Context Awareness and Privacy in Collaborative Environments

1. Context Awareness and Privacy in Collaborative Environments Guest Lecturer: Shin’ichi Konomi konomi@colorado.edu

2. Outline • What is context? • Examples • How should context be used to support collaboration? • More discussions on context • Privacy issues • Summary

3. Ubiquitous Computing • Invisible, everywhere computing • First articulated by Mark Weiser in 1988 • Third wave in computing • Mainframes  PCs  ubiquitous computing • Ubiquitous computing v.s. virtual reality • Virtual reality • Horse power problem • Ubiquitous computing • Challenging integration of human factors, computer science, engineering and social sciences • Various use settings (location, time, tasks,…)  Unique opportunities and challenges of using context Original graphics at http://www.ubiq.com

4. What is context? A context-aware cell phone [ Noisy hallway ] [ Movie theater ] “silent mode” RING!! RING!! RING!!

5. Interaction applications user Related entities (person, place, object, …) Characterizes their situations Context (a type of information) Examples: location, identity and state of people, groups and computational and physical objects What is context? Definition based on (Dey, Abowd, & Salber, 2001)

6. Examples of context-aware systems • Meeting support • Smart tour guides • Information services for commuters • Smart care • Displaying social context at an academic conference • Store of the Future • Online medical cabinet and wardrobe

7. Meeting support • Sample Scenarios: • People enter a meeting • room  a meeting agenda • automatically shown on the • wall-sized screen • Person A stands near the • screen and puts a physical • token on the blue area • his data appear on the screen Person B and C move theirchairs so they can see eachother  a collaboration toolautomatically launched on the “chair computers” http://www.roomware.de

8. Tour guides • Campus Aware (Cornell University) • Learning, planning and navigating Users’ locations and how much they liked each location (color-coded)  Social Navigation

9. Information services for commuters (1) On the train (to work) Today’s events and news (2) Walking (to work) Area Info (places to eat, etc.) Movie discount Only $10! Tomorrow is the monthly movie discount day Gourmet Info FullBelly Café (Chinese Noodle / Shinjuku) Their special is worth taking a look • Odakyu News • Hakone ropeway introduces a new gondola car • a Swiss-made cute gondola Psychology Test You have a pet bug. Which one is it? (1) beetle (2) grasshopper (3) butterfly (4) Walking (to home) Newsletter from the train company (3) On the train (to home) Entertaining contents to relax

10. “This water heater tells you if your elder parents are fine” Elder care; support for cognitively handicapped people CLever (Mobility for All, Lifeline, MAPS, …) (Zojirushi) A glove for an elder (Intel) Detects touched household objects

11. Supporting social interactions at an academic conference • People’s presence as context • System shows invisible connections between users • Enriched social context for human-human communication • Supporting social interactions • Start a conversation with a stranger • Find common topics of conversation • Find something you didn’t know about you and your friend • Technology • RFID chips in nametags (linked to an academic publication database) • Shows invisible “strings” that connect you and the other person • Common coauthors • Common coauthors’ coauthors • Common academic conferences • People who cited past publications of the two RFID reader RFID reader

12. Links connecting two researchers

14. Store of the Future User identification Location/map Smart shelf Kiosk Ad display Budget critics Alert (prescription drugs) Cashiers Future Store (Rheinberg, Germany) http://www.future-store.org/ Shopping Buddy (Kingston, MA) http://www.kioskbusiness.com/janfeb_03/article1.html http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/11/earlyshow/contributors/lauriehibberd/main567720.shtml

15. Future Store (video) http://www.future-store.org/servlet/PB/menu/1002197_l2/index.html

16. Online Wardrobe http://www.accenture.com/xd/xd.asp?it=enweb&xd=services%5Ctechnology%5Cvision%5Csil_what.xml

17. Online Medicine Cabinet http://www.accenture.com/xd/xd.asp?it=enweb&xd=services%5Ctechnology%5Cvision%5Csil_what.xml

18. Enabling technologies • GPS (Global Positioning System) • RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) • read and write, unique Identification, read many at once, line of sight not required • Active and passive tags; Different frequency bands • Sensors • Infrared, ultrasound, temperature, light, vibration, vision, sound, etc. • Wireless networks • Wireless LAN, Bluetooth, Ultra Wide Band, Near Field Communication, etc. • Information appliances • Data management systems (middleware and databases) • “data avalanche”  Much more than 5 Exabytes/year (2002) • Software development platforms (e.g., GeorgiaTech’s Context Toolkit)

19. Lessons learned so farPrada Epicenter (Manhattan, NYC) (Busuness 2.0, March 2004 issue)

20. How should context be used to support collaboration? • Creating context-aware applications is not an end in itself, but it is a means to an end. “How can contextual information empower users to live, work, learn, and collaborate more easily and more productively?”

