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A smart home is an intelligent and shared space, where various services coexist and multiple residents with different preferences and habits share these services most of the time. Due to the sharing of space and time, service conflicts may occur when multiple users try to access media services. In this paper, we propose a context-based mediation method, consisting of service mediators and mobile mediators, to resolve the service conflicts in a smart home. The service mediators detect service conflicts among the residents and recommend their preferred media contents on a shared screen and their own mobile devices by exploiting users' preferences and service profiles. The mobile mediators collect the recommendation information and give the users personal recommendation. With combination of the service and mobile mediator, the residents are allowed to negotiate the media contents in the conflict situation. Based on experiments in the ubiHome, we observed that mediation is useful to encourage discussion and helps to choose a proper service in a conflict situation. Therefore, we expect the proposed mediation method to play a vital role in resolving conflicts and providing multiple residents with harmonized services in a smart home environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in ubiquitous computing have evoked the prospect of real-time monitoring of people's health in context-aware homes. Home is the most private place for people and health information is of highly intimate nature. Therefore, users-at-home must have means to benefit from home healthcare and preserve privacy as well. However, most smart home healthcare systems currently lack support for privacy management for home inhabitants. In this paper, we analyze the privacy needs of smart home inhabitants utilizing a healthcare system and present a conceptual framework to manage disclosure of their personal health information. The proposed framework supports sharing the most meaningful detail of personal health information at different time granularities with different recipients in different contexts. To relieve the burden of configuration, default disclosure settings are provided, and to ensure end-user's control over disclosure, the option to override default settings is included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a toolkit, wear-UCAM, which can support mobile user interactions in smart environments through utilizing user’s context. With the rapid developments of ubiquitous computing and its relevant technologies, the interest in context-aware applications for mobile/wearable computing also becomes popular in both academic and industrial fields. In such smart environments, furthermore, it is crucial for a user to manage personal information (health, preferences, activities, etc) for the personalized services without his or her explicit inputs. Regarding reflection of user’s context to context-aware applications, however, there are only a few research activities on such frameworks or toolkits for mobile/wearable computers. In the proposed wear-UCAM, therefore, we focus on a software framework for context-aware applications by taking account of how to acquire contextual information relevant to a user from sensors, how to integrate and manage it, and how to control its disclosure in smart environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, a formal approach for modeling central concepts of context-awareness in ubiquitous and mobile computing is introduced. The focus is on an appropriate handling of issues of vagueness and granularity in ubiquitous computing environments. A formalization of perceptual and sensory uncertainty and a characterization of granularity are applied for modeling three central aspects of context-awareness: context as retrieved from sensors, context for representing relevance, and context as unfocussed background information. The notions are developed and demonstrated with respect to the special case of spatial contexts, but are sufficiently general to also cover other types of context. Use of the characterized concepts is motivated with an example of ongoing work on ontology design for ubiquitous computing environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose ubiFloorII, a novel floor-based user identification system to recognize humans based on their walking pattern such as stride length, dynamic range, foot angle, and stance and swing time. To obtain users walking pattern from their gait, we deployed photo interrupter sensors instead of switch sensors used in ubiFloorI. We developed a software module to extract walking pattern from users' gait. For user identification, we employed neural network trained with users' walking samples. We achieved about 96% recognition accuracy using this floor-based approach. The ubiFloorII system may be used to automatically and transparently identify users in home-like environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose Responsive Multimedia System (RMS) for a virtual storytelling. It consists of three key components; Multi-modal Tangible User Interface (MTUI), a Unified Context-aware Application Model for Virtual Environments (vr-UCAM), and Virtual Environment Manager (VEManager). MTUI allows users to interact with virtual environments (VE) through human's senses by exploiting tangible, haptic and vision-based interfaces. vr-UCAM decides reactions of VE according to multi-modal input. VEManager generates dynamic VE by applying the reactions and display it through 3D graphics and 3D sounds, etc. To demonstrate an effectiveness of the proposed system, we implemented a virtual storytelling system which unfolds a legend of Unju Temple. We believe the proposed system plays an important role in implementing various entertainment applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a unified ubiHome application service model which provides user-centered services by exploiting intelligent context-awareness. Recently, most of research related to smart home focused on the infrastructure rather than a user, and did not consider effective use of context. Such approaches are not appropriate for a user-centered interface, intelligent home control, flexible extension of application service, etc. In this paper, we design a unified ubiHome application service model by exploiting ubi-UCAM (unified context-aware application