Transcript Slide 1

The Computer for the Twenty-First
Century
Mark Weiser, ACM MCCR 1991
Part of slides are adapted from:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/courses/ubicomp-sp2007/
Rewind Back to the Late 1980s
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Bad hair was popular
Computers expensive
Macintosh had just come out
Before cell phones cheap
Before Internet widespread
• PC was the only notion of
a computer
Next Big Thing
• One of the insights that led PARC to ubicomp:
Ubicomp Also a Reaction to
Computing Trends at the Time
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Personal Computer
Laptops
Dynabooks
Knowledge Navigator
Virtual Reality
Ubicomp Influenced by Philosophy
• Martin Heidegger’s notion of
Ready-to-hand vs Present-at-hand
• When the mouse is used to complete
a task, it is an extension of your body
• When the mouse runs off the pad or the wire
obstructs motion, it becomes consciously present
as an artifact in use
Ubicomp Influenced by Anthropologists
• “From atoms to culture”
• “The most profound technologies are those that
disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric
of everyday life until they are indistinguishable
from it.”
• Technology effective when not consciously aware
– “I talked to my brother on the phone the other day”
– Driving a car
Ubicomp Technologies
Tabs, Pads, Boards
Ubicomp Technologies
Tabs, Pads, Boards
• Physical scale matters
– Inches
– Feet
– Yard
– Good reason not to switch to metric system?
Active Badges
• Identity + Room level location + Button
Active Badges
• Identity + Room level location + Button
• Relatively “simple” tech led to lots of apps
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Door opens only to right badge wearer (Bill Gates’ house)
Rooms greet people by name
Telephone calls automatically forwarded
Computer terminal can quickly your settings
(“Teleporting”)
– Automatic diary
• Having actual hardware let them experiment quickly
Some Characteristics of Ubicomp
• Embed tech into the physical world
(“Colonizing”)
– New devices leveraging familiar metaphors
Some Characteristics of Ubicomp
• Embed tech into the physical world
– New devices leveraging familiar metaphors
• Push tech into the background, invisible
– Analogy to literacy
• Artificial intelligence not needed
• Context can be very powerful
– Automatic diary, auto door open, call forwarding
• Lots of very cheap displays (inch, foot, yard)
– Lots of new interaction techniques
– Waving, writing, walking into rooms
The Sal Story
• “Coffee?”
– Coffee machine only knows “Yes” and “No”
– No other speech input devices nearby, or can
ignore
– Coffee machine knows if it has coffee grounds
inside
• “She sees electronic trails that have been
kept
for her of neighbors coming and going”
– Window has some computer vision
– Window can also display information
The Sal Story
• “She can see that [her kids] got up 15 and 20
minutes ago”
– No plausible deniability for kids anymore!
– Possibly sensors in bed, microphones in bedrooms,
or location tracking
• “She wipes her pen over the newspaper’s name,
date, section and page number and then circles
the quote. The pen sends a message to the paper,
which transmits the quote to her office”
– How does the pen know who to send to?
The Sal Story
• “[Sal] can press a code into the opener and the missing
manual will find itself”
– These days would probably be web based
• “She spots a slowdown ahead and also notices on a
side street the telltale green … of a food shop”
– Advertiser-based hardware? Install this and 10% off price?
– Or somehow configure it? Configure lots of devices?
The Sal Story
• “Sal glances out her windows: a gray day in
Silicon Valley… meanwhile it has been a quiet
morning at the East Coast office”
The Sal Story
• “The telltale by the door that Sal
programmed
her first day on the job is blinking:
fresh coffee”
– End-user programming, how to do
this in ubicomp?
– Coffee seems to be popular in
Silicon Valley 
– Fresh coffee also popular app at
PARC
The Sal Story
• “Sal picks up a tab and waves it to her friend Joe”
– Have to be careful of accidental data sharing
– How does it know what to share?
– How to differentiate if multiple people there?
• “The two have given each other access to their
location detectors and to each other’s screen
contents and location”
– How to easily configure (an area of research for me)
– Would co-workers find this acceptable? Social
conventions?
