Pervasive Computing, Content Awareness, and RFID

1. Pervasive Computing
Roy Campbell

2. Profile of one professor
• Sussex University (Maths/Phys)
• Burroughs City of London
• University of Newcastle upon Tyne (Ph.D.,
M.S)
• UIUC
• They actually pay me to do what I like doing!

3. Advice
• Things I wished I had known as an undergrad:
• http://williamstallings.com/StudentSupport.ht
ml
• Get Involved!
• The following stories are about students who
did get involved and had articles written
about them.

4. III. Student News
• http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/articles.php?id=2006Feb2-125 (DCS student teams
place in ACM contest)
• http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/articles.php?id=2006Mar31-155 (U of I students
place 3rd in Midwest Competition)
• http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/articles.php?id=2006Apr11-161 (Two CS students
win Google Anita Borg Scholarships)
• http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/articles.php?id=2006Apr18-164 (Two students, two
faculty receive Data Engineering Award for 2006)
• http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/articles.php?id=2006May23-180 (Two CS students
receive ACM awards in Student Research Competition)
• http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/articles.php?id=2006May8-177 (Student award
winners of Second Annual Computing Habitat Competition for Siebel Center
improvement)
• http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/articles.php?id=2006Feb13-130 (PhD candidate
Danny Dig wins ACM competition)
• http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/articles.php?id=2006Dec11-220 (UIUC team
qualifies for Japan 2007 World Finals ACM-ICPC competition)

5. 2007 News:
• http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/articles.php?id=2007Sep12
(Solar-decathlon news)
• http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/articles.php?id=2007Aug3-
(I-ventures and start-ups from our undergrads)
• http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/articles.php?id=2007May8
(Computing Habitat competition winners)
• http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/news/articles.php?id=2007Apr9-
(Greg Schechter wins national Yahoo! contest -
beating out all our peer institution students!)

6. OUTLINE
• Background
• Challenges
• Ideas
• Publications
• Solutions/Projects

7. What does this mean?
• Ubiquitous
• Pervasive

8. Semantics
• Ubiquitous: Existing or being everywhere, or
in all places, at the same time; omnipresent.
• Pervasive. per- through + vadere to go
Tending to pervade, or having power to
spread throughout; of a pervading quality.
• Pervasive is a stepping stone to ubiquity.
• Does a pervasive technology become
ubiquitous when its taken for granted?

9. Post Desktop

10. Active World
• Spectrum of computation and communication
devices.
• Seamless augmentation of human thought
and activity.
• Enhance users behavioral context in an
automated mirror, virtual or mixed world.

11. Benefits
• The translation of information to/from
physical properties.
• The ability to transform data.
• The collaborative computational environment
that results from embedding devices in a
network.

12. Ethics
• How do we make sure only good things
happen?
– Surveillance
– Loss of Privacy
• Whether you study pervasive computing or
not, this is going to be one of the problems
your generation will have to solve.

13. Rapid Convergence
• Distributed • Sensing
• Networked • Robotics
• Multimedia • Multimedia
• Mobile • Wireless communications
• Embedded computing • The Internet

14. Active Space: Merging the physical &
computational infrastructures

15. Active Spaces organize networked
computer devices into a distributed system
that cooperates and coordinates its activities
with its mobile users

16. The human endeavors of creativity and
learning in areas from art, music & the
humanities to science & engineering become a
crucible for new perspectives on how
ubiquitous computing can impact society.

17. Our research on Active Spaces examines
how ubiquitous computing can support
different physical human activities, from
classroom and office activities to
entertainment and communication

18. Our project combines elements of HDTV,
sensor networks, plasma touch panels,
tracking cameras, mobile devices, speech
recognition and synthesis, and location
tracking into a rich tapestry.

19. To enable location aware applications we utilize
various location sensing technologies including
RFID, biometrics, Bluetooth, WiFi, & Ubisense™.
Ubisense represents a new class of UWB-based
sensing devices that are economic to deploy in a
building and have an accuracy of 6 inches 95% of
the time.

20. Location awareness allows ubiquitous computing
environments to tailor themselves according to
users’ preferences. Applications can follow users
as they move, content can be customized based on
users’ locations, and physical surroundings can be
customized according to their inhabitants.

21. Gaia in the classroom empowers students and
teachers with better technologies for educational
interaction and facilitates communication in a
seamless fashion encouraging students to
participate actively even in large scale class
settings.

22. We are extending the notion of Active Spaces to the
Siebel Center, our new Computer Science building,
& exploring the security concerns of ubiquitous
computing, and new ways to harness the web,
mobile devices, & location sensors into ubiquitous
context-aware environments

23. Active Buildings
• Applications for tours, exhibitions, seminars, lectures,
meetings
• Migrating, suspending, resuming sessions of interactive
tasks that implement an abstract human activity
• a programmable COTS infrastructure enabling context
sensitive applications that allow users to interact
seamlessly with a combination of physical and computer
facilities.

24. Challenges for Ubiquitous Computing
• How do we ensure that ubiquitous computing
systems fulfill their required and intended
purpose?
• How do we ensure that we can trust these
systems to perform as intended?
• How do we produce ubiquitous computing
systems efficiently and economically?

25. Active Spaces
Thank you
The Gaia Project
http://gaia.cs.uiuc.edu/
Ubisys Notes
http://ubisys.org