Specification and Verification of Complex Location Events with Panoramic

We present the design and evaluation of Panoramic, a tool that enables end-users to specify and verify an important family of complex location events. Our approach aims to reduce or eliminate critical barriers to deployment of emerging location-aware business activity monitoring applications in domains like hospitals and office buildings. Panoramic does not require users to write code, understand complex models, perform elaborate demonstrations, generate test location traces, or blindly trust deterministic events. Instead, it allows end-users to specify and edit complex events with a visual language that embodies natural concepts of space and time. It also takes a novel approach to verification, in which events are extracted from historical sensor data traces and then presented with intelligible, hierarchical visualizations that represent uncertainty with probabilities. We build on our existing software for specifying and detecting events while enhancing it in non-trivial ways to facilitate event specification and verification. Our design is guided by a formative study with 12 non-programmers. We also use location traces from a building-scale radio frequency identification (RFID) deployment in a qualitative evaluation of Panoramic with 10 non-programmers. The results show that end-users can both understand and verify the behavior of complex location event specifications using Panoramic.