UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING

A man at Xerox PARC came up with the idea in 1988 of hundreds of computers all around us everywhere we go that are so much a part of our lives that they become invisable.  Not really, he means we take them for granted, like electricity.  We don't walk into a room and say whow, look at all the lights and power outlets, we don't even notice them.  I liked the last paper.

http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html

A brief overview of his ideas:

Ubiquitous computing was described by Mark Weiser (1991 <http://www.ubiq.com/weiser.html>) as a paradigm where computers and computing are omni-present, yet anonymous. For information technology to really reach its potential of simplifying and enriching our lives, access to computers must be available in our natural environment. It is paramount, however, that computers stay out of sight; while computers aid us in performing our tasks, we are oblivious to their presence. Ubiquitous computing is about extracting computers from their traditional desktop boxes and integrating them into the world at large. The key challenge is that of interfacing with users: to bring the computers themselves into the background, leaving users free to concentrate on accomplishing their tasks. The typical screen, keyboard, and mouse interface is not applicaple.

What are characteristics of computers in ubiquitous computing:

·         location aware

·         come in different sizes for different purposes.

What remains to enable ubiquitous computing (as described by Weiser in 1991).

·         small low-powered hardware (CPU, storage, screen).

·         ubiquitous networks (wireless and wired, mobile computing).

·         flexible, adaptable distributed systems (dynamic configuration, functionality on demand, mobile agents, mobile resources).

 The above summation was done by someone else: http://pi.nta.no/norsk/ittt/resources_files/ubicomp.html

There are some other links there but half of it is in German (I think).  An interesting link from there was to a site about a computer coffeecup that talks to the other coffeecups, the coffeepot, and the sign by the door. http://mediacup.teco.edu/

There is also a good paper about their research at Xerox (Weiser's project) at:

http://sandbox.parcxerox.com/parctab/cs19501/paper.html

IBM's systems journal has an entire issue dedicated to the topic of Ubicomp:

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj38-4.html

The cover of the journal issue has butterflies because Ubicomp will result in a metamorphasis in computing.  Some people are not so excited about the idea.  A paper relating this idea to the apocalypse, with four horsemen (softhardware, LINUX, JAVA, and highspeed serial interconnections) whose hoofbeats sound like proprietary and open standards. http://www.vita.com/vroadmap.html

A page of links is at http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/~Konomi/ubicomp.html

A good one from there is Aware Home at http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/rh-win00/main.html

This site provides useful information of how these could be used to enable the elderly to stay at home longer.  The latest thing available now in home nursing is a machine that takes vital signs and sends the info. to a nursing station to be monitored.  (From the channel nine morning show with that woman that can't sing.)  The Aware Home would offer much more.  Its a Georgia Tech project.

Washington also has a research project. See http://data.cs.washington.edu/sagres/index.htm  There is a good overview of ubiquitous computing.  If it wants a password just click cancel.  (You may have to click cancel several times as the box keeps coming up, 2-3 times).  Also they have an invisable computer project at http://portolano.cs.washington.edu click on scenarios for another Sal story but with illustrations.

An interesting story about a matchbox size web server that does everything a desktop does made from off the shelf components, 1 3/4" x 2 3/4" x 1/4" at http://www.silug.org/lists/silug-discuss/msg00964.html

The future of computing is discussed at http://www.scientificamerican.com/1999/0899issue/0899dertouzos.html  (for some reason you have to be out of frontpage to see this one, but its good) look under designing oxygen, the Handy21, Enviro21, and Net21  Click on the picture.

The two companies that are working on bringing Ubicomp products to the market are sun and microsoft.  Technical info. is at their sites.  For some reason the sun site took a long, long, long time to download earlier today, be patient.

http://www.sun.com/jini  and http://www.microsoft.com/homenet/upnp.htm

THE MOST FUN WEB SITE ON UBICOMP: is at

http://vismod.www.media.mit.edu/vismod/demos/kidsroom/kidsroom.html

The MIT people have designed a play room that is interactive and is a beginning for the Ubicomp environment of the future.  They admit that this is just a start and is not true unbicomp, similar to the first written language beginning with crude drawings made on clay tablets.

The article I chose is "The Post-PC Era", by Larry Press, in Communications of the ACM, October 1999, page 21.  Soon cell phones and pagers will be on the internet.  Next will be appliances and cars.  Devices will have scensing abilities to respond to speech, movement, heat, etc.  They will be intellegent and networked.  Chips are discussed.  Wireless LAN, phone line LAN and power line LAN will be combined for a seamless LAN.  Sun and Microsoft technologies are briefly discussed with examples of what will be possible.  Potential problems: two different technologies will have to be interoperable, privacy, regulation & oligopoly, repackaging software, reliability, infrastructure vapor, complex standards, and parochial applications.  Each of these problem areas are discussed briefly.

Thank you for a great topic Dr. Reithel.