model). The proposed model provides services corresponding to a user's intention and also supports flexible interaction between a user and ubiHome environment. It provides personalized ubiHome environment to each user. The proposed model contributes flexible interaction between a user and ubiHome environment. And it provides personalized ubiHome environment to a user and simplifies extension of various application services. Therefore, the proposed model helps ubiquitous applications obtain users' context and provide adaptive applications flexibly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a panoramic mesh modeling method from multiple range data for indoor scene reconstruction. The input to the proposed method is several sets of point clouds obtained from different viewpoints. An integrated mesh model is generated from the input point clouds. Firstly, we partition the input point cloud to sub-point clouds according to each camera's viewing frustum. Then, we sample the partitioned sub-point clouds adaptively and triangulate the sampled point cloud. Finally, we merge all triangulated models of sub-point clouds to represent the whole indoor scene as one model. Our method considers occlusion between two adjacent views and it filters out invisible part of point cloud without any prior knowledge. While preserving the features of the scene, adaptive sampling reduces the size of resulting mesh model for practical usage. The proposed method is modularized and applicable to the other modeling applications which handle multiple range data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel registration method is presented for 3D point clouds, acquired from a multi-view camera, for scene reconstruction. In general, conventional registration methods require a high computational complexity, and are not robust for 3D point clouds with a low precision. To remedy these drawbacks, a projection-based registration is proposed. Firstly, depth images are refined based on temporal property by excluding 3D points with large variations, and spatial property by filling holes referring to neighboring 3D points. Secondly, 3D point clouds are projected to find correspondences and fine registration is conducted through minimizing errors. Finally, final colors are evaluated using colors of correspondences, and a 3D virtual environment is reconstructed by applying the above procedure to several views. The proposed method not only reduces computational complexity by searching for correspondences on an image plane, but also enables an effective registration even for 3D points with a low precision. The generated model can be adopted for interaction with a virtual environment as well as navigation in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a prototype of a client system for Realistic Broadcasting that can receive and process immersive media. It provides a viewer which supports stereoscopic video display and haptic interaction with the displayed media. The structure of the system is introduced and each component is described. In order to show the feasibility of Realistic Broadcasting, a home shopping channel scenario is applied to the system and its demonstration is performed in an exhibition. We also discuss users' comments and directions for improving of Realistic Broadcasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries in the world are putting much effort for the preservation of cultural assets of their own countries using digital. However, most of the attempts are based on the aspect of preservation science which aims to exquisitely restore cultural assets through historical investigation. Therefore in most cases they are successful in the restoration of shape without incorporating the spirit and meaning of the respective cultural asset. In this regard, we suggest an approach using Responsive Multimedia System which can present legend of Unju Temple as a sequence of events in VE. Users can experience virtual story by manipulating interactive StoryMap displayed on ARTable. In the suggested artwork, we express the uncompleted beauty, which we cannot find out from Unju Temple today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a Context-based Storytelling with Responsive Multimedia System (RMS). Many researches related to virtual storytelling have been presented with the advancement of multimedia technology. However, people have different abilities to understand a story according to their experience, knowledge, age, gender, etc. In the proposed approach, virtual story is unfolded by interaction between users, Multi-modal Tangible User Interface (MTUI) and Virtual Environment Manager (VEManager) with vr-UCAM (a unified Context-aware Application Model for Virtual Environments). We adopt an interactive StoryMap and tangible interfaces into MTUI with vr-UCAM such that VEManager can control the responses of virtual objects according to the user's context. Accordingly, the users can experience a personalized story since action of virtual objects, interaction level and scene of VE are reorganized and adjusted according to a user's profile and preference. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we applied it to a virtual storytelling with RMS. According to the experimental results, we observed that the combination of virtual reality technology and context-aware computing could be promising technologies that enables users to experience a personalized virtual story. Therefore, we expect that the proposed approach plays an important role in virtual storytelling applications such as education, entertainment, games, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous emotion recognition systems have mainly focused on pattern classification, rather than utilizing sensing technologies or feature extraction methods. This paper introduces a method of physiological sensing and feature extraction for emotion recognition that is based on an oriental medicine approach. The specific points for affective sensing were experimentally determine, in which it was found that skin conductance measurements of the forearm region correlate well with acupuncture spots. Features are then extracted by the same way to interpret pulsation signals in diagnosis. We found that the proposed sensing and feature extraction method benefits the recognition of emotion with a neural network classifier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]