Autohan Project

People and their Activities:1995-2000

This page lists the people and projects that compose Autohan at the moment.

Iota Language

Lecturers Dr Gavin Bierman and Dr Peter Sewell are designing experimental languages for use in Autohan. They currently have a language called Iota that handles XML trees within its expressions. The language has concurrency and IPC and can block waiting for Autohan events.

A student is making an implementation of Iota.

As mentioned on the main page, all application code in Autohan is envisioned to have been coded or mirrored in the Autohan Language, AL. The Iota language will evolve or be combined with another language, such as the events language, to form the AL language.

Lingua Franca: Scripts From Tangible Interfaces

Research student, Rob Hague is implementing the layer that converts a series of events from the Cubes into an application script that can execute on the event engine. This is so that residents of the home can program the home environment without keyboards and knowledge of programming. The generated scripts will be written in the Autohan language (AL) in the final scenario.

Rob was sponsored by AT&T Cambridge Laboratories.

Device Infrastructure

Research Associate, Dr Daniel Gordon is maintaining the operational infrastructure. This consists of the older Warren devices and some newer UPnP devices.

Autohan Repositorary

Research student, Umar Saif implemented the DHan XML store that is used as the Autohan repositorary. Saif is now at MIT and this work is a core part of the Oxygen project.

Autohan Event Engine

Research student, Andrew McNeil, implemented the first Autohan event engine and the first version of the Autohan language, based on the Cambridge Event Language.

Natural Language Input

Dr David Milward of Linguamatics is providing the link to the EEC-funded D'Homme Programme that is developing a multimodal interface to a home management system, integrating speech and graphical display.

The current early consumer products with direct natural language control implement the full language recognition internally. We will evolve this architecture so that devices can export their full grammar and vocabularly to run elsewhere in the system and then add extensions so that more than one device is controlled with a given utterance and programs can be written.

Reasoning

Lecturer Dr David Greaves is sketching out examples of where automated reasoning can show that the home has been programmed inconsistently. This may lead to new requirements on the design of the Autohan Language and extensions to the language to specify rules of consistency.

HCI and Project Psychology

Lecturer Dr Alan Blackwell is leading the human-computer interaction part of the project and also doing a study of the project development.

Last updated: Dec 2000

David.Greaves@cl.cam.ac.uk