ABSTRACT

The IoT industry supplies a plethora of Internet connected devices and services supporting smart home automation. However, end-users having little knowledge of the features and possibilities of such technologies, face difficulties in conjuring up useful application scenarios combining such devices and services, thus missing out on potential applications outside those provided by vendors. A remedy for such end-users can potentially be found in crowdsourcing IoT scenario creation. For such an enterprise to be viable it is essential to assess whether crowdsourcing can result in practical and original scenarios. This article reports two studies aiming to establish the practicality and originality of crowdsourced IoT scenarios for smart homes. In the first study, we recruited 102 crowd workers who created 306 scenarios in various categories. We then recruited a second cohort of 620 crowd workers to rate the scenarios’ creativity. In the second study, we evaluated the corpus of IoT scenarios by 20-experienced smart home users recruited through a screening survey. Our results show that the crowd evaluations of originality and creativity are strongly correlated with those of smart home users. Our major IoT-specific findings in relation to creativity are: a) The number of IoT devices and the number of combination of devices impact how creative the scenarios are perceived; b) Workers with self-reported intermediate programming knowledge wrote more creative scenarios when compared to workers having expert knowledge; c) Computational metrics such as text metrics can provide the basis for automated assessment of the scenarios’ creativity. Finally, an inductive thematic analysis of the scenarios revealed interesting themes (e.g., types of rules, automation styles and novel operators) which can serve as a guide for designing more expressive and intuitive end-user development solutions, in the context of IoT.

摘要

物联网行业提供了大量支持智能家居自动化的互联网连接设备和服务。然而，对这种技术的特征和可能性了解很少的最终用户在构想结合了这种设备和服务的有用应用场景时面临困难，因此错过了卖方提供的那些潜在应用。可以在众包物联网场景创建中找到针对此类最终用户的补救措施。为了使这样的企业能够生存，必须评估众包是否会导致实际和原始场景。本文报告了两项研究，旨在确定智能家居众包物联网场景的实用性和独创性。在第一个研究中，我们招募了102名人群工作者，他们创建了306个不同类别的场景。然后，我们招募了第二批620名人群工作者，以评估情景的创造力。在第二项研究中，我们通过筛选调查招募了20位有经验的智能家居用户，评估了IoT场景的语料库。我们的结果表明，人群对创意和创造力的评价与智能家居用户的评价高度相关。我们与创造力相关的特定于物联网的主要发现是：a）物联网设备的数量和设备组合的数量会影响场景的创造力感知方式；b）与具有专家知识的工人相比，具有自我报告的中级编程知识的工人写的创意场景更多；c）诸如文本度量之类的计算度量可为自动评估方案的创造力提供基础。最后，