Applying commonsense to augment user interaction in an intelligent environment

In this paper, we present a system that augments user interaction to elicit intelligence of a living room adorned with aware artefacts. These artefacts are computationally augmented everyday objects, like a phone, a light, a TV, etc., which are enabled to communicate their operational states among themselves. The operational state of an artefact is usually changed to another state as a result of an interaction by the user. Our system augments such interactions by improvising other spatially correlated artefacts with the help of commonsense knowledge. For example, if a user picks up a ringing phone while the TV is on, the system either mutes or reduces the TV volume. In this case the phone's state is changed to "in use" state due to deliberate interaction of the user and simultaneously the state of the TV may be changed to "mute" or "low volume" by the system. Such idea of augmenting user interaction has been elaborated in this paper. We present the computational model and the implementation detail of our approach and also demonstrate its feasibility through an informal user study.