CSR: Small: Collaborative Research: Easily Adapting Apps to Diverse Wearable Form Factors

With the advent of many small, inter-connected devices - from appliances to wearable computers - the vision of ubiquitous computing appears increasingly tractable. The key obstacle is software development effort. Currently, a programmer must write a substantial amount of code for each different device form factor, such as smart phones, smart watches, and smart glasses. The research objective of this proposal is to demonstrate that a combination of techniques from Operating Systems, Human Computer Interaction, and Programming Languages can significantly reduce the programmer effort in adapting applications to different form factors. The developer writes an application for one form factor, and then specifies a simple metaprogram to extend the application to additional form factors. The UIWear system proposed in this project compiles the metaprogram to effectively and efficiently extend the smart phone application to different form factors. UIWear has the potential to transform the wearable application market by: (a) reducing the barrier for development and (b) intelligently offloading computation between the smart phone and the wearable device. Ubiquitous computing has the potential to dramatically improve many aspects of life, including healthcare, commerce, and education. Unfortunately, the widening range of different devices also introduces an equally large range of different and complex programming models' creating an obstacle between good ideas and end users. This proposal, if successful, will significantly simplify development of ubiquitous apps, making these platforms available to a wide range of developers. The work on augmenting accessibility services is independently useful to design new applications for the visually impaired. The software designed as part of this project will be released on a public site: https://github.com/sbunetsys. Electronic data will be archived internally. All data will be kept for at least 5 years after publication; likely longer, depending on its size and outside interest.

The project will advance the state-of-the-art in three key areas. First, it will explore new models for abstracting and refactoring graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for a wide range of form factors. The research approach is to identify an intermediate, lowest-common-denominator-style representation of the GUI that has enough details to allow the GUI to be repositioned, transformed, and scaled, but is simple enough that it can be rendered natively on any device display. Second, the UIWear framework will design new constraint optimization strategies to find the optimal UI that satisfies the limitations of the new form factor while leveraging the unique capabilities of the form factor. Third, the UIWear framework will use new language-level analysis techniques to guide programmers in placing computation across multiple devices.