nicolaimarquardt.com

Research

I'm interested in the research of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), especially in projects of Ubiquitous Computing and Physical User Interfaces. On this page you can read more about my projects in the last years; and please write me your comments or critics about my projects!

Current work

At the moment I continue some work related to the SharedPhidgets project from the Grouplab. This is especially a new release with lots of new features: many ways to work with metadata, new skins and phidget devices, and use of the new Phidgets Inc. drivers 2.1.

I also organize ideas for my diplom theses starting at the end of the year. This includes work with the CollaborationBus system, and preparation of an evaluation study. I will write more details about my diplom thesis soon.

Shared Phidgets

UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY, GROUPLAB, 2005/2006

The Shared Phidgets toolkit provides a library and tools that enables the rapid protoyping of physical user interfaces with remote located devices. The Phidgets can be accessed and controlled over the network, while all the network specific technology is hidden from the application developer.
.NET components and interface skins facilitate the development, and the included tools (such as the server, connector, controlling and observing applications) let the programmer easily overview and control the Phidget components.
The toolkit uses a distributed Model-View-Controller (dMVC) design pattern to represent every device so that data associated with the model is easily queried and manipulated. Therefore the programmer can also access the model directly (implemented as a shared dictionary) and reading and writing entries in the shared dictionary.

Marquardt, N. and Greenberg, S. (2007)
Shared Phidgets: A Toolkit for Rapidly Prototyping Distributed Physical User Interfaces.
In TEI '07: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction (February 15-17, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA), ACM Press, pp. 13-20.

Marquardt, N. and Greenberg, S. (2006)
Shared Phidgets: A Toolkit for Rapidly Prototyping Distributed Physical User Interfaces.
Report 2006-829-22, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, T2N 1N4. April.

Collaboration Bus

BAUHAUS UNIVERSITY WEIMAR, COOPERATIVE MEDIA LAB, 2004/2005

The CollaborationBus application is a graphical editor that provides abstractions from base technology and thereby allows multifarious users to configure Ubiquitous Computing environments. By composing pipelines users can easily specify the information flows from selected sensors via optional filters for processing the sensor data to actuators changing the system behaviour according to the users� wishes. Users can compose pipelines for both home and work environments. An integrated sharing mechanism allows them to share their own compositions, and to reuse and build upon others� compositions. Real-time visualisations help them understand how the information flows through their pipelines.

Gross, T. and Marquardt, N. (2007)
CollaborationBus: An Editor for the Easy Configuration of Complex Ubiquitous Computing Environments.
In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Euromicro Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network - Based Processing - PDP 2007 (Feb. 7-9, Naples, Italy). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, (accepted).

Gross, T. and Marquardt, N. (2006)
CollaborationBus: An Editor for the Easy Configuration of Complex Ubiquitous Computing Environments.
Technical Report # BUW - CSCW - 2006 - 02, Computer - Supported Cooperative Work Group, Faculty of Media, Bauhaus - University Weimar, Bauhausstr. 11, 99423 Weimar, Germany, April.

SensBase: Ubiquitous Computing Middleware

BAUHAUS UNIVERSITY WEIMAR, COOPERATIVE MEDIA LAB, 2004/2005

Sens-ation is an open and generic service-oriented platform, which provides powerful, yet easy-to-use, tools to software developers who want to develop context-aware, sensor-based infrastructures. The service-oriented paradigm of Sens-ation enables standardised communication within individual infrastructures, between infrastructures and their sensors, but also among distributed infrastructures. On a whole, Sens-ation facilitates the development allowing developers to concentrate on the semantics of their infrastructures, and to develop innovative concepts and implementations of context-aware systems.

Gross, T., Egla, T. and Marquardt, N.
Sens-ation: A Service-Oriented Platform for Developing Sensor-Based Infrastructures.
International Journal of Internet Protocol Technology (IJIPT) 1, 3 (2006). pp. 159-167. (ISSN Online: 1743-8217, ISSN Print: 1743-8209).

Swarm Intelligence

BAUHAUS UNIVERSITY WEIMAR, VIRTUAL REALITY LAB, 2004

The basic principle of the swarm intelligence algorithms is to divide complex calculations between multiple, simple executive agents. The computer science algorithms are inspired by observations of real ant swarms, since they solve complex tasks by simple local behaviour and activities.

With this swarm simulation implementation, various SI algorithms can be used to cluster data sets and display the virtual swarm environment with a two or three dimensional visualization. The applied algorithms are founded on the research of V. Ramos, J. Handl, M. Dorigo, E. Bonabeau, E. D. Lumer, B. Faieta and some other researchers of the swarm intelligence science community. Furthermore there are various extensions to the original systems, such as dynamic pheromone evaporation, object switching while carrying another object, dynamic picking and dropping probabilities, varying border conditions, changes of the world dimensions in two and three dimensions as well as elegant solutions for some problems concerning orientation and boundary conditions.

For the visualization of the environment of the swarms we used two dimensional worlds, as well as varying three dimensional ?orlds (e.g. cube, dish and tube). We have analyzed the swarms sorting behaviour in the environments, and also evaluated the main swarm features: flexibility, robustness, decentralized organization and self-organization of the swarm. The self-organization of the swarm is based on the feedback that each agent can transmit with the change of the swarm�s environment (e.g. picking or dropping) or the deposition of pheromones. More details about our research can be found in the Developer Documentation; however, this documentation is only available in German.

Metacoon iCal Synchronize

BAUHAUS UNIVERSITY WEIMAR, METACOON, 2003/2004

The objective of this research project was the development of a synchronization module for the exchange of address and calendar data between Personal Information Managers (PIM) and an e-learning platform. The Component Object Model (COM) is used to access entries in Microsoft Outlook and export them to vCalendar and vCard format. Other PIM software can import and export these formats as well. A PHP module then synchronizes these files with the Metacoon e-learning platform, and tries to synchronize the entries automatically (e.g., add, replace). If the algorithm can not decide how to modify an entry (e.g., if there are changes from both sides), the user has to confirm decisions.