Lecturer:Michael O'Grady

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Mobile Computing

• Lecturer Michael O'Grady
• Course MSc Ubiquitous Multimedia Systems
• Unit UMS 1 Context Sensitive Service Delivery
• Lecture 1

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Objectives

• Introduce Mobile computing
• Outline Context-aware computing
• Outline Wearable computing
• Present an overview of some prominent research
  projects and initiatives

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Chronological History - I

• Phase 1 - Desktop to Laptop
• Replicated the work environment
• Initially used at home (static)
• Later, used on trains etc (mobile)
• batteries became more powerful
• Popular with sales marketing
• Compromised by
• lack of access to real-time/up-to-date information

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Chronological History - II

• Phase 2 - augmentation via wireless telephony
• Mobile computing now a discipline in its own
  right
• Various attempts to formalize the issues involved
• Communications, mobility, portability (Forman,
  1994)
• Disconnection, latency (Kleinrock, 1996)
• nomadically enabled systems
• Problem How to differentiate Mobile computing
  from other paradigms.

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Chronological History - III

• Four constraints that characterize Mobile
  Computing (Satyanarayanan, 1996)
• Mobile elements are resource poor relative to
  static elements
• resource bandwidth gap
• Mobility is increasing hazardous
• security, privacy, dropping the laptop!
• Mobile connectivity is highly variable in
  performance and reliability
• Mobile elements rely on a finite energy source

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Chronological History - IV

• Phase 3 - Downsizing to the PDA
• Limitations that characterize laptops even more
  prominent
• Limited screen size
• limited possibilities for interaction - stylus
• no hard disk
• limited memory
• Challenge Develop software that will run under
  such circumstances while meeting user
  expectations!

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Chronological History - V
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Software Implications

• Operating Systems
• Windows CE
• Linux
• Symbian
• Software Development
• C
• Java
• Question Does the classic software engineering
  lifecycle apply to mobile computing applications?
• Problem Desktop metaphor does not apply to
  mobile users!

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Some Design Principles

• Interfaces should be intuitive and responsive
• Applications should be customizable to the
  capabilities of target devices and wireless
  networks
• Local processing and storage should be used
  judiciously
• Intelligent use should be made of the users
  context e.g. location etc
• Only relevant content should be provided
• Caseres et al 2002

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Ubiquitous Computing (UC)

• Mark Weiser
• 1988 - 1993
• Xerox Parc
• The Desktop Metaphor
• Could computer be actually embedded in the desk?
• The Signpost Analogy
• people do not log into signposts!
• Goal make computing as common and intuitive to
• use as a signpost!

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Two Pioneering Applications

• Active Badges
• Roy Want, Andy Hopper, Veronica Falcao, Jonathon
  Gibbons, "The Active Badge Location System", ACM
  Transactions on Information Systems, Vol. 10, No.
  1, pp 91-102, January 1992.
• ParcTab
• Roy Want, Bill Schilit, Norman Adams, Rich Gold,
  David Goldberg, Karin Petersen, John Ellis, Mark
  Weiser. An Overview of the ParcTab Ubiquitous
  Computing Experiment. IEEE Personal
  Communications, December 1995, Vol. 2 No.6,
  pp28-43.

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Active Badges

• Olivetti Research Lab
• now part of ATT laboratories
• 1992
• Problem How to track people in a large
  organization
• Solution - electronic tags
• emits unique code every ten of second
• code picked up by a network of sensors in
  building
• master station polls sensors and makes
  information available
• Infra-red (IR) used for signaling
• but problems with poor position granularity and
  scalability
• Next generation termed Active Bats (sonic waves)

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Four Generations of the Active Badge
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Active Badge Sensor
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ParcTab

• Xerox Parc
• 1995
• palm sized computer
• Infra-red network (connected to a LAN)
• IR used for communication and positioning
• nanocells (usually coincided with a room)
• Characteristics
• Three buttons
• touch screen
• LCD monochrome display (128 x 64 pixels)
• speaker
• wireless communications (19.2 kb/s)

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ParcTab
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UC Some Research Directions

• Location-sensing technologies
• GPS outdoors
• indoors ???
• Pseudolites a possibility
• Sensor networks
• ad-hoc networking
• Wireless sensor networks
• Data networks
• WLAN
• 3G

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Introducing Context

• "the interrelated conditions in which something
  exists or occurs (Oxford Dictionary )
• " Who you are, whom you are with and what
  resources are nearby (Schilit, 1994)
• "knowledge about the users and IT devices
  state, including surroundings, situation and, to
  a lessor extent location" (Schmidt, 1999)
• "the set of environmental states and settings
  that either determines an applications behaviour
  or in which an application event occurs and is
  interesting to the user (Chen, 2000)

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Examples of Context

• Location orientation
• lighting
• noise level
• network connectivity
• communications bandwidth
• communication cost
• social situation
• etc etc etc

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Classification of Context

• Two Categories (Schmidt, 1998)
• Human factors
• user details
• social environment
• current task
• Physical Environment
• user location
• available infrastructure
• physical conditions

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Context-aware Applications - I

• Classification (Schilit, 1994)
• Proximate Selection
• A user interface technique where objects located
  nearby are emphasized or otherwise made easier to
  choose. For example, consider an electronic
  yellow pages that, when consulted, sorts its
  entries according to distance from the user.
• Automatic contextual reconfiguration
• A process of adding new components, removing
  existing components or altering the connection
  between components due to context changes.

