Yesterday and today I've been attending the latest workshop on grand challenges in Ubicomp at Imperial College - very cool stuff - lots of neat talks
some ideas and pointers while listening
for early computer mediated art in a ubicomp environment, see the Cybernetic Serendipity show at the ICA which I was lucky enough to attend in 1968- I have a copy of the awesome book produced for the exhibition (which featured a very young Nicholas Negroponte amongst others).
On ubicomp sensors for healthcare (great talk by Guang-Zhong Yang - the E-AR sensor is extremely cool way to measure gait etc) - while I am impressed by the creativity of the sensor devices, we are still a LONG way from something that carers or patients will be able to deploy affordably - we cannot scavenge power yet realistically (probably not for 5-10 years) and wires or replacing or recharging batteries every few weeks for a 100 devices is already annoying enough for all the remote controls around a house, let alone life-critical stuff - I suppose if we made the devices provide a useful summary healthcare report for a health visitor (including a reminder of when to replace batteries) that might work - this could work like "Alertme"s home monitoring stuff via GPRS and SMS - reminds me of an idea I had for putting a zigbee beacon inside a battery that would give you a ubicomp location service for all the devices with batteries by default AND would remind you when the battery need recharging (and would let you find missing remote controls under the sofa:)
another cool application of the EAR device would be for monitoring children in "at risk" homes...
Privacy keeps popping its head above the parapet - we design devices and then blame users for misusing them (I think how many people hold strictly private conversatiosn at the top of their voice in public places (the train) on a cell phone - how often you hear stories of people revealing lots of embarassing facts on facebook) - my solution (Tim Kindberg tells me this is called a "privacy mirror") is to show people the "anti-social" network of peopel that can witnes this event _before_ they make this mistake - e.g. as you make a cell phone call, a voice (of someone you don't know) is played back on the phone repeating something you said earlier to remind you who might hear - and as you add a photo to facebook, a list of people more than (say) three hops away in your friends-of-friends-of-friends graph, pops up who could see this photo (preferably people with no common affiliatin, but with common interests, say).
trust is slippery stuff - If a computer A trusts a computer B and B trusts C, then we have GNY/BAN logic to reason about trust (or we can build other trust logics, e.g. interval arithmetic based or bayes based). If a person "trusts" a person, what can we infer about transitivity, associativity etc? not a lot - but social anthropology has things to say on this and we should listen! If my friend Richard thinks Ruth is his friend is Ruth stranger than Richard, to me, as Robert Wyatt once asked?
Jon Bird reminded us that the ludic mode of research (e.g. driven by art) is very valuble in exploring areas of the ubicomp (and other) design space that a purely tech/biz driven approach might not reach (he also had some really cool videos from art from 25 years ago - viz David Rokeby aweome video) and the bit from Monty Python's Life of Brian abut "what did the roman's do for us" which (given situation in Gaza right now) ends with the list of "roads, law, aquaducts, hot baths .... oh, and peace..."
which reminds me of one of my fave XKCD's - see
Alice and Bob etc
maginc new interfaces - see also, dasher:-
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/
and also spoof on
apple spinwheel
On programme properties, what is the relationship between Prism and Microsoft research's (byron cooke et al)'s Terminator programme?
Meanwhile, in Steve Hodge's neat talk, I was reminded that teenagers have telepathy (only 1 bit) that tells them when a friend is about to call or when its a parent so they can turn on (off) their cell phone:)
Steve's key point is that if we do a mindmap of WSN, we find that although a lot of peopel list ad hoc and mobile and multihop/decentralised/self* as key components, the most common applications AND sensor systems are
a) centralised/infrastructure oriented
b) not mobile (particularly)
think remote controls, games and cell phones
i.e the academic obsession with the technically challenging and interesting problems that are roughly grouped under MANET (and maybe DTN) are not relevant to many realworld deployments. (I made this point a while back about most of the projects in the EPSRC WINES programme of research - not only are almost all of them completely diferent (i.e. they are good because they are use-case driven) almost none has a multi-hop radio net or a self-orgnaising system or even any mobility:) Yet they are all good examples of UbiComp.
Day 2 kicked off well with a total power failure at Euston Station. Meanwhile, Wendy Mackay made it from Paris in time to talk about InterLiving - situated UbiComp experiment in everyday life - a lot of the 2nd day talks are more either living or about trust. Tim Kindberg discussed many of th failures of trust in "invisible computing".
Why not put a webcam on the wifi hotspot router and then it could put up a picture of you when it is authorizing your access, and you get to see that it is "physically" actually the router you can see (line of sight:)
Also present in talks was art and politics!
A nice taxonomy of "mobiel art" by Martin Reiser - lots of good gadget ideas here (similar to Jon Bird's and some of the outer scope ideas by Steve Hodges). One work is called the Third WOman and is a mobile installation in Vienna (after the Third Man - graham green/orson welles movie) _ would be neat to add a sound track by Joan as Policewoman and make it the Third Policewoman:)
Next session was two more trust talks:- Palamidessi on Bayesian trust infernecing, and Ian Brown on law.
Last talk I stayed for was Robin Milner, looking at the bigraph work on space/motion in large systems (see his new book! relevant work
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