An approach to explainable automations in daily environments

How people interact with digital technologies is currently caught between the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. In both trends, human control over technology is jeopardized. At the same time, little is happening in terms of innovating how we think and build automations. This is despite the current availability of various types of devices and modalities for supporting user interactions. This paper discusses con- cepts and methods that can be useful to address some challenges of human control over automations involving people, objects, devices, services, and robots. The goal is to identify innovative approaches to support end users, even without programming experience, to understand, create or modify the automations in their daily environ- ments, augmenting human capabilities in managing automations through effective modalities, explanations, and intelligent recommendations.