Site visit in Vantaa on 6 November 2003

The coordination unit made a site visit at Jaakko Pöyry Consulting Oy in Pöyrytalo on 6 November 2003. The Finnish research teams gave a presentation of their project Context Management for Proactive Computing (ContAct). The project is a joint project between Finnish and French researchers and it receives funding from Tekes and the French Ministry of Research.

The aim of the project is to explore novel approaches to the detection and manipulation of contextual information to support proactive computing applications. The project's value proposition is to use rich context information to determine high-level information about a person's activity and thereby provide appropriate services at the appropriate time.

The partners all have complementary expertise in different areas. IMAG is building an augmented meeting environment. It consists of a meeting room that has been enhanced with cameras and video projectors. In the meeting environment, information ("the screen" of a computer) may be displayed on portable surfaces (e.g., a cardboard). A camera is able to follow and locate a portable surface and a video projector to display information on it even if the surface is moved or held in different angles. Information may also be displayed on the wall or on the table. People participating in the meeting may "ask" for this virtual display for their personal use by a simple hand gesture and make changes to it by touching it. The display must then be released back, e.g., to the wall, before another person may ask for it. Context is computed by federating or combining perceptual processes. The context surrounding the human activities in the meeting environment will be used for predicting possible solutions and events and for determining appropriate actions and reactions.

IMAG has also developed Imalab, a development environment for complex applications in computer vision. Imalab is a collection of modules and scripts: the modules provide general processing functionalities; the scripts give convenient ways to use these functionalities. The Finnish partners are now using Imalab together with self-organising maps (SOM) to detect and identify moving people in the moving image domain. They have been collecting research data by shooting their own video clips in downtown Helsinki. In the SOMs, the general idea is that clips with similar types of movement are close in the map. Features to distinguish the movements are the average amount of moving regions and the average area of moving regions (an object, such as a human, may be represented by several regions).

The Finnish partners have also built a test bed for ubiquitous shopping technologies and looked into the privacy issues involved in pervasive computing. The test bed allows different store layouts, different kinds of customers with different kinds of shopping lists, products, etc. The shelves can be as smart as needed; the package designs can be more or less attractive; and the people can be made to behave in different ways. The test bed shows the consequences of new technology and consumer behaviour in an easy-to-understand manner (but it does not optimise, e.g., layout, so it is not competing with such optimization software).

XRCE has developed sensors for measuring PC usage and ambient sound and a user feedback interface for producing labelled training data. In their ubiquitous environment they also include infrared beacons, Bluetooth access points and cameras (the input of which is processed with Imalab).  Phone usage and the time of the day also provide more low-level context. By using machine learning methods they derive higher-level context such as activity (e.g. discussing, walking, in a meeting), availability and location of the user as well as co-location of other users from this variety of sensor and low-level context information. Based on these techniques, presence information, such as 'You are on floor X, with Y, discussing and available only for a quick question', can be automatically produced.

For the second year, the project has located a very specific application area in collaborative workspaces, which will be described in detail in later reports.

The Finnish-French research consortium consists of the following units

• Jaakko Pöyry Consulting Oy (JPC), Director Petri Vasara, Consultant Katja Bergroth
• Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), Professor Olli Simula, Researchers Sampsa Laine, Teppo Marin
• Ellipse Oy, Director Markus Siponen
• Xerox Research Centre (XRCE), Grenoble, Christer Fernström, Dave Snowdon, Martin Mühlenbrock
• L'Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG)/L'Institut Informatique et Mathématiques Appliquées de Grenoble (IMAG), James L. Crowley, Augustin Lux
  

More information

For more information, please contact the Coordinator of the project, Director Petri Vasara at Jaakko Pöyry Consulting Oy or see the project's web page at this site.