Gerd Kortuem

Ubiquitous Computing, Internet of Things, Human-Centered Design, User Innovation, Open Data

In my research I focus on the development of ubiquitous information systems for the workplace, the home and public settings. Ubiquitous information systems are systems for collecting, presenting, using information about the physical and human world we inhabit. Such systems consists of interconnected device - such as mobile phones, wearable computers, smart everyday objects, and sensors - that are embedded in the physical world or attached to people and objects. Ubiquitous information systems give rise to people-centric sensing applications in which people are both producers and consumers of sensed data. My work spans across system layers and is concerned with software systems, user experience and applications. 

My current activities focus on three areas:

• Smart objects as building block of the Internet of Things (device architecture, infrastructure, interaction with smart objects)
• Situated workflow technology (high-level models for representing human activities, embedded and situated user interfaces)
• Industrial applications of ubiquitous computing (health and safety for road construction, smart storage facilities for chemical plants, situated information systems for hospitals and nursing facilities)
• Smart city / smart energy systems
• User Innovation related to the Internet of Things
• Pervasive information architecture

ALLOW: The objective of the project is to develop a new programming paradigm for human-oriented pervasive applications. This paradigm will enable pervasive technical systems to adapt automatically and seamlessly to humans involved and embedded in them, explicitly supporting people in achieving well-defined goals in dynamically changing environments and contexts. Furthermore, it will enable the integration of humans into pervasive business and working processes in an unobtrusive way. One of the major goals of the project is to design this technology such that the resulting environments are secure and trustworthy.

NEMO: Networked Embedded Models and Memories of Physical Work Activity. The NEMO project aims to lay the foundation for ubiquitous activity support systems encompassing wireless sensing capabilities and networked embedded technologies. The project investigates ubiquitous activity support from a technology, management, and human-factors point of view, and focus on safety-critical systems as application domain. The project's vision is to network physical entities such as tools, artifacts and goods, to the effect that these provide 1) timely context information concerning their use, handling or processing, as platform for collaborative in situ decision making, and 2) life-long entity memories of activities and events, as platform for long-term analyses and activity accounts.

CoBIs: Collaborative Business Items. The CoBIs project will develop a new approach to business processes involving physical entities such as goods and tools in enterprise environments. The intention is to apply advances in networked systems to embed business logic in the physical entities. The goal is to create Collaborative Business Items (CoBIs) that make it possible to relate more closely the state of an enterprise as represented in business processes with what is actually happing in the real world. CoBIs will make it possible to apply networked embedded systems technologies in large-scale business processes and enterprise systems by developing a platform for directly handling processes at the relevant point of action rather than in a centralized back-end system. Project objectives include modeling embedded business services, developing the collaborative and technology frameworks for CoBIs with necessary management support, and investigating and evaluating CoBIs in real world application trials in the oil and gas industry.

Relate: Relative Positioning of Mobile Objects in Ad hoc Networks. The objective of this project is to investigate sensing technologies and systems appropriate for collaborative positioning on surfaces. In such a system, small, wireless objects perform peer-to-peer sensing and produce relative location and orientation estimates without relying on pre-existing infrastructure.

RuleCaster: Global Programming Techniques for Sensor-Actuator Networks

Projected Interfaces for Smart Object Using Steerable Projector/Camera Systems

Smart-Its. The Smart-Its project is interested in a far-reaching vision of computation embedded in the world. In this vision, mundane everyday artefacts become augmented as soft media, able to enter into dynamic digital relationships. In our project, we approach this vision with development of "Smart-Its" - small-scale embedded devices that can be attached to everyday objects to augment them with sensing, perception, computation, and communication. We think of these "Smart-Its" as enabling technology for building and testing ubiquitous computing scenarios, and we will use them to study emerging functionality and collective context-awareness of information artefacts.

Wearable Communities

Agilent, Ambient Systems, BP, Carillion, Cisco, In Touch, Infineon, SAP