Team Computing: TeC

In many of application domains of mixed reality, system requirements are too personalized, too specific to circumstances, and may change too often to make the approach of hiring engineers to make every change economically feasible or even fast enough to be useful.  Thus, current systems have been perceived as rigid by end users and domain specialists, as engineers struggle to address unclear and conflicting requirements compounded by requests for changes after a system is deployed.

This line or research concerns TeC, a framework for end-user design, deployment, and evolution of applications for ubiquitous computing.  TeC is meant for a range of end users, from home owners to domain experts, such as facility administrators and health-care professionals.

To become accessible to end users, TeC departs from an algorithmic view of computing in favor of a declarative view similar to spreadsheets.  In the latter, there is no algorithm or “main” program: all formulas are asynchronously recalculated whenever the values they refer to are updated.  Similarly, computation and communications in TeC are triggered asynchronously and overall system behavior is emergent.

 

See related publications.