Weiser's Vision Research Articles

In Search of an Accuracy-Tuneable Accelerator Platform for Ubiquitous Computing

Paving the way towards the realization of Mark Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing [1], the research community has made incredible advancements on several fronts. When it comes to interacting with humans, for example, computers can already use pretty much anything as a touchpad [2]. Similarly, when it comes to sensing the environment, computers can unobtrusively detect anything from a driver fatigue [3] to the presence of the queen bee in a hive [4]. When compared with these, advancements on the "core" front - the computing itself - appear to be rather orthodox and limited.

A Survey of Pervasive Displays for Information Presentation

Weiser's seminal vision of ubiquitous computing had information presentation at its heart and identified an important challenge in providing pervasive yet unobtrusive information display while avoiding problems of information overload. Since this vision was first articulated, a range of approaches have emerged for presenting information on pervasive displays, while digital screens of varying sizes have become an everyday feature of our environments. Such displays provide significant opportunities for presenting information in-situ to support users in a range of activities, and the growing expectation is that there is constant peripheral access to digital information. In this article, the authors review three different pervasive display technologies used for information presentation: traditional 2D display media, urban media facades, and novel display hardware. Their survey identifies five emerging trends that cross all three technologies: an increasing focus on situatedness, a movement toward nonexpert users, a growing demand for accessible interaction, a potential for new applications of data, and difficulty in balancing calm computing against presentation of data at an appropriate granularity and complexity. This article is part of a special issue on pervasive displays.

Societal Discussion Required? Ubicomp Products beyond Weiser's Vision

We often pay little attention to how our world has changed in the past 20 years through computing technologies, but if you walk around with open eyes, you see it everywhere. As a community, we need to be more aware of the impact and inspiration our research creates. Here, two new products--a pair of glasses to monitor cognitive activities and a sticker to monitor physical activities--are presented as examples of technologies that have a chance to make a great and positive impact on users. At the same time, these products could create controversy in society and require open discussions on what we can and should do.

Internet of things: why we are not there yet

Twenty–one years past since Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) has been written, and it is yet to be fully fulfilled despite of almost all the needed technologies already available. Still, the widespread interest in UbiComp and the results in some of its fields pose a question: why we are not there yet? It seems we miss the 'octopus' head. In this paper, we will try to depict the reasons why we are not there yet, from three different points of view: interaction media, device integration and applications.

Privacy By Design [From the Editor in Chief

Nigel Davies and Marc Langheinrich explore one of the greatest challenges in ubiquitous systemsa#x2014;how to provide smart, context-aware systems that can realize Weiser's vision while protecting users' privacy.

Looking Ahead

The breadth of topics covered in this issue, the quality of the material, and the exciting new department developments provide compelling evidence that IEEE Pervasive Computing is continuing in its mission to serve as a catalyst toward Mark Weiser's vision.

Pervasive Tabs, Pads, and Boards: Are We There Yet?

How far have we come with respect to commercial deployments of the devices Mark Weiser described? This review of Weiser's vision evaluates the commercial success of tabs, pads, and boards and discusses their real-world use.

20 Years Past Weiser: What's Next?

The paper mentions that over the past two decades, the pervasive computing field evolved through roughly three generations of research challenges. Now, the scientific community, in a new research agenda book, articulates next-generation research directions as the quest to attain Weiser's vision continues.

Twenty Years On

Ten years ago, the articles in this magazine's inaugural issue provided a snapshot of the start of the art in pervasive computing and charted the progress the field had made in the 10 years since Weiser's seminal article. To mark the 20th anniversary, this issue similarly contains a series of articles that reflect on Weiser's vision, consider how far the field has come, and ponder where we're headed.Mark Weiser, pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing

Interacting with 21st-Century Computers

This discussion reflects on four themes from Weiser's original vision from a human-computer interaction perspective: computing everywhere, personal computing, the social dimension of computing, and privacy implications. The authors review developments both in accordance with and contrasting this vision.

