Carlos Manuel Rodrigues Machado Autonomic Ubiquitous Computing

Xerox ParcTab
Inspired by the Weisers’ vision described in [Weiser, 1991] the Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center (PARC) developed the ParcTab 1 system. It consists in a palm-sized PDA with touch screen,
complemented by an infrared communication infrastructure with room-sized cells. Most of its
applications are executed on remote hosts and thus depend on the communication infrastructure,
which also handles location tracking. One of the applications that have been implemented on the
ParcTab is a remote control system to control lights and temperature for the current location; others
include the better known Forget-me-not system [Lamming et al., 1994]. The ParcTab can be seen
as a more complicated version of the Active Badge that includes a limited user interface for arbitrary
applications.
The Adaptive House
Learning habits of users has previously been explored by Michael C. Mozer in The Neural
Network House [Mozer et al., 1995], later named as The Adaptive House, which is able to predict
occupancy of rooms, hot water usage and likelihood that a zone is entered in the next few seconds
using trained feed-forward neural networks [Mozer, 1998]. It used motion detectors and X10
devices to capture and act on the house environment. The context information was again mainly
comprised of location, but additional state information from rooms like the status of lights or the
temperature set by inhabitants were used. While this project is one of many “smart house” projects,
it was one of the first to include prediction of user actions using a feed-forward multi-layer
perception Artificial Neural Network (ANN), trained with standard back-propagation [Mozer, 1999].
The author of this project identified proactivity as the main problem of this type of systems. It
pointed out that incorrect autonomic actions inevitably frustrate users to a point of having to
completely remove that functionality [Mozer, 2005].
1 Available on-line at http://sandbox.xerox.com/parctab/
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