A programming-by-example approach to customising digital homes

The arrival of the digital home, signals a new era for both manufacturers and consumers. It raises the possibility that people may be able to create their own unique digital home functionalities, by combining elemental network services to create sophisticated "virtual appliances" that satisfy their individual needs and desires. We present taxonomy of approaches for customising digital homes and use this to introduce a novel computational methodology, that we term 'pervasive interactive programming' (PiP), that allows non-technical end-users to build their own "virtual appliances"for customising their 'electronic environments' without the need to write program code. We show this approach is novel in that it firstly allows the user to translate mental concepts into functions (which differs to agent based approaches using historical behaviour data to form functions) and secondly it moves "programming-by-example" from single processor computers into real-time distributed embedded computing environments. Finally we report on a small evaluation which showed it was possible for non-programmers to use these tools to customise the electronic functionality of their digital homes.