21. Beyond location awareness • One of the simplest location-aware systems • Can we go beyond that?What are possibilities and challenges? • How can we capture the larger (often unarticulated) context of what users are doing? • How can we increase the richness of resources available for computer programs to understand their uses? GPS (40N,74W) Nearby restaurants

22. What is context, really? • Many conventional systems are limited by the designers’ simplistic definitions/views of context • Defining context is not easy • Context is dynamic • Context emerges throughout the design process • Context plays a critical role in shaping, interpreting and understanding an action • Users are situated in some settings of people, places, and things Features of the world become context through their use • How can we build better context-aware applications based on these considerations? c.f., Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 16. Special Issue on Context-aware Computing. Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 2001

23. physical, organizational, social, cultural context framework for practices (“rules for a game”) temporal and interactional context (within a larger pattern of activity); domain description anecdotal memories “coordinating mechanisms” religious beliefs user’s intentions and goals scientific hypothesis “activity landscape” user profile specification components physical features location buildings list of preferences collection of background beliefs identity state of people, groups and computational and physical objects general cultural assumption record of past conversations expectations about the future beliefs about the mental state of the speaker (user) immediately preceding utterances domain background knowledge “entry points”, social interactions institutions artifact under construction Context, context, context buildings and architecture physical, device, and informational context temporal, attentional, social, organizational context c.f., Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 16. Special Issue on Context-aware Computing. Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 2001

24. Unarticulated design intent • A large fraction of context-relevant information cannot be inferred from the environment because the context resides outside the environment, is unarticulated, or exists only in the head of a designer. • If a system provides mechanisms to articulate intentions explicitly and designers are willing to do so, the additional context can be used to identify the breakdown situation and provide designers with opportunities for reflection and learning. (G. Fischer et al., 2004)

25. Making context-aware systems usable and useful • Context awareness 1: “anytime/anywhere” • Context awareness 2: “right thing at the right time in the right way” Information work is often fragmented (people change working spheres) Challenge for context awareness is to enable people to integrate their information • Context awareness 3: “The right thing at the right time in the right way with the right kind of integration (G. Mark 2004)

26. Privacy Issues • Systems that monitor users (and tailor services ) may violate users’ privacy • Consumer tracking via item-level RFID tagging • Tracking school kids with GPS and RFID Information about RFID privacy and security (including cryptography ) see http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/rfid/index.asp

27. Example: tracking school children • Recent pilot tests • - Rikkyo Elementary School, Tokyo • - Iwamura Elementary School, Gifu • Kakogawa Daycare Center, Hyogo • (California) • Location, identity, time • Surveillance camera • Historical data No tracking Pervasive tracking ? Safety, peace of mind Privacy and freedom

28. RFID and privacy: existing approaches • Killing tags • Faraday cage • Active jamming • Sophisticated tags • Blocker tags • Local computation • Information management • Social regulation Mostly technologies for isolation People & Things Network

29. What is privacy? • Traditional view • “the right to be left alone” • Alternative view (Altman, 1975; Palen and Dourish, 2003) • “selective control of access to the self (or to one’s group)”

30. Towards a new class of privacy-enhancing technologies People & Things Network Privacy problems control Network People & Things Network People & Things B. Technologies for boundary control A. Technologies for isolation

31. Designing for privacy: the feedback-control approach • Designing for privacy in multimedia, ubiquitous computing environments (Bellotti and Sellen, 1993) • Key issue: appropriate feedback and control Capture Existence of database records, Stored?, Copied?, Integrated? Where? How? Existence of tags/readers, Occurrences of scans, Who?, What?, When? Construction Removing tags, Which readers?, Anonymity and pseudonymity Modifying database records, Restricting operations, Permissions, Supervision When and who accessed my information on RFID tags, readers, and database records Accessibility Purposes Why? Privacy policies, Inferred purposes Social control with technological support (e.g., something like P3P) Access control, Authentication, Encryption

32. Technology support is necessary but not sufficient • Practical privacy is shaped by four strongly interacting forces (Lessig 1998) • Markets • Social norms • Legislation • Technology

33. Related issues • Trust • Security • Contextual factors • locations, personal preferences, cultural differences • "The fundamental thing about technology is that there needs to be cooperation as never before between governments, consumers and vendors" "Consumers cannot be passive. They have to state their rights and how they wanted to be protected." (Art Coviello, RSA)

34. Distributed intelligence approaches controlled by users Smart assistive technologies Sensor networks Libraries Manufacturing Tracking medical wastes Food traceability Tracking children Future store Drug anti-counterfeit Supply chain Timekeeping in sports RFID injection Tickets &payments Keys & Access control Gift-wrapping Techno-determinism Risks Conclusion Opportunities • Context and privacy are both elusive concepts; difficult to define precisely. • Where is a practical middle ground? And how do we find it? Privacy