a CAPpella
Prototyping context-aware applications by demonstration

Summer 2003
Advised by Dr. Anind K. Dey, UC Berkeley

Paper, slide presentation, poster, and source code

In recent years, various projects have developed infrastructures and toolkits to facilitate the development of context-aware applications. These efforts made creating context-aware applications easier for programmers, but not for creative designers and end users, most of whom do not program. a CAPpella is a tool that facilitates programming of context-aware applications by allowing end users to program by demonstration.

In our approach, the user demonstrates to a CAPpella a situation and an associated action. The user tells the system which parts of the demonstration are relevant to the system and trains the system multiple times. Once trained, a CAPpella would perform the actions associated with a particular situation.

I created and used a paper prototype to test various representations of sensor data and different user interface components. The results of the tests guided the design of the user interface.

A paper on a CAPpella was accepted to CHI 2004 (16% acceptance rate).