Development of a new visual programming paradigm in the Interactex IDE.

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Needless to say that, for any act of team organisation like task management the importance of having an overview of the activities and the strength of the team members in different fields is of no doubt. As elements of task management, the features of task board management and assignee recommender cover the former and the latter respectively. Through task board management, the organiser tracks the sequence of the tasks and the arrangement of the assigned tasks, so he or she could minimize the idle status of the team. To this end, the task should be distributed optimally among the developers based on their level of desirability. This implicitly brings the necessity of a mechanism to evaluate their desirability quantitatively which is normally assessed intuitively and qualitatively. As a result, through more rational assignment of the tasks among the developers based on their quantitative desirability, more tasks would be accomplished in the same specific sprint. Therefore, the effectiveness of the team would be improved. In this thesis we develop a light weight assignee recommendation and association algorithm, which is integrated within an android application for task management

Study the popular offline open-source speech recognition systems and training/tuning them in order to compare with the cloud-based solutions

Studying methods to create datasets from 3D models and use them in training a model for small parts classifier. This method will be compared with the normal manually photographing approach in terms of usability of dataset creation and performance of the classifiers.

 

 

In this thesis, a flexible and extensible framework for communication with fixtures, using a variety of communication protocols is proposed. The solution is based on the REST architectural style and the broker pattern that is used for decoupling the clients from fixtures. The broker provides a uniform protocol for controlling all fixtures in the environment, while hiding the complexity of different fixture communication protocols being used. The protocol, provided by the broker, is a HTTP based protocol which can be easily implemented in any programming language that supports the HTTP protocol. Using this feature, a variety of mobile or web based smart environment applications can be developed.

The master thesis studies how Radio-frequency Identification (RFID) along with Cloud-based computing can be used to improve the user experience of household appliances. Bringing RFID and cloud computing together provides a modern solution enabling the users ubiquitous real time control and management of a wide range of household appliances. This thesis describes the development of a scalable platform named "Cloud oriented Push Platform" (CoPP). The main purpose of CoPP is to connect and control various smart devices. These functions are enabled by storing and retrieving user information, and are supported by push notification services. Furthermore, CoPP may facilitate the development of a low-cost home automation system that is easy to deploy and maintain. Finally, this thesis displays a development and implementation process of a cloud based RFID solution for a content-aware smart fridge. Additionally, in order to determine the best solution for the implementation of the smart fridge, this thesis also evaluates available cloud computing services, RFID technologies, and different micro-controllers from several perspectives, keeping economic, legal, and technical restrictions in mind.

The current thesis proposes a gamified approach that encourages the office workers to start saving energy in a collaborative way. They can define sequences of actions to be performed immediately or at a later time and send tailored recommendations to their colleagues, in the form of action sequences. By actively using the application, controlling their workplace in an energy-efficient way and encouraging their colleagues to have a pro-environmental behavior, the users enter a competition. The gamification strategy used in the current application makes use of game mechanics elements such as points, badges, levels and high scores. The pro-environmental behavior of the users is rewarded with points and/or stars. By accumulating points, they can climb in the high scores. Each player starts the game with five empty American flags, without stars on the canton. By accumulating stars, they can fill in the flags one by one and advance to the next level.

A solution is proposed that aims at leveraging smart meters and delivers insight into consumption as well as control to office occupants using a mobile application. Occupants receive smart meters for tracking their appliances and are personally in control of registering these. The application gives them access to current, monthly and weekly data as well as the possibility to switch appliances on and off. Additionally, consumption comparisons are presented which express Wh (watt hours) in terms of another appliance with the goal to increase the occupant’s understanding of the consumption of their appliances. This prototype of an iPhone application was built at the Intelligent Workplace at the Carnegie Mellon University. The Intelligent Workplace is a living and lived-in laboratory providing an instrumented environment with sensors and controls to developers and occupants who can test applications in their daily use. The application was created in a user-centered and scenario-based approach. Continuous delivery ensured a highly iterative process with weekly deployments to the occupants. The design of the application was reviewed weekly by experts in building controls of the Intelligent Workplace. At the end of the project a survey was conducted, in which occupants were asked about whether the application helped to increase their understanding of the consumption of the appliances and reduce the consumption. The results show that, among the implemented features, presenting the current consumption, split by appliances and giving occupants the possibility to control them has most impact when this functionality can be accessed fast and conveniently.

By making use of flow-based programming paradigms and visual programming, we developed an automation system that is easy to learn and use by people without prior programming knowledge. Automation rules created with our system are represented graphically and modifying rules is as simple as dragging-and-dropping and connecting basic building blocks provided by the system. The system also features a plug-in infrastructure that makes it independent from appliance-vendor-specic protocols used to gather data from sensors or control appliances. Plug-ins can be written by third-party developers to make the system adaptable to every environment that allows access and control via a computer network. It is not tied to a specic appliance manufacturer and can be deployed on all major operating systems and hardware platforms. An informal usability evaluation conducted with the prototype we implemented over the course of the project shows, that our approach to graphical programming is easy to learn by people newly introduced to the concept. People can use the system to easily implement automated behaviour for their smart environments to increase their comfort and safe energy through intelligent, on-demand appliance control.

In this thesis, I propose NICE (Natural Intuitive Camera-based Environment) control which allows occupants to use freehand-gestures, speech commands and a multimodal combination of both in order to interact with individual devices in a smart building. The usage of gestures and speech is a natural user interface that allows for an easy and intuitive interaction. Backed by a 3D camera, users can interact from various positions in a room without any additional personal device. The development of NICE control was complemented by two dedicated user studies as well as a continuous quasi-experiment in a user-centered approach. The first, a wizard-of-oz study, provided essential findings for the design of gestures and speech commands, whereas the second user study evaluated the real-world performance of NICE control. Participants stated they enjoyed natural user interfaces for controlling a smart room and were able to complete about 90% of the given tasks. Speech showed the fastest overall completion times for the tasks. Notably, participants ranked gesture commands as fastest and most fun.

This thesis introduces a way of combining any number of location providers into one centralized location provider. By using the input of multiple location sources the accuracy of every single source can be improved and the availability of location information can be increased. Simple scenarios where two sources’ location information overlaps will be addressed as well as more complex ways of combining the information. The system introduced is flexible and extensible in terms of fusion algorithms or sources used. It’s ability to provide indoor location information more accurately and with higher availability makes it a better alternative to existing location based services.