Philipp Moll

Zhiyi Zhang, Tianyuan Yu, Xinyu Ma et al.

Recent years have witnessed the rapid deployment of smart homes; most of them are controlled by remote servers in the cloud. Such designs raise security and privacy concerns for end users. In this paper, we describe the design of Sovereign, a home IoT system framework that provides end users complete control of their home IoT systems. Sovereign lets home IoT devices and applications communicate via application-named data and secures data directly. This enables direct, secure, one-to-one and one-to-many device-to-device communication over wireless broadcast media. Sovereign utilizes semantic names to construct usable security solutions. We implement Sovereign as a publish-subscribe-based development platform together with a prototype home IoT controller. Our preliminary evaluation shows that Sovereign provides a systematic, easy-to-use solution to user-controlled, self-contained smart homes running on existing IoT hardware without imposing noticeable overhead.

Philipp Moll, Veit Frick, Natascha Rauscher et al.

The popularity of computer games is remarkably high and is still growing every year. Despite this popularity and the economical importance of gaming, research in game design, or to be more precise, of game mechanics that can be used to improve the enjoyment of a game, is still scarce. In this paper, we analyze Fortnite, one of the currently most successful games, and observe how players play the game. We investigate what makes playing the game enjoyable by analyzing video streams of experienced players from game streaming platforms and by conducting a user study with players who are new to the game. We formulate four hypotheses about how game mechanics influence the way players interact with the game and how it influences player enjoyment. We present differences in player behavior between experienced players and beginners and discuss how game mechanics could be used to improve the enjoyment for beginners. In addition, we describe our approach to analyze games without access to game-internal data by using a toolchain which automatically extracts game information from video streams.