of the thesis is design-oriented, a model has been developed and it will be illustrated throughout this report. The aim of the thesis is to show how it is possible to design new metadata models that combine both relevant attributes of the context and content in order to develop new educational activities supported by location-based services.

Recent development in modern computing has led to a more diverse use of devices within the field of mobility. Many mobile devices of today can, for instance, surf the web and connect to wireless networks, thus gradually merging the wired Internet with the mobile Internet. As mobile devices by design usually have built-in means for creating rich media content, along with the ability to upload these to the Internet, these devices are potential contributors to the already overwhelming content collection residing on the World Wide Web. While interesting initiatives for structuring and filtering content on the World Wide Web exist – often based on various forms of metadata – a unified understanding of individual content is more or less restricted to technical metadata values, such as file size and file format. These kinds of metadata make it impossible to incorporate the purpose of the content when designing applications. Answers to questions such as "why was this content created?" or "in which context was the content created?" would allow for a more specified content filtering tailored to fit the end-users cause. In the opinion of the authors, this kind of understanding would be ideal for content created with mobile devices which purposely are brought into various environments. This is why we in this thesis have investigated in which way descriptions of contexts could be caught, structured and expressed as machine-readable semantics. In order to limit the scope of our work we developed a system which mirrored the context of ubiquitous learning activities to a database. Whenever rich media content was created within these activities, the system associated that particular content to its context. The system was tested during live trials in order to gather reliable and “real” contextual data leading to the transition to semantics by generating Rich Document Format documents from the contents of the database. The outcome of our efforts was a fully-functional system able to capture contexts of pre-defined ubiquitous learning activities and transforming these into machine-readable semantics. We would like to believe that our contribution has some innovative aspects – one being that the system can output contexts of activities as semantics in real-time, allowing monitoring of activities as they are performed.

When looking at the Internet of Things the question arises how people, places and things will be connected to each other in the future. One option to create interoperability between devices and humans for the Internet of Things is to use open web standards. Researchers have named this approach the Web of Things and have studied the vision by showing the technical feasibility and by suggesting software architectures. What has been missing so far is a designer’s view on the challenges of connecting the virtual and the physical world with web technology. This thesis therefore aims to explore how current web technologies can be used as design material for the Web of Things. The results indicate that new web technologies like push notifications work well in the context of ubiquitous computing. Additionally, the repertory grid method was applied to evaluate how users experience the Web of Things. It was found that the prototypes were perceived as easy to use, personal and working instantly but the participants were also clearly aware of the dependency to a working smartphone.

Today’s society has moved towards a greater focus on users experiences from several different perspectives. It applies to the virtual world as well as to the environment outside computers. As markets are becoming saturated with products and services that are relatively similar, staging experiences is a possible way to increase product and service value. Within academic ceremonies at universities, the focus on the guests’ experiences is central. The aim of this thesis is to clarify how three key concepts can lay a ground for better understanding when going forward in the design of experiences in the context of academic ceremonies. The concepts are User Experience, Service Design and Ubiquitous Computing. The results shows that by dividing the processes of designing the ceremonies into smaller pieces and analysing them, using Patrick W. Jordan’s Hierarchy of Consumer Needs the current situation could be defined. A unified approach was taken towards the key concepts, which visualized the means we have to utilize in the possibilities of reaching upwards in the hierarchy and thus designing better experiences.

Abstract Traditional telepresence systems are comprised of a person remotely controlling a robot in a hostile environment while receiving visual feedback from a camera mounted on the robot. While useful for a number of applications, this model is not particularly useful for everyday work applications. The size of the robot is intrusive, the robot needs to be designed for specific interactions and only one person can use the robot at any one time. This work seeks to address this problem by replacing the physical proxy with a virtual proxy. The purpose of this virtual proxy is to enhance the system by providing improved support for multiple users, interaction and navigation in the remote environment. This enhanced, or improved, version of telepresence is termed TeleReality as it combines elements of virtual reality with traditional telepresence technologies. To achieve this goal, the basic building blocks, or constructs, of traditional telepresence systems need to be changed. This thesis identifies and evaluates the base constructs needed to build any TeleReality system. These constructs include the need to support navigation of the remote environment and this is achieved by using a network of cameras and image processing software to calculate the various perspective viewpoints of the users. These constructs govern the means in which this collection of cameras are organised and connected. Each user receives a common set of video images from which they calculate their own perspective viewpoints, and consequently supporting a multi-user system. Interaction within the remote environment is promoted using ad-hoc networks and augmented reality technologies. Constructs also cover security and privacy issues that arise from using multiple cameras by adopting both an organisational and technological viewpoint. The focus is on establishing trust within the system by divesting control to the user. An example of these constructs is given by the implementation of a TeleReality model called a 'Visual Cell' system. The conclusion of this work identifies the constructs that are needed to support a telepresence system using a virtual proxy where the primary interaction framework is informational exchange, although physical interaction can also be supported depending upon the environmental support. This work also identifies the technical issues that require additional research for the implementation of a TeleReality system, from the need for improved image processing, video codec's, broadcast and ad-hoc security protocols, software architecture, registration and the availability of suitable head mounted displays.

Abstract The use of agent systems has increased enormously, especially in the field of mobile services. Intelligent services have also increased rapidly in the web. In this thesis, the utilization of software agent technology in mobile services and decentralized intelligent services in the multimedia business is introduced and described. Both Genie Agent Architecture (GAA) and Decentralized International and Intelligent Software Architecture (DIISA) are described. The common problems in decentralized software systems are lack of intelligence, communication of software modules and system learning. Another problem is the personalization of users and services. A third problem is the matching of users and service characteristics in web application level in a non-linear way. In this case it means that web services follow human steps and are capable of learning from human inputs and their characteristics in an intelligent way. This third problem is addressed in this thesis and solutions are presented with two intelligent software architectures and services. The solutions of the thesis are based on a combination of neural network and agent technology. To be more specific, solutions are based on an intelligent agent which uses certain black box information like Self-Organized Map (SOM). This process is as follows; information agents collect information from different sources like the web, databases, users, other software agents and the environment. Information is filtered and adapted for input vectors. Maps are created from a data entry of an SOM. Using maps is very simple, input forms are completed by users (automatically or manually) or user agents. Input vectors are formed again and sent to a certain map. The map gives several outputs which are passed through specific algorithms. This information is passed to an intelligent agent. The needs for web intelligence and knowledge representation serving users is a current issue in many business solutions. The main goal is to enable this by means of autonomous agents which communicate with each other using an agent communication language and with users using their native languages via several communication channels.