A.J. Brush: A Leader in the Ubiquitous Computing Field
It would be an understatement if someone were to say A.J. Brush’s involvement in Human-Computer Interactions and Ubiquitous Computing was just like any other in the field. Her research received a 10-year impact award, multiple best paper awards and nominations, and a Borg Early Career Award. She is also a member of the UbiComp Steering Committee, on the Advisory Board of the ACM Proceedings on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technology, an editor for Pervasive Computing Magazine, and served as co-chair for the CRA-W board for two years.
A.J. Brush is most well known for her research on technologies for families and conducting technological field studies. She has built and released many remote sensing systems for homes. She also worked on Cortana with her team to connect it with other assistants such as Alexa to improve the speech interaction experience. Currently, Brush works at Microsoft and currently serves as the principal program manager.
One project that Brush is focused on is improving home automation. She co-leads the Lab of Things (LoT) project, which is a publicly available platform for experimental research using connected devices in homes. Their goal is to minimize the barrier to develop and evaluate new technologies for the home environment.
Below is a Youtube video that explains the Lab of Things and summarizes how the project works.
The Lab of Things enables researchers to easily interconnect devices and implement application scenarios. LoT also enables field studies to be conducted through cloud services that can monitor and update experiments. This is done because it allows data to be collected faster and users can access it more easily. LoT also allows researchers to share code, data, and participants, making it easier for knowledge to be spread and lets others build on discoveries. A common framework is provided to write applications and users can log application data to the cloud storage, remotely monitor systems, and remotely update applications. Brush hopes that this platform will encourage new ideas and devices to be tested without the high cost of building infrastructure.
One objective that the LoT is combatting is bringing auditory messages to people who are deaf or have a hard time hearing. In homes, many devices emit important messages through sounds such as a smoke alarm, doorbell, and many more. By using LoT, researchers can integrate auditory data from a network of home sensors in which that information is then processed in real-time. The information is then relayed to a smartwatch which will alert the user in which they can see the message as a visual output.
Another task that is being tackled by the LoT is monitoring elderly residents. The current situation is that many older people prefer to remain in their homes as long as possible, but it is hard for the elderly to live alone. Some problems of this are if the elderly suffer strokes, fall, can’t call for help, and more. A college student involved with LoT developed a prototype in which a system could monitor elderly people who live by themselves.
The student’s prototype consists of three sensors that can be placed on different household items such as a refrigerator, the front door, etc., in which they can detect and monitor the movements of the user involved. The LoT system can link the devices together and store the data to the Microsoft Azure cloud, which scans for signs of inactivity that could indicate an injury or illness. This information can be shared with family members which they could then act on the problem immediately.
As seen in these situations, LoT can utilize technology in homes for various situations that pose a serious threat. These prototypes show that lives can be saved and prevent problems from occurring.
Nowadays, the first thing that comes to mind about smart devices in homes are smart thermostats, smoke detectors, wi-fi, locks, and cameras to someone with basic knowledge of smart devices. While those devices do make a “smart home,” Brush looks at smart homes in a different light to combat many problems that people are facing.
Workers at Microsoft, researchers around the world, and students are contributing to the success of LoT. The research and results were successful to the point where LoT supports many off-the-shelf devices such as Z-Wave switches and multi-sensors, The Kinect for Windows sensors, the Philips Hue light bridge, and the Envi energy sensor. These products are available all around the world and on the internet.
The LoT project has been a great movement in the technological world due to the innovative ideas. The project allows Microsoft, professionals, and students to work together to advance technology. Without Microsoft’s program and the people working on this project creating unique ideas, these devices wouldn’t be possible and problems in people’s households could pose a greater threat.
A great thing about this project is that everyone and any idea is welcomed. If an idea or creation fails, there is no loss. These ideas help others improve their ideas and may lead to even better ideas and products. If a product ends up being successful, it can be released to the public and integrated into homes. Brush makes sure that LoT is all about innovation and is not bound to a business model where there is a deadline for creating products.
Although Brush did not contribute directly to every device and discoveries made, she was able to start something amazing. LoT is not only a project, but an idea to integrate problem-solving technology into people’s everyday lives.
Today, she continues to talk about the project as it continues to grow. She discusses the motivations of the project and current capabilities, as well as giving demos of new LoT client-side set up using various devices. With her help, she is helping technology become more ubiquitous.
A.J. Brush is also heavily involved with researching technology. She has published numerous amounts of papers on various topics such as home automation, mobile devices, and more.
One of Brush’s papers discusses the security and reliability of authentication through personal questions. Many popular websites such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! all rely on personal questions as the secondary authentication used to reset account passwords.
Her research ran a user study to measure the reliability and security of the questions used by the websites listed above. Users were also asked to answer the personal questions and their acquaintances were to guess their answers after. The results showed that the user’s acquaintances were able to guess 17% of their answers. The same users also forgot 20% of their own answers within six months. Also, 13% of the answers were able to be guessed within five attempts by guessing the most popular answers of other participants.
Brush concluded that the security of personal questions is not a reliable authenticator. She notes that both popular questions and user-written questions were not good enough and all questions are vulnerable to guessing. Brush found that the security of personal questions appears significantly weaker than passwords. She suggests having backup authentication mechanisms and hopes that by showing these results, people will be inspired to create and deploy new alternatives to the current personal questions.
Brush also wrote another paper based on her research regarding the value of location and user preferences for location privacy. She first mentions how personal GPS data is useful for many UbiComp services, however, inference attacks for data information such as this can reveal private information such as home addresses and schedules.
Her research ran a study on 32 participants from 12 households to collect 2 months of GPS data and show them in visualizations. They were asked to think about how much they valued privacy, keeping their location private depending on location, and if they were comfortable in revealing their data publicly.
Brush concluded that participants preferred to keep data private and anonymous while deleting data near their homes. They were also consistent with their choices with their personal privacy concerns such as protecting their home locations and not having their precise location/schedule known. The results also show that participants showed a lack of awareness of privacy in their location traces as it varied between each household.
This study shows that users are not completely aware of their location being tracked and Brush’s results show that people should be provided privacy control interfaces and make choices based on their own privacy concerns.
Although only two papers were mentioned, her research shows that there are improvements to be made to privacy and security for users. Many people do not know about these problems and assume that they are private or safe.
I believe that Brush’s research on various topics shows that people must be educated more regarding technology despite most of the world living in such a technological based age. With technology usage increasing and being more important, security and privacy concerns must be addressed. As improvements to technology continue, new technology continues to be created. The LoT allows technology to interact with humans and solve various problems. Brush helped develop technology with a purpose to solve everyday problems while researchers and students continue to help make the technology more efficient. The future looks bright for both smart homes and the technological future.
References
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/ajbrush/
https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=labofthings
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lab-of-things-keeps-growing/
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lab-of-things-enables-research-and-teaching/
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/www-cse-public/ugrad/publications/msb/alumni-achievement-award-2017.pdf
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1518701.1518953
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1864349.1864381
