Enabling Pervasive Computing Become Truly Pervasive

1. Enabling Pervasive Computing Become Truly Pervasive Dr. Joseph Loyall BBN Technologies Research Directions in Situational-aware Self-managed Proactive Computing in Wireless Ad hoc Networks March 3, 2009

2. What are the grand challenge applications (3 to 4) in the pervasive computing domain today? • Access to and control of all aspects of your life from anywhere • Requires constant connectivity • Not just access to e-mail and phone, but also your home, family, car, restaurant reservations, what’s happening up ahead, entertainment • Information on demand, provided proactively • Directions to where you need to go, traffic, construction and rerouting • Answers to questions in anticipation (never forget a person’s name again) • Your own personal assistant and encyclopedic knowledge at the speed of thought • Fewer devices, more intuitive interfaces • Why does the ordinary person have tiny screens; what happened to HUDs? • Why does everything need to be typed in? keyboards get smaller as our fingers get fatter.

3. What technological barriers prevent pervasive computing from becoming truly pervasive? • Don’t want to have to think in terms of devices, but instead about capabilities or functionality • Ease of use is key • Mobility is key, applications should follow you around • Still need to pull a device (cell phone, PDA, Ipod, laptop) out of your pocket, look at it, and type on it to use it • Your car is a big computer (actually lots of them), why doesn’t it take over all the duties of your computer when you get in it • Devices, connectivity, and applications seamlessly following us around as we move • Connectivity is still spotty • Why can’t our Internet connectivity move from device to device and WAP to WAP as seamlessly as our cell phone moves from tower to tower • Middleware, applications, devices need to hide the “seams” better from the user • Middleware and devices need to manage and control the limited and unreliable connectivity so that drops and degradation is hidden from the user • Interfaces • Still dominated by screens and keyboards • Proactive, autonomic computing should remove the need for much human input • Luke Skywalker didn’t type a single command into R2D2 yet got the information he needed when he needed it • Think of the success enabled by systems that captured an appropriate user metaphor • Excel, IPod, TIVO

4. What are the particular challenges from the networking and data mgmt perspectives? • Device capabilities (processing, memory, secondary store) has outstripped the available connectivity and bandwidth. • Still don’t have code mobility, WORA • It’s much better than it used to be, but you still can’t run the same apps on your PDAs as on your desktop • Still significant challenges with versions, synchronizing data, etc. • Although there are more information and services at your fingertips, it still takes effort to get what you need • It’s hard to remember life before Google, but still many situations where crafting a search query and looking through pages of results is unwieldy • Data management based on search and response, with the analysis, selection, filtering burden on the user is not conducive to pervasive computing • Information and service access are not context-aware, proactive • Computers and devices still do what you tell them to, not what you want

5. Societal issues that need to be addressed to enable people-centric design of pervasive systems?  (1/2) • Recognizing the innovation associated with some incremental achievements… • Tivo is disk IO hooked up to a TV listing interface and TV display • An integration of existing mature technologies • Yet revolutionized TV viewing (and the economics of advertising) • IPod is a disk drive, file listing, and display, and a trivial user input device • Would be unlikely to be published or funded by research funding organizations

6. Societal issues that need to be addressed to enable people-centric design of pervasive systems?  (2/2) Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping! Mediating the tension between the all purpose device versus a new device for each purpose.

7. How to re-design curriculum towards next-generation scientists with inter-disciplinary training suitable to tackle a wide spectrum of problems in pervasive computing? • Classes that combine disciplines traditionally taught separately • Middleware, operating systems • Applications that run on multiple devices, i.e., desktop and small devices • Context-aware, adaptive, network management • Classes and disciplines that focus on • The use and benefit of provided capabilities, hiding the specifics of computers • Removing complexity, increasing mobility and functionality • Simplifying human experience with computers