The Sal Story
• “A blank tab on Sal’s desk beeps and displays
the word “Joe”… Joe wants to discuss a
document with her, and now it shows up on
the wall”
– These days would probably be initiated via IM
– Easy to share data and talk real-time
Success of the Ubicomp Project
• Electronic whiteboards
• PDAs
• Local Area Wireless networking
• Active Badges
Stuff We Still Can’t Easily Do
• Location based services in general
• Scoreboard – public display that shows
custom information depending on who’s there
– Sports scores, news, etc
• Locating lost objects
– RFIDs
• Deployment costs, robustness, economics
What’s Missing?
• Web
– Notice no mention of the Internet, wasn’t obvious at
time
– Makes the paper feel a little dated
– Subtle difference in vision: original ubicomp about
embedded chips in everything, web services about
mass scale
• Social sciences
– Privacy
– Really compelling apps
What’s Missing?
• Do laptops still have a future in ubicomp?
– Lots of devices and somehow your data gets to them
– Laptops still central, but can easily share data
• How do cell phones fit into the ubicomp picture?
Famous Quote
• There is more information available at our
fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any
computer system, yet people find a walk among
trees relaxing and computers frustrating.
• Machines that fit the human environment instead
of forcing humans to enter theirs will make using
a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the
woods
Beyond Prototypes: Challenges in
Deploying Ubiquitous Systems
Nigel Davies and Hans-Werner Gellersen
IEEE Pervasive Computing 2002
Ubiquitous Information and Communication
• Ubiquitous computing systems are made more
possible because of:
– advances in technology
• processing power/storage
• GPS, smart cards, RFID
• social developments
• And particularly…
– World Wide Web accessibility
– Mobile communication popularity
World Wide Web
• People have become
accustomed to web portals
reducing attachment to one
device (host vs. content centric)
• People use multiple devices in a
single day to access info
• Web encouraged us dealing
with privacy issues.
Mobile Communications
• 800 million subscribers to mobile phone
services
• 23 billion SMS, heading to 1 billion per day
• Phones offer many capabilities and are now a
commodity
• SIM cards – approximate ubiquitous
computing model, but users only have one
and still have to make conscious effort.
System integration is challenging
• Technical challenges
• Social and legal issues
• Economic concerns
Technical Challenges
• Different technologies can make up ubiquitous
systems
• Might have to map between different systems
(e.g. if cameras describe view using different
location model than car’s navigational system)
• Hard to predict user intent in software
Social and Legal Challenges
• Intelligent systems might be gathering too much
personal data
• Can they discard personal information and only
return the relevant information like parking space
availability?
• What about mistakes?
• Privacy is two-way:
– May communicate other people’s information to a user
– Need to communicate user’s information to a server
Economic Concerns
• Since technologies are distinct, there are
multiple service providers
• What’s the business model for this?
• How do you ensure fair competition?
Active Bat System
• Conducted at AT&T lab. in Cambridge
• Indoor positioning system
– Using sensor and badge
Lancaster’s Guide System
• Provides visitors with tour guide information
– Based on visitor’s interest and movement
– Tablet PC + WLAN deployed around major
attractions
MediaCup Project
• University of Karlsruhe, Germany
• Cups equipped with sensors and wireless communications
Not used
Someone plays with the cup Someone
drinks
Lessons learned from deployments
• Need forums to discuss projects/results
– Most projects faced common problems of deployments,
which affected many aspects of system design
• E.g., energy concern (e.g., active badge, ParcTab, MediaCup);
sensor accuracy, etc.
• Need to understand cost vs. benefit issues
– Better understanding a business model
• Need real deployment (not just demos)
– Lab trials could be misleading in some cases..
– Help us discover new viewpoints, unearth unexpected
issues, new applications using the system..
Research Challenges for Deployments
• Component interaction
– Should be designed in an open and extensible manner
• Adaptation and contextual sensitivity
– might reconfigure applications involving multiple
components
• Appropriate management mechanism
– Unlikely occurs within the context of a single
administrative domain
Research Challenges for Deployments
• Component association and task analysis
– Accurately determine a user’s task and intention
– Develop associations between components
• Viable economic models
– A single “killer” application is unsuccessful
– Many small contributions from applications that
use the component
Research Challenges for Deployments
• User interface integration
– Need coordination between applications
– To ensure a reasonable user interface
• Privacy and security
– Empower users to evaluate the trade-off
• Protection of privacy vs. improved service
– Legislation must define the boundaries