Human-centric Mechanism Design for Ubiquitous Systems and Applications

With the proliferation of communication technologies and mobile electronic devices, there is a fast growing need of ubiquitous applications. However, designing ubiquitous applications faces a lot of challenges, and many of them actually comes from human rather than from computers. In order to handle the challenges, system designers must provide a human-centric protocol that specifies the rules of the system. The process of designing such protocols is not an easy task, especially in a distributed environment where there are a large variety of devices with different capabilities, or when users have disparate interests on their own. The goal of the paper is to present the need to develop a theory for providing fundamental methodologies in designing human-centric ubiquitous systems and applications.