Abstract:

This talk starts with a short presentation of Finland, the City of Oulu, and the Intelligent Systems Group. The main part of the talk presents first our research on physical user interfaces and then our Urban Interactions Research Programme.

We develop physical user interfaces that are based on RFID tags in the local environment and RFID readers in mobile phones. In physical user interfaces, mobile phones are used rather as physical objects than I/O devices. Users start and control services by touching RFID tags that are advertised by RFID icons. We have developed several fully functional prototypes of such user interfaces. With these prototypes, users can control public displays by touching RFID tags with their mobile phones, pick multimedia content in a museum by touching RFID tags, and even study foreign languages by touching objects.

The Urban Interactions Research Program studies how ubiquitous computing solutions can be utilised in urban environments to provide city inhabitants better services. Our vision of a ubiquitous city is an urban environment where embedded information technology solutions and devices

carried by users merge physical, virtual, and social spaces into one seamless entity. Our aim is to build a concrete prototype of a ubiquitous city into the city of Oulu. The research will provide solutions for context recognition, multi-modal user interfaces, physicaluser interfaces, sensor networks, and middleware connecting large amounts of software components together. Large public displays and a heterogeneous sensor network will be installed in downtown Oulu (Rotuaari) and the first large scale field trial will be organised in Summer 2009.

Biography：

Jukka Riekki is professor at the University of Oulu, in the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering. He leads together with two other professors the Intelligent Systems research group. His main research interests are in context-aware systems serving people in their everyday environment. Currently he studies in several projects physical user interfaces, context recognition, and service composition. In these projects he cooperates with research groups from China, Japan, and Sweden. He is a member of IEEE.