User Centric and Infrastructure Aspects of Pervasive Computing

As an introduction, the known challenges of pervasive/ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) are rephrased following a categorization into five main areas, abbreviated as S.C.A.L.E. Next, the talk briefly introduces a reference architecture for UbiComp as a pragmatic way to organize UbiComp research. The emphasis is then put on two large issues addressed by the Telecooperation research group, and on the corresponding research projects:

Personal carry-on devices with support for hands-free/eyes-free use, digital identity, device federation, and context awareness; research in this area comprises hardware/software prototypes called TalkingAssistants
IR local positioning and IR smart tags & badges research
the Stairs approach (structured audio retrieval)
dynamically federated devices (some carried, some encountered on the move)
BioStore, bio-analog visualization & learning/forgetting of mass (e.g., SenseCam) data

  1. The design and harmonization of mobile AdHoc, enterprise wide, and globally scalable UbiComp infrastructures, with two research foci:

MundoCore, an event based SmallFootprint middleware for UbiComp with a programming model that harmonizes support for pub/sub, stateful (RPC) and streaming communication. MundoCore comes with distributed debugging support and 2D & 3D world models for (partly) visual programming and is the basis of all projects mentioned in the talk; MundoCore is also compatible with projects in the group about a widget-like approach to multimodal software development and
a support system for context-sensitive service discovery/orchestration, aiming at a global free market (economy) of services iClouds, infrastructure and support for mobile AdHoc applications, in particular for community networks; iClouds features, e.g., AdPass, a secure coupon distribution scheme for spreading qualified Ads and collecting rebates in infrastructure-free communities, as an example for secure community services.

The talk is intended as an introductory overview and will hopefully stimulate follow-on discussions. In case of foreseeable interest, appointments would be most welcome.

Speaker Details

Max Mühlhäuser is a Full Professor of Computer Science at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. From 2002–2004, he acted as a Dean of the Informatics Department. Max received his Doctorate in Informatics from the University of Karlsruhe and founded a research center for Digital Equipment (DEC). Since 1989, he worked as either professor or visiting professor at universities in Germany, Austria, France, Canada, and the US. Max published more than 180 articles, co-authored and edited books about computer aided authoring/learning and distributed/multimedia software engineering. He heads the Telecooperation Division and the Departmental Computing Center within the Informatics Dept., and the campus wide eLearning lighthouse research; he is co-head and currently speaker of the Information Technology Transfer Office ITO, and co-supervisor of PhD programs funded by the National Funding Agency DfG. His core research interest is development support for next generation Internet applications, mainly in the following areas: eLearning; ubiquitous/ambient/mobile computing and commerce, distributed multimedia and continuous media, multimodal interaction, hypermedia and SemanticWeb, cooperation, and ubiquitous security. The enabling technologies applied comprise distributed object-oriented programming, event-based and peer2peer infrastructures, and hypertext.

Date:
Speakers:
Max Muhlhauser
Affiliation:
Technische Universitat Darmstadt