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Context-aware Applications - II

• Contextual information and commands
• Different results are produced according to the
  context in which they are issued.
• Context-triggered actions
• Simple IF_THEN rules used to specify how
  context-aware systems should adapt.

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Context Some thoughts

• What about the prevailing situation at the time
  of context capture?
• What about the context that was not captured?
• Can all contextual states be captured?
• Can all contextual states be even identified?

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Wearable Computing

• Origins debatable
• 1960s
• Thorpe Shannon
• Objective to predict roulette
• Odds improved by up to 44
• devices finally banned by Nevada State
• Steve Mann
• Father of wearable computing
• MIT wearable computing project
• In a nutshell -
• conventional computing paradigms have failed and
  that another, namely wearable computing, is
  needed to "restore the technological balance
  between people and their environments"

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Definition of Wearable Computing

• Three Operational Modes
• Constancy
• Augmentation
• Mediation
• Six Fundamental Attributes
• Unmonopolizing
• Unrestrictive
• Observable
• Controllable
• Attentive
• Communicative

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Alternative Definition

• "pursuit of a style of interface as opposed to a
  manifestation in hardware,
• Starner, 2001.
• Augmented reality defining characteristic
• Kortuem, 1998
• Augmented Reality
• Origins in the 1960s
• 1990s a research field in its own right
• Supplements the real world with objects that
  appear to coexist in the same space as the real
  world

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Example of a Wearable Computer
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Future Directions

• The Disappearing Computer
• Ambient Intelligence
• Autonomic Computing
• Sentient Computing
• Proactive Computing
• Amorphous Computing

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The Disappearing Computer

• European IST program
• Future Emergent Technology (FET)
• Lanuched 2001
• Duration 2/3 years
• 16 projects
• Overall Objective how can everyday life be
  supported and enhanced through the use of
  collections of interacting objects
• Development of new tools and methods for
  embedding computation into everyday objects
• Research on how new use and functionality can
  emerge from collections of interacting artefacts
• Ensuring that the user's experience is coherent
  and engaging in both a spatial and temporal sense

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Ambient Intelligence

• Convergence of three technologies
• Ubiquitous Computing
• Ubiquitous communications
• Intelligent user interfaces
• Motivation as the number of devices increases,
  intelligent interfaces are needed for the
  comfort, health and sanity of the average user
• Such interfaces are envisaged as being embedded
  in everyday objects

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Autonomic Computing

• Industry initiative - IBM
• Paradox - hardware costs are falling yet total IT
  costs are rising
• Reason Complexity of modern software
• Objective specify design principles by which
  complexity may be reduced and managed
• self-healing
• self-optimizing
• self-configuring
• self-protecting
• Envisages autonomic network operating in an
  heterogeneous environment, being platform
  agnostic and adhering to open standards

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Sentient Computing

• Proposed by ATT laboratories
• System model environment via a sensor network
• Behavior is modified according to changes in the
  environment
• Environment is the user Interface
• users action form the single modality of
  interaction

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Proactive Computing

• Industry initiative (Intel)
• aims to move from human-centric to
  human-supervised computing
• Motivation As computer number increases,
  competition for human attention (a scarce
  resource) increases
• Solution remove people from the control loop
  wherever possible
• Proactive Systems will
• operate autonomously
• anticipate user needs
• respond to user needs

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Amorphous Computing

• Proposition Use biological principles as a basis
  for understanding the behavior of large
  organizations
• Objective Obtain a vision of how coherent
  behavior can be obtained from a large number of
  elements that are interconnected in unknown,
  irregular and time varying ways

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Other Interesting Projects

• OXYGEN (MIT)
• Ubiquitous Computing systems will be as pervasive
  and necessary as Oxygen
• inHaus (Germany)
• Intelligent buildings and homes
• EQUATOR (UK)
• how to integrate the physical world with the
  virtual

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Required Reading

• Pervasive Computing Visions Challenges, M.
  Satyanarayanan, IEEE Personal Communications,
  August 2002.
• There is more to Context than Location, A.
  Schmidt, M. Beigl, H. Gellersen
• Some problems with the notion of context-aware
  computing, Communications of the ACM
  archiveVolume 45 , Issue 2 (February 2002)

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Exercise

• Explore the notion of context further.
• Identify some exemplar examples of context-aware
  applications on the WWW.
• Use IEEE/SpringerLink/Science Direct
• Identify one and prepare to share your views on
  it with the class. Date to be confirmed!

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The End