What should adaptivity mean to interactive software programmers?

Abstract

Works about adaptability and adaptivity in interactive systems cover very different issues (user adaptation, context-aware systems, ambient intelligence, ubiquitous computing), not always with the explicit goal of supporting programmers. Based on examples that highlight how weakly discriminative the present terminology is, we propose to separate two concerns: adaptivity as a purely analytical concept, relative to a given viewpoint on the software rather than to its very structure, and its programming as a non specific case of reactive behavior. We describe how simple adaptive behaviors can be programmed with simple interactive behavior patterns, and how more complex patterns can be introduced for intelligent adaptation. Finally we describe an application where, relying on the principles exposed in this paper, interaction and adaptation are combined in a simple and innovative manner.