TeC is a framework for end-user design, deployment, and evolution of applications for smart spaces. Design is declarative and focuses on simple tailoring of behavior and on interconnection of devices such as motion sensors, cameras, thermostats, and smart electric meters. TeC apps act as teams of elements with no central control: elements play their roles autonomously, and app behavior is emergent. Under the hood, the operational semantics promotes resiliency: the failure of any element may cause degraded operation of the features that depend on it, but all others remain operational. Automated (re)deployment of TeC designs allows users to keep evolving their apps as they buy new gadgets or change their minds about features.

Team computing concerns the coordination of teams comprised of software components, devices, and humans operating in ubiquitous computing environments. Teams have no central control: elements play their roles autonomously, and overall behavior is emergent. The proposed model promotes resilience to incompleteness and inconsistency in team designs, as well as to run-time faults. Team computing is geared towards enabling end users to design and deploy their own teams in domains such as home surveillance, assisted living, and energy management. This paper presents the foundations of team computing, including its operational semantics and a framework to automate the verification of desired behaviors. The paper also discusses the implementation of a software infrastructure for the automatic deployment of systems based on team designs.

This paper presents team computing, TeC, a framework for end-user design, deployment, and evolution of applications for ubiquitous computing. Systems in TeC act as teams of elements with no central control: elements play their roles autonomously, and system behavior is emergent. The paper presents five small but illustrative systems in the domains of home automation, energy management, and surveillance. TeC's features include the ability to relate, at the design level, system behaviors to physical location and to the presence and identity of users. TeC also allows for the secure integration of parts of design contributed by different users. The paper discusses the implementation of a software infrastructure for the design and automated deployment of systems.

Most pervasive computing technologies focus on helping users with computer-oriented tasks. In this NSF-funded project, we instead focus on using computers to support user-centered "activities" that normally do not involve the use of computers. Examples may include everyday tasks around such as answering the doorbell or doing laundry. A focus on activity-based computing brings to the foreground a number of unique challenges. These include activity definition and representation, system design, interfaces for managing activities, and ensuring robust operation. Our project focuses on the first two challenges.

This paper introduces an architectural style for enabling end-users to quickly design and deploy software systems in domains characterized by highly personalized and dynamic requirements. The style offers an intuitive metaphor based on boxes, pipes, and wires, but retains enough preciseness that systems can be automatically assembled and dynamically reconfigured based on uDesign descriptions. uDesign was primarily motivated and validated within monitoring and control applications for smart spaces, but we envision possible extensions to other domains. Our contribution differs from early attempts at end- user programming by dealing with higher level software architectural abstractions rather than programming, and by addressing run-time descriptions rather than code structures. The paper presents validation of uDesign along the following aspects: (a) expressiveness, by means of two case studies, one in health care, and one in home security, (b) soundness, by providing uDesign's formal semantics, and (c) implementability, by describing a mapping of uDesign to an existing software infrastructure: the Aura infrastructure.

An important domain for autonomic systems is the area of ubiquitous computing: users are increasingly surrounded by technology that is heterogeneous, pervasive, and variable. In this paper we describe our work in developing self-adapting computing infrastructure that automates the configuration and reconfiguration of such environments. Focusing on the engineering issues of self-adaptation in the presence of heterogeneous platforms, legacy applications, mobile users, and resource variable environments, we describe a new approach based on the following key ideas: 1) explicit representation of user tasks allows us to determine what service qualities are required of a given configuration; 2) decoupling task and preference specification from the lower level mechanisms that carry out those preferences provides a clean engineering separation of concerns between what is needed and how it is carried out; and 3) efficient algorithms allow us to calculate in real time near-optimal resource allocations and reallocations for a given task

An important emerging requirement for computing systems is the ability to adapt at run time, taking advantage of local computing devices, and coping with dynamically changing resources. Three specific technical challenges in satisfying this requirement are to (1) select an appropriate set of applications or services to carry out a user's task, (2) allocate (possibly scarce) resources among those applications, and (3) reconfigure the applications or resource assignments if the situation changes. In this paper, we show how to provide a shared infrastructure that automates configuration decisions given a specification of the user's task. The heart of the approach is an analytical model and an efficient algorithm that can be used at run time to make near-optimal (re)configuration decisions. We validate this approach both analytically and by applying it to a representative scenario.