This article describes an infrastructure that supports the creation of interoperable systems while requiring only limited prior agreements about the specific forms of communication between these systems. Conceptually, our approach uses a set of “meta-interfaces”—agreements on how to exchange new behaviors necessary to achieve compatibility at runtime , rather than requiring that communication specifics be built in at development time —to allow devices on the network to interact with one another. While this approach to interoperability can remove many of the system-imposed constraints that prevent fluid, ad hoc use of devices now, it imposes its own limitations on the user experience of systems that use it. Most importantly, since devices may be expected to work with peers about which they have no detailed semantic knowledge, it is impossible to achieve the sort of tight semantic integration that can be obtained using other approaches today, despite the fact that these other approaches limit interoperability. Instead, under our model, users must be tasked with performing the sense-making and semantic arbitration necessary to determine how any set of devices will be used together. This article describes the motivation and details of our infrastructure, its implications on the user experience, and our experience in creating, deploying, and using applications built with it over a period of several years.

Peer-to-peer systems appear promising in terms of their ability to support ad hoc, spontaneous collaboration. However, current peer-to-peer systems suffer from several deficiencies that diminish their ability to support this domain, such as inflexibility in terms of discovery protocols, network usage, and data transports. We have developed the Speakeasy framework, which addresses these issues, and supports these types of applications. We show how Speakeasy addresses the shortcomings of current peer-to-peer systems, and describe a demonstration application, called Casca, that supports ad hoc peer-to-peer collaboration by taking advantages of the mechanisms provided by Speakeasy.

Interoperability among a group of devices, applications, and services is typically predicated on those entities having some degree of prior knowledge of each another. In general, they must be written to understand the type of thing with which they will interact, including the details of communication as well as semantic knowledge such as when and how to communicate. This paper presents a case for "recombinant computing" -- a set of common interaction patterns that leverage mobile code to allow rich interactions among computational entities with only limited a priori knowledge of one another. We have been experimenting with a particular embodiment of these ideas, which we call Speakeasy. It is designed to support ad hoc, end user configurations of hardware and software, and provides patterns for data exchange, user control, discovery of new services and devices, and contextual awareness.

Users in ubiquitous computing environments need to be able to make serendipitous use of resources that they did not anticipate and of which they have no prior knowledge. The Speakeasy recombinant computing framework is designed to support such ad hoc use of resources on a network. In addition to other facilities, the framework provides an infrastructure through which device and service user interfaces can be made available to users on multiple platforms. The framework enables UIs to be provided for connections involving multiple entities, allows these UIs to be delivered asynchronously, and allows them to be injected by any party participating in a connection.

Article Supporting creative work tasks: the potential of multimodal tools to support sketching Share on Authors: Jana Sedivy Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of LondonView Profile , Hilary Johnson Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of LondonView Profile Authors Info & Claims C&C '99: Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Creativity & cognitionOctober 1999 Pages 42–49https://doi.org/10.1145/317561.317571Online:01 October 1999Publication History 10citation611DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations10Total Downloads611Last 12 Months5Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access