Domino: Exploring Mobile Collaborative Software Adaptation

Marek Bell, Malcolm Hall, Matthew Chalmers, Phil Gray, Barry Brown, Domino: Exploring Mobile Collaborative Software Adaptation, To appear in Proc. Pervasive 2006, Dublin.

Domino is an experiment to support raising complexity (complex patterns of interdependence) in handling software plug-ins, a situation that could become a “plug-in hell” as well as the need of incremental adaptation requested by ubicomp applications (because of real-world dynamics of activities, context and preferences). When in proximity with each others Domino system exchange usage information. A collaborative filtering algorithm then recommends the needed plug-in additions and upgrades. The long term goal is to better understand how patterns of user activity, often considered to be an issue more for HCI than software engineering, may be used to adapt and improve the fundamental structures and mechanisms of technological systems.

Relation to my thesis: Current ubicomp constraints force mutual-adaptation of human and technology. Domino is a example of a incrementally adapting system based on all the users usage. Its social-proximity approach makes it very scalable.

“adaptable and adaptive interaction techniques are likely the only scalable approaches to personalisation.”
Weld, D. et al. Automatically personalizing user interfaces. Proc IJCAI 2003, Morgan Kaufmann, 1613-1619