A little bit about Alvin Chin and his research

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A little bit about Alvin Chin and his research
Alvin Chin PhD student Computer Systems
Group Dept. of Computer Sciencehttp//www.cs.toro
nto.edu/achin achin_at_cs.toronto.edu
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Background

• PhD student (1st year) with Eyal de Lara
• Aka Gadget Man
• Graduated from Masters in Electrical and Computer
  Engineering, June 2004, University of Waterloo
• Bachelors in Computer Engineering, 1999,
  University of Waterloo
• Website http//www.the-gadgetman.com for more
  info about me!

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Research Interests

• Pervasive or ubiquitous computing
• accessing information anytime, anywhere on any
  device blended into a human, non-obtrusive,
  ubiquitous environment
• conceive a new way of thinking about computers,
  one that takes into account the human world and
  allows the computers themselves to vanish into
  the background
• Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21st
  Century, Scientific American, 1991.
• Is pervasive computing new?

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What is pervasive computing?
M. Satyanarayanan, Pervasive Computing
Vision and Challenges, IEEE Personal
Communications, August 2001.
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Objective of Research

• Want to make computing environment easier to use
  in our everyday lives everyday computing
• Things still too complicated in our world
• Problem is that we have to adapt to computers
• Should be other way around

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Areas of interest

• Context-awareness
• Adding context from physical environment to
  computer environment to infer user behaviour
• Bridge the gap between human and computer
• Eg. Location
• Personalization
• Customized according to what you want
• profiling

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Areas of interest

• Human-computer interaction
• A bit of HCI, human-computer interfaces
• Mobile, wireless computing
• 802.11, Bluetooth, roaming
• Semantic web
• Wearable computing
• Smart environments
• Recall Minority Report movie

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Current Research

• Community-Driven Adaptation (Alvin Chin, Iqbal
  Mohomed, Jim Cai, Eyal de Lara)
• Users have different perception as to how they
  view content, what may be considered good quality
  for one may not be for the other
• Our research intends to investigate the
  feasibility of adapting images and content to an
  optimal fidelity that will provide for a personal
  rich interaction experience for a community of
  users.
• We need users for our study, if interested,
  please contact me!

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Current Research

• Investigating User Mobility for Ad-Hoc Networks
  (Alvin Chin, Jing Su, Ashvin Goel, Eyal de Lara)
• Current mobility studies use theoretical models
  and/or some kind of randomized movement
• View time as a propagation factor, not networking
  feature
• Use real user mobility, not simulation
• Study equipped users with Palm Tungsten T
  Bluetooth devices and detected pair-wise
  communications
• Results network can exist, a node can reach
  other nodes even though it does not directly
  contact it

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Previous Research

• Service invocation and roaming in pervasive
  computing (Alvin Chin, Kostas Kontogiannis)
• Masters thesis at University of Waterloo
• How to dynamically invoke services and continue
  to access them when moving to a different
  location or network

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PhD Thesis

• Still in investigation phase
• Would like to combine HCI, wearable computing,
  context-awareness, smart environments areas with
  pervasive computing focus

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Comments, Feedback?

• I value and appreciate any feedback on my
  research
• achin_at_cs.toronto.edu
• http//www.the-gadgetman.com