Digital plumbing: the mundane work of deploying UbiComp in the home

Deploying UbiComp in real homes is central to realizing Weiser's grand vision of `invisible' computing. It is essential to moving design out of the lab and making it into an unremarkable feature of everyday life. Deployment can be problematic, however, and in ways that a number of researchers have already pointed to. In this paper, we wish to complement the community's growing understanding of challenges to deployment. We focus on `digital plumbing'--i.e., the mundane work involved in installing ubiquitous computing in real homes. Digital plumbing characterizes the act of deployment. It draws attention to the work of installation: to the collaborative effort of co-situating prototypical technologies in real homes, to the competences involved, the practical troubles encountered, and the demands that real world settings place on the enterprise. We provide an ethnographic study of the work. It makes visible the unavoidable need for UbiComp researchers to develop new technologies with respect to existing technological arrangements in the home and to develop methods and tools that support the digital plumber in planning and preparing for change, in managing the contingencies that inevitably occur in realizing change, and in coordinating digital plumbing and maintaining awareness of change.

Making ubiquitous computing available

Introduction The field of ubiquitous computing was inspired by Mark Weiser's vision of computing artifacts that disappear. "They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are ind...

Foundations of Transparency in Tactile Information Design.

This paper places contemporary literature on the topic of unimodal, single-site display of information using complex tactile signals in the context of progress towards the achievement of transparent communication - placing minimal load on the user's attentional resources. We discuss recent evidence that more is possible with purely haptic display than is commonly believed, as well as procedural developments that support systematic design of transparent tactile information display; and we frame the advances required to realize significant benefits with the technology we have now. Examples used and objectives thus identified focus on establishing effective information representations, and outlining efficient tools and processes for perceptually guiding icon design. Our discussion is inspired by Weiser's vision of calm technology based on locatedness and seamless movement between center and periphery, and it is organized along the lines of potential utility, form and learning.

The LilyPad Arduino: Toward Wearable Engineering for Everyone

Electronic textiles, or e-textiles, are an increasingly important part of wearable computing, helping to make pervasive devices truly wearable. These soft, fabric-based computers can function as lovely embodiments of Mark Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing: providing useful functionality while disappearing discreetly into the fabric of our clothing. E-textiles also give new, expressive materials to fashion designers, textile designers, and artists, and garments stemming from these disciplines usually employ technology in visible and dramatic style. Integrating computer science, electrical engineering, textile design, and fashion design, e-textiles cross unusual boundaries, appeal to a broad spectrum of people, and provide novel opportunities for creative experimentation both in engineering and design. Moreover, e-textiles are cutting- edge technologies that capture people's imagination in unusual ways. (What other emerging pervasive technology has Vogue magazine featured?) Our work aims to capitalize on these unique features by providing a toolkit that empowers novices to design, engineer, and build their own e-textiles.

Mobile Synchronizing Petri Nets: A Choreographic Approach for Coordination in Ubiquitous Systems

The term Ubiquitous Computing was coined by Mark Weiser almost two decades ago. Despite all the time that has passed since Weiser's vision, ubiquitous computing still has a long way ahead to become a pervasive reality. One of the reasons for this may be the lack of widely accepted formal models capable of capturing and analyzing the complexity of the new paradigm. We propose a simple Petri Net based model to study some of its main characteristics. We model both devices and software components as a special kind of coloured Petri Nets, located in locations, that can move to other locations and synchronize with other co-located nets, offering and requesting services. We obtain an amenable model for ubiquitous computing, due to its graphical representation. We present our proposal in a progressive way, first presenting a basic model where coordination is formalized by the synchronized firing of pairs of compatible transitions that offer and request a specific service, and ad hoc networks are modeled by constraining mobility by the dynamic acquisition of locality names. Next, we introduce a mechanism for the treatment of robust security properties, namely the generation of fresh private names, to be used for authentication properties.

Middleware for pervasive and ad hoc computing

More than a decade has passed since Mark Weiser articulated his vision of a world of pervasive devices, leveraging contextual information, to provide an increasingly interactive and responsive environment to users, to aid them in their everyday activities [1]. However, despite considerable progress, the promise of pervasive computing still remains elusive. The diversity in currently available devices, networking infrastructure and information content has complicated Weiser's vision, forcing many current research and development projects to focus only on point-examples of this technology. The organisation of the workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and Ad-Hoc Computing (MPAC) has been motivated by our belief that underpinning middleware mechanisms are central in weaving together the multitude of computing, communication and information technologies. Middleware for pervasive computing and ad hoc networking provide two core research areas in this respect. In particular, pervasive computing middleware will allow you to take advantage of the resources in your environment to tailor your services and applications for seamless access and unrestricted mobility. Ad hoc networking middleware will permit the formation of ad hoc communities for new applications. However, existing middleware technologies do not fully exploit the potential of such pervasive and ad hoc environments.

UTILIZING CONTEXT HISTORY TO PROVIDE DYNAMIC ADAPTATIONS

In order to provide “intimate” and “dynamic” adaptations under Weiser's vision for ubiquitous computing environments, we propose the utilization of context history together with user modeling and machine learning techniques. Our approach supports proactive adaptations by inducing patterns of user behavior. In addition, we support the requirement for enabling the user to receive an explicit and understandable explanation when a proactive adaptation occurs in order to encourage a trust relationship between the user and the context-aware system. In this article, we describe an experiment to examine the feasibility of our approach for supporting proactive adaptations in the domain of an intelligent office environment. The initial results of our experiment are promising and demonstrate how our system could gradually learn the user's preferences for controling his office environment by making inductions from the context history. Based on these initial findings, we believe that context history has a concrete role to play in supporting proactive adaptation in a ubiquitous computing environment.

An Attention-Based Approach to Content-Based Image Retrieval

Mark Weiser's vision that ubiquitous computing will overcome the problem of information overload by embedding computation in the environment is on the verge of becoming a reality. Nevertheless today's technology is now capable of handling many different forms of multimedia that pervade our lives and as a result is creating a healthy demand for new content management and retrieval services. This demand is everywhere; it is coming from the mobile videophone owners, the digital camera owners, the entertainment industry, medicine, surveillance, the military, and virtually every library and museum in the world where multimedia assets are lying unknown, unseen and unused. The volume of visual data in the world is increasing exponentially through the use of digital camcorders and cameras in the mass market. These are the modern day consumer equivalents of ubiquitous computers, and, although storage space is in plentiful supply, access and retrieval remain a severe bottle-neck both for the home user and for industry. This paper describes an approach, which makes use of a visual attention model together with a similarity measure, to automatically identify salient visual material and generate searchable metadata that associates related items in a database. Such a system for content classification and access will be of great use in current and future pervasive environments where static and mobile content retrieval of visual imagery is required.

From Ubiquitous Computing to Ubiquitous Intelligence

If computers could be as commonplace as the written word, our everyday world would be transformed. That was the vision, announced over a decade ago, of the computer visionary Mark Weiser. In Weiser's world computers would be ubiquitous and we would interact with them almost subconsciously. This vision is currently developing, but has still some way to go. Yet Weiser's vision can be extended further, with intelligence embedded in objects ranging from mechanical components to tins. This paper outlines a future which embraces Weiser's vision but goes beyond it to a world of such intelligent devices interacting autonomously, for the benefit of people but often without human intervention. Opportunities exist, in particular for those who develop the new applications and the complex systems which support them. For the general public the greatest fearwhich needs to be allayed is a loss of privacy.

A catalyst for mobile and ubiquitous computing

We dedicate this first issue, "Reaching for Weiser's Vision," to Mark Weiser. We begin with his original 1991 article - reprinted in the print edition only - with the permission of Scientific American. We then present five invited articles by the AEICs and coauthors, each examining the state of the art in one of the five areas of pervasive computing mentioned earlier. Each article begins by crisply characterizing the relevance of its area to Weiser's vision. It then summarizes recent advances and asking if they suggest any refocusing of Weiser’s vision. Finally, the article looks out into the future and identifies the challenges ahead in its area. This issue also includes pieces in the four departments, each providing a thought-provoking report or perspective on an aspect of pervasive computing.