End-User Service Composition in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

End-User Service Composition in Ubiquitous Computing Environments by Mark Webster Newman Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science University of California, Berkeley Professor James A. Landay, Co-chair Professor John Canny, Co-chair The era of ubiquitous computing is upon us. We are seeing a sustained explosion in the numbers and types of networked devices and services with which users can interact. This means that great new capabilities are available to end-users, but such capabilities may come at a cost in terms of the complexity of understanding and managing multiple heterogeneous devices and services. In this dissertation, I present work on the design, development, and evaluation of three systems that offer solutions to existing approaches’ shortcomings with regard to developing networked devices and services for end-users. The Obje Framework is a distributed middleware platform that overcomes the problem of piecemeal interoperability by providing a robust interoperability solution for distributed services by dictating minimal up-front agreements and allowing the details of interoperation to be supplied at runtime through the delivery of mobile code.