Seminar Report 12

Ubiquitous Computing

CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION 2. HISTORY OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING 3. OVERVIEW AND BACKGROUND 4. INFRASTRUCTURE OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING 5. VISION AND APPLICATIONS OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING 6. EXAMPLES OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING 7. CONCLUSION 8. REFERENCES

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1. INTRODUCTION

Computers are everywhere. Making many computers available throughout the physical environment, while making them effectively invisible to the user. Ubiquitous computing is held by some to be the Third Wave of computing. The First Wave was many people per computer, the Second Wave was one person per computer. The Third Wave will be many computers per person. Ubiquitous computing is a relatively new area of Computer Science that has attracted quite a bit of attention over the past few years. It involves the emergence and subsequent disappearance of new technology. What this means is that to take the next step into the future of computing, we must develop technologies that allow the computer to become invisible to the person using it. Interaction should be as straightforward and nontrivial as any other everyday task one might perform; the "computer" is invisible. Ubiquitous computing is unusual amongst technological research arenas. Ubiquitous computing, by contrast, encompasses a wide range of disparate technological areas brought together by a focus upon a common vision. It is driven, then, not so much by the problems of the past but by the possibilities of the future. Ubiquitous computings vision, however, is over a decade old at this point, and we now inhabit the future imagined by its pioneers. The future, though, may not have worked out as the field collectively imagined. Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. Alan Kay of Apple calls this "Third Paradigm" computing. Three key technical issues are: power consumption, user interface, and wireless connectivity.

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2. HISTORY OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING

The father of Ubiquitous Computing is Mark Weiser, the current Chief Technologist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Dr. Weiser envisions an environment where each person has hundreds of computers attached to their person, perhaps in their clothing. The computers would monitor environmental conditions, and location of oneself and other people. They will track external objects and events. They will also monitor internal conditions, such as heart rate and stress level. They can help the hearing and visually impaired, and even allow mentally challenged individuals to operate in society. It will do all this in a way that is very subtle and human. Voice, gestures, and facial expressions will all be common interfaces. Worthy on note, Weiser is also a member of the first live band on the internet, Severe Tire Damage. Another figure worthy of mention is Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the Media Lab at MIT. Many of his writings in the late 70s influenced a general shift in perceived paradigms, most notably in Mark Weiser. He is credited as a founding father of ubiquitous computing, but never actually acknowledged the particular term. Mark Weiser coined the phrase "ubiquitous computing", during his tenure as Chief Technologist of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Both alone and with John Seely Brown, Weiser wrote some of the earliest papers on the subject, largely defining it and sketching out its major concerns.Recognizing that the extension of processing power into everyday scenarios would necessitate understandings of social, cultural and psychological phenomena beyond its proper ambit, Weiser was influenced by many fields outside computer science, including "philosophy, phenomenology, anthropology, psychology, post-Modernism, sociology of science and feminist criticism." He was explicit about "the humanistic origins of the invisible ideal in post-modernist thought'", referencing as well the ironically dystopian Philip K. Dick novel Ubik.

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3. OVERVIEW AND BACKGROUND

Ubiquitous Computing is the idea that computers can be everywhere, infiltrating and permeating our everyday lives. The idea is that these computers require little or no interaction from the human, in fact, the user is not even aware that the computer is there. Each user may have hundreds of computers at his or her disposal, each carrying out some task in response to its environment. To discuss exactly what ubiquitous computing entails and areas it covers, we must examine what computing paradigms we have implemented thus far and what this gives us to build upon. The earliest computing involved many users interacting with a single mainframe computer. To make computing somewhat more accessible, we quickly progressed to desktop computing, where each person has a personal computer on his or her desktop, a one on one interaction. The idea now is to progress beyond the desktop, to make computing available at any time or place and to integrate it so closely to our everyday lives, that we are not even conscious of the interaction. We surround ourselves with so many computers, each carrying out the more mundane tasks of our daily routines, that we soon become oblivious to their presence. There are many technologies that we use every day for which we have already reached ubiquity. Take electricity, for example. From the time we get up in the morning and turn off the alarm clock to the time we go to bed at night when we shut out the light, we are constantly using electricity. Almost everything we do requires it. It completely surrounds us literally - for it is in the walls, the outdoor power lines, and even in the ground. Yet rarely are we ever aware of it. Aside from the notion of plugging in an appliance to get power, we never think of how that power actually works. We do not think about volts, amperes, or whether it is an alternating or direct current. It does not need to be configured or booted, and we do not think to tinker with it except to turn it on or off. When we go about our daily routine, we do not even acknowledge its presence However, we certainly know when it is NOT there, for when the power goes out, we are rendered virtually useless. This is the point we want to get to with computing. It is so tightly involved and intrinsic to our everyday lives, that we effectively ignore its presence.

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The fig shows the difference between ubiquitous computing and other computings.

Fig: 3.1

3.1 THE UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING PHILOSOPHY

This new technology aims for the flexibility of a far simpler and more ubiquitous technology: printed text. Depending on the need, print can be large or small, trivial or profound, verbose or concise. But though print surrounds us in myriad forms, it does not dominate our thoughts the way computers do today. We do not need to log on to road signs to use them or turn away from our colleagues to jot notes on a pad of paper. Similarly, ubiquitous computers would demand less of our concentration than present commercial computer interfaces that require users to sit still and focus their attention. Yet through casual interaction they would provide us with more information and all the advantages of an intelligently orchestrated and highly connected computer system. Creating such an intuitive and distributed system requires two key ingredients: communication and context. Communication allows system components to share information about their status, the user and the environment---that is, the context in which they are operating. Specifically, context information might include such elements as: The name of the user's current location;

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The identities of the user and of other people nearby; The identities and status of the nearby printers, workstations, Live boards, coffee machines, etc.; Physical parameters such as time, temperature, light level and weather conditions.

The combination of mobile computing and context communications can be a powerful one .Consider, for example, an employee who wants to show a set of figures to his manager. As he approaches her office, a quick glance at his tab confirms that the boss is in and alone. In the midst of their conversation, the employee uses the tab to locate the data file on the network server and to request a printout. The system sends his request by default to the closest printer and notifies him when the job is finished. Many more examples of the Ubiquitous Computing philosophy are presented in Mark Weiser's article ``The Computer of the 21st Century.

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4. INFRASTRUCTURE OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING

Attaining the goals of Ubiquitous Computing will require a highly sophisticated infrastructure. In the ideal system, a real-time tracking mechanism will derive the locations and operational status of many system components and will use that context to deliver messages more intelligently. Users will be able to choose from among a variety of devices to gain mobile, high-bandwidth access to data and computational resources anywhere on the network. These devices will be intuitive, attractive and responsive. They will automatically adapt their behavior to suit the current user and context.

Although one can speculate about the design of a future system, unfortunately the components needed to build such an infrastructure have yet to be invented. Current processors and microcontrollers are slow and power-hungry compared to their likely descendants 10 years from now. We reasoned that we could bridge this technology gap by constructing an operational system that resembles an optimal design. Despite the inevitable compromise of some engineering characteristics, we could then use the system to assess the advantages and disadvantages of Ubiquitous Computing as if we had glimpsed into the future.

It is impossible to predict the range of device forms and capabilities that will be available a decade from now. We therefore based our device research on size, a factor that is likely to continue to divide computers into functional categories. A useful metaphor that highlights our approach is to consider the traditional English units of length: the inch, foot and yard. These units evolved because they represent three significantly different scales of use from a human perspective.

Devices on the inch scale, in general, can be easily attached to clothing or carried in a pocket or hand.

Foot-sized devices can also be carried, though probably not all the time. We expect that office workers will use foot-sized computers similar to the way that they use notebooks today. Some notebooks are personal and are carried to a particular place for a particular purpose. Other notepads are scattered

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throughout the work environment and can be used by anyone for any purpose.

In the future office there will be computers with yard-sized screens. These will probably be stationary devices analogous to whiteboards today.

Fig: 4.1

4.1 UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING PHILOSOPHY AT PARCS

Researchers at PARC have built computer systems at the three scales described above :

These experimental devices use different mechanisms for communication and computation within the building's distributed system. The Liveboard is not mobile and connects directly to an Ethernet. Our mobile devices extend battery life by using lowpower communication technologies: infrared (IR) signalling for the PARCTAB and nearfield radio for the PARCPAD . They have also investigated how operating system design

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can reduce power consumption and this is well suited to mobile computers. The PARCPAD and Liveboard are described elsewhere by Kantarjiev and Elrod.

Goals for the PARCTAB project were:

To design a mobile hardware device, the PARCTAB , that enables personal communication;

To design an architecture that supports mobile computing; To construct context-sensitive applications that exploit this architecture; To test the entire system in an office community of about 41 people acting as both users and developers of mobile applications

Ubiquitous computing is the method of enhancing computer use by making many computers available throughout the physical environment, but making them effectively invisible to the user. Since they started this work at Xerox PARC in 1988, a number of researchers around the world have begun to work in the ubiquitous computing framework. Ubiquitous computing offers a framework for new and exciting research across the spectrum of computer science. A few places in the world have begun work on a possible next generation computing environment in which each person is continually interacting with hundreds of nearby wirelessly interconnected computers. The point is to achieve the most effective kind of technology, that which is essentially invisible to the user. To bring computers to this point while retaining their power will require radically new kinds of computers of all sizes and shapes to be available to each person. I call this future world "Ubiquitous Computing" (short form: "Ubicomp") .The research method for ubiquitous computing is standard experimental computer science: the construction of working prototypes of the necessary infrastructure in sufficient quantity to debug the viability of the systems in everyday use, using ourselves and a few colleagues as guinea pigs. This is an important step towards insuring that infrastructure research is robust and scalable in the face of the details of the real world.

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Ubiquitous Computing

The idea of ubiquitous computing first arose from contemplating the place of today's computer in actual activities of everyday life. In particular, anthropological studies of work life taught that people primarily work in a world of shared situations and unexamined technological skills. However the computer today is isolated and isolating from the overall situation, and fails to get out of the way of the work. In other words, rather than being a tool through which we work, and so which disappears from our awareness, the computer too often remains the focus of attention. And this is true throughout the domain of personal computing as currently implemented and discussed for the future, whether one thinks of PC's, palmtops, or dynabooks. The characterization of the future computer as the "intimate computer" or "rather like a human assistant" makes this attention to the machine itself particularly apparent.

Fig: 4.2 Getting the computer out of the way is not easy. This is not a graphical user interface (GUI) problem, but is a property of the whole context of usage of the machine and the affordances of its physical properties: the keyboard, the weight and desktop position of screens, and so on. The problem is not one of "interface". For the same

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reason of context, this was not a multimedia problem, resulting from any particular deficiency in the ability to display certains kinds of realtime data or integrate them into applications. (Indeed, multimedia tries to grab attention, the opposite of the ubiquitous computing ideal of invisibility). The challenge is to create a new kind of relationship of people to computers, one in which the computer would have to take the lead in becoming vastly better at getting out of the way so people could just go about their lives. In 1988, when they started PARC's work on ubiquitous computing, virtual reality (VR) came the closest to enacting the principles we believed important. In its ultimate envisionment, VR causes the computer to become effectively invisible by taking over the human sensory and affector systems . VR is extremely useful in scientific visualization and entertainment, and will be very significant for those niches. But as a tool for productively changing everyone's relationship to computation, it has two crucial flaws: first, at the present time (1992), and probably for decades, it cannot produce a simulation of significant verisimilitude at reasonable cost (today, at any cost). This means that users will not be fooled and the computer will not be out of the way. Second, and most importantly, it has the goal of fooling the user -- of leaving the everyday physical world behind. This is at odds with the goal of better integrating the computer into human activities, since humans are of and in the everyday world. Ubiquitous computing is exploring quite different ground from Personal Digital Assistants, or the idea that computers should be autonomous agents that take on our goals. The difference can be characterized as follows. Suppose you want to lift a heavy object. You can call in your strong assistant to lift it for you, or you can be yourself made effortlessly, unconsciously, stronger and just lift it. There are times when both are good. Much of the past and current effort for better computers has been aimed at the former; ubiquitous computing aims at the latter. The approach was to attempt the definition and construction of new computing artifacts for use in everyday life. I took my inspiration from the everyday objects found in offices and homes, in particular those objects whose purpose is to capture or convey information. The most ubiquitous current informational technology embodied in artifacts is the use of written symbols, primarily words, but including also pictographs, clocks, and other sorts of symbolic communication. Rather than attempting to reproduce
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these objects inside the virtual computer world, leading to another "desktop model" ,instead they wanted to put the new kind of computer also out in this world of concrete information conveyers. The physical affordances in the world come in all sizes and shapes; for practical reasons our ubiquitous computing work begins with just three different sizes of devices: enough to give some scope, not enough to deter progress. The first size is the wall-sized interactive surface, analogous to the office whiteboard or the home magnet-covered refrigerator or bulletin board. The second size is the notepad, envisioned not as a personal computer but as analogous to scrap paper to be grabbed and used easily, with many in use by a person at once. The cluttered office desk or messy front hall table are real-life examples. Finally, the third size is the tiny computer, analogous to tiny individual notes or PostIts, and also like the tiny little displays of words found on book spines, lightswitches, and hallways. Again, I saw this not as a personal computer, but as a pervasive part of everyday life, with many active at all times. I called these three sizes of computers, respectively, boards, pads, and tabs, and adopted the slogan that, for each person in an office, there should be hundreds of tabs, tens of pads, and one or two boards. This then is phase I of ubiquitous computing: to construct, deploy, and learn from a computing environment consisting of tabs, pads, and boards. This is only phase I, because it is unlikely to achieve optimal invisibility. (Later phases are yet to be determined). But it is a start down the radical direction, for computer science, away from attention on the machine and back on the person and his in the world of work, play, and home.

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4.2. HARDWARE PROTOTYPES

New hardware systems design for ubiquitous computing has been oriented towards experimental platforms for systems and applications of invisibility. New chips have been less important than combinations of existing components that create experimental opportunities. The first ubiquitous computing technology to be deployed was the Liveboard [Elrod 92], which is now a Xerox product. Two other important pieces of prototype hardware supporting our research at PARC are the Tab and the Pad. 4.2.1 TAB The ParcTab is a tiny information doorway. For user interaction it has a pressure sensitive screen on top of the display, three buttons underneath the natural finger positions, and the ability to sense its position within a building. The display and touchpad it uses are standard commercial units. The key hardware design problems in the pad are size and power consumption. With several dozens of these devices sitting around the office, in briefcases, in pockets, one cannot change their batteries every week. The PARC design uses the 8051 to control detailed interactions, and includes software that keeps power usage down. The major outboard components are a small analog/digital converter for the pressure sensitive screen, and analog sense circuitry for the IR receiver. Interestingly, although we have been approached by several chip manufacturers about our possible need for custom chips for the Tab, the Tab is not short of places to put chips. The display size leaves plenty of room, and the display thickness dominates total size. Off-the-shelf components are more than adequate for exploring this design space, even with our severe size, weight, and power constraints. A key part of our design philosophy is to put devices in everyday use, not just demonstrate them. We can only use techniques suitable for quantity 100 replication, which excludes certain things that could make a huge difference, such as the integration of components onto the display surface itself. This technology, being explored at PARC, ISI, and TI, while very promising, is not yet ready for replication. The Tab architecture is carefully balanced among display size, bandwidth, processing, and memory. For instance, the small display means that even the tiny

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processor is capable of four frame/sec video to it, and the IR bandwidth is capable of delivering this. The bandwidth is also such that the processor can actually time the pulse widths in software timing loops. Our current design has insufficient storage, and we are increasing the amount of non-volatile RAM in future tabs from 8k to 128k. The tab's goal of postit-note-like casual use puts it into a design space generally unexplored in the commercial or research sector.

4.2.2 PAD The pad is really a family of notebook-sized devices. Our initial pad, the ScratchPad, plugged into a Sun SBus card and provided an X-window-system-compatible writing and display surface. This same design was used inside our first wall-sized displays, the liveboards, as well. Our later untethered pad devices, the XPad and MPad, continued the system design principles of X-compatibility, ease of construction, and flexibility in software and hardware expansion. At the end of 1992, commercial portable pen devices have been on the market for two years, although most of the early companies have now gone out of business. Why should a pioneering research lab be building its own such device? Each year we ask ourselves the same question, and so far three things always drive us to continue to design our own pad hardware. First, we need the right balance of features; this is the essence of systems design. The commercial devices all aim at particular niches, and so balance their design to that niche. For research we need a rather different balance, all the more so for ubiquitous computing. For instance, can the device communicate simultaneously along multiple channels? Does the O.S support multiprocessing? What about the potential for high-speed tethering? Is there a high-quality pen? Is there a high-speed expansion port sufficient for video in and out? Is sound in/out and ISDN available? Optional keyboard? Any one commercial device tends to satisfy some of these, ignore others, and choose a balance of the ones it does satisfy that optimize its niche, rather than ubiquitous computing-style scrap computing. The balance for us emphasizes communication, ram, multi-media, and expansion ports.

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Second, apart from balance are the requirements for particular features. Key among these are a pen emphasis, connection to research environments like Unix, and communication emphasis. A high-speed (>64kbps) wireless capability is built into no commercial devices, nor do they generally have a sufficiently high speed port to which such a radio can be added. Commercial devices generally come with DOS or Penpoint, and while we have developed in both, they are not our favorite research vehicles because of lack of full access and customizability. The third thing driving our own pad designs is ease of expansion and modification. We need full hardware specs, complete O.S. source code, and the ability to rip-out and replace both hardware and software components. Naturally these goals are opposed to best price in a niche market, which orients the documentation to the end user, and which keeps price down by integrated rather than modular design.

We have now gone through three generations of Pad designs. Six scratchpads were built, three XPads, and thirteen MPads, the latest. The MPad uses an FPGA for almost all random logic, giving extreme flexibility. For instance, changing the power control functions, and adding high-quality sound, were relatively simple FPGA changes. The Mpad has built-in both IR (tab compatible) and radio communication, and includes sufficient uncommitted space for adding new circuit boards later. It can be used with a tether that provides it with recharging and operating power and an ethernet connection. The operating system is a standalone version of the public-domain Portable Common Runtime developed at PARC. 4.2.3 THE CS OF UBICOMP In order to construct and deploy tabs, pads, and boards at PARC, we found ourselves needing to readdress some of the well-worked areas of existing computer science. The fruitfulness of ubiquitous computing for new Computer Science problems clinched our belief in the ubiquitous computing framework. In what follows they walk up the levels of organization of a computer system,from hardware to application. For each level I describe one or two examples of computer science work required by ubiquitous computing. Ubicomp is not yet a coherent body of

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work, but consists of a few scattered communities. The point of this paper is to help others understand some of the new research challenges in ubiquitous computing, and inspire them to work on them. This is more akin to a tutorial than a survey, and necessarily selective. The areas discussed are: hardware components (e.g. chips), network protocols, interaction substrates (e.g. software for screens and pens), applications, privacy, and computational methods.

4.3 ISSUES OF HARDWARE COMPONENTS

In addition to the new systems of tabs, pads, and boards, ubiquitous computing needs some new kinds of devices. Examples of three new kinds of hardware devices are: very low power computing, low-power high-bits/cubic-meter communication, and pen devices. 4.3.1 LOW POWER In general the need for high performance has dominated the need for low power consumption in processor design. However, recognizing the new requirements of ubiquitous computing, a number of people have begun work in using additional chip area to reduce power rather than to increase performance. One key approach is to reduce the clocking frequency of their chips by increasing pipelining or parallelism. Then, by running the chips at reduced voltage, the effect is a net reduction in power, because power falls off as the square of the voltage while only about twice the area is needed to run at half the clock speed. Power = CL * Vdd2 * f where CL is the gate capacitance, Vdd the supply voltage, and f the clocking frequency. This method of reducing power leads to two new areas of chip design: circuits that will run at low power, and architectures that sacrifice area for power over performance. The second requires some additional comment, because one might suppose that one would simply design the fastest possible chip, and then run it at reduced clock and

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voltage. However, as Lyon illustrates, circuits in chips designed for high speed generally fail to work at low voltages. Furthermore, attention to special circuits may permit operation over a much wider range of voltage operation, or achieve power savings via other special techniques, such as adiabatic switching 4.3.2 WIRELESS A wireless network capable of accommodating hundreds of high speed devices for every person is well beyond the commercial wireless systems planned even ten years out [Rush 92], which are aimed at one low speed (64kbps or voice) device per person. Most wireless work uses a figure of merit of bits/sec x range, and seeks to increase this product. We believe that a better figure of merit is bits/sec/meter3. This figure of merit causes the optimization of total bandwidth throughout a three-dimensional space, leading to design points of very tiny cellular systems. Because we felt the commercial world was ignoring the proper figure of merit, we initiated our own small radio program. In 1989 we built spread-spectrum transceivers at 900Mhz, but found them difficult to build and adjust, and prone to noise and multipath interference. In 1990 they built direct frequency-shift-keyed transceivers also at 900Mhz, using very low power to be license-free. While much simpler, these transceivers had unexpectedly and unpredictably long range, causing mutual interference and multipath problems. In 1991 we designed and built our current radios, which use the near-field of the electromagnetic spectrum. The near-field has an effective fall-off of r6 in power, instead of the more usual r2, where r is the distance from the transmitter. At the proper levels this band does not require an FCC license, permits reuse of the same frequency over and over again in a building, has virtually no multipath or blocking effects, and permits transceivers that use extremely low power and low parts count. We have deployed a number of near-field radios within PARC. 4.3.3 PENS A third new hardware component is the pen for very large displays. We needed pens that would work over a large area (at least 60"x40"), not require a tether, and work with back projection. These requirements are generated from the particular needs of large displays in ubiquitous computing -- casual use, no training, naturalness, multiple people

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at once. No existing pens or touchpads could come close to these requirements. Therefore members of the Electronics and Imaging lab at PARC devised a new infrared pen. A camera-like device behind the screen senses the pen position, and information about the pen state (e.g. buttons) is modulated along the IR beam. The pens need not touch the screen, but can operate from several feet away. Considerable DSP and analog design work underlies making these pens effective components of the ubiquitous computing system .

4.4 NETWORK PROTOCOLS

Ubicomp changes the emphasis in networking in at least four areas: wireless media access, wide-bandwidth range, real-time capabilities for multimedia over standard networks, and packet routing. A "media access" protocol provides access to a physical medium. Common media access methods in wired domains are collision detection and token-passing.These do not work unchanged in a wireless domain because not every device is assured of being able to hear every other device (this is called the "hidden terminal" problem). Furthermore, earlier wireless work used assumptions of complete autonomy, or a statically configured network, while ubiquitous computing requires a cellular topology, with mobile devices frequently coming on and off line. We have adapted a media access protocol called MACA, first described by Phil Karn , with some of our own modifications for fairness and efficiency. The key idea of MACA is for the two stations desiring to communicate to first do a short handshake of Request-To-Send-N-bytes followed by Clear-To-Send-N-bytes. This exchange allows all other stations to hear that there is going to be traffic, and for how long they should remain quiet. Collisions, which are detected by timeouts, occur only during the short RTS packet. Adapting MACA for ubiquitous computing use required considerable attention to fairness and real-time requirements. MACA (like the original ethernet) requires stations whose packets collide to backoff a random time and try again. If all stations but one backoff, that one can dominate the bandwidth. By requiring all stations to adapt the backoff parameter of their neighbors we create a much fairer allocation of bandwidth.

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Some applications need guaranteed bandwidth for voice or video. We added a new packet type, NCTS(n) (Not Clear To Send), to suppress all other transmissions for (n) bytes. This packet is sufficient for a basestation to do effective bandwidth allocation among its mobile units. The solution is robust, in the sense that if the basestation stops allocating bandwidth then the system reverts to normal contention. When a number of mobile units share a single basestation, that basestation may be a bottleneck for communication. For fairness, a basestation with N > 1 nonempty output queues needs to contend for bandwidth as though it were N stations. We therefore make the basestation contend just enough more aggressively that it is N times more likely to win a contention for media access. Two other areas of networking research at PARC with ubiquitous computing implications are gigabit networks and real-time protocols. Gigabit-per-second speeds are important because of the increasing number of medium speed devices anticipated by ubiquitous computing, and the growing importance of real-time (multimedia) data. One hundred 256kbps portables per office implies a gigabit per group of forty offices, with all of PARC needing an aggregate of some five gigabits/sec. This has led us to do research into local-area ATM switches, in association with other gigabit networking projects [Lyles 92]. Real-time protocols are a new area of focus in packet-switched networks. Although real-time delivery has always been important in telephony, a few hundred milliseconds never mattered in typical packet-switched applications like telnet and file transfer. With the ubiquitous use of packet-switching, even for telephony using ATM, the need for real-time capable protocols has become urgent if the packet networks are going to support multi-media applications. Again in association with other members of the research community, PARC is exploring new protocols for enabling multimedia on the packet-switched internet . The internet routing protocol, IP, has been in use for over ten years. However, neither it nor its OSI equivalent, CLNP, provides sufficient infrastructure for highly mobile devices. Both interpret fields in the network names of devices in order to route packets to the device. For instance, the "13" in IP name 13.2.0.45 is interpreted to mean net 13, and network routers anywhere in the world are expected to know how to get a packet to net 13, and all devices whose name starts with 13 are expected to be on that
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network. This assumption fails as soon as a user of a net 13 mobile device takes her device on a visit to net 36 (Stanford). Changing the device name dynamically depending on location is no solution: higher level protocols like TCP assume that underlying names won't change during the life of a connection, and a name change must be accompanied by informing the entire network of the change so that existing services can find the device. A number of solutions have been proposed to this problem, among them Virtual IP from Sony,and Mobile IP from Columbia University.These solutions permit existing IP networks to interoperate transparently with roaming hosts. The key idea of all approaches is to add a second layer of IP address, the "real" address indicating location, to the existing fixed device address. Special routing nodes that forward packets to the right real address, and keep track of where this address is, are required for all approaches. The internet community has a working group looking at standards for this area .

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5. VISION AND APPLICATIONS OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING

