With the rapid development of IoT technology, IoT systems represented by smart homes have become ubiquitous. Such systems are often user-centric, which urgently requires an end-user programming paradigm in which the required systems are deployed in accordance with the end-user’s intent. First, this talk presents a mixed-methods study to determine the preferred way to express end-user intent. We found that the expression of smart home requirements can be divided into three levels of abstraction. In addition, we found that requirements at different levels of abstraction can reveal refinement relationships from the intent to the smart device operations. This may enable the intent-driven automated programming. In order to demonstrate its feasibility, the talk also proposed a method to automatically generate a device scheduling instruction sequence based on user intent and existing smart devices. This instruction sequences can serve as the scheduling logic to provide smart home services. Furthermore, this talk presents a dynamic assembly approach to generate the experience prototypes for IoT end-user programming by orchestrating user experience delivery service scenarios and context changes. This simulation synthesizes the desired system behaviors, system device behaviors, and context changes. We employ animation techniques specifically designed to the experience prototypes for allowing end-users to examine the effects of the IoT-enabled systems, thereby determining whether their intentions are satisfied. In summary, this talk highlights the importance of the environment modeling in the design of IoT systems. It carries the user’s intent, defines the device resources on which the programming depends, and can also be used to show the execution of the device scheduler.

Zhi Jin is professor of computer science at Peking University and Hongyi Visiting Professor at Wuhan University. Her main research interest is AI for SE, with a long-term focus on domain knowledge-led requirements engineering. She has published over 300 scientific articles in refereed international journals, such as IEEE T-KDE, T-SE, ACM T-OSEM, and T-CHI, and high rank conferences, such as ICSE, FSE, ASE, ACL and RE. She has co-authored five books and has held more than 30 approved invention patents. She is five times recipient of ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards. She is IEEE Fellow and CCF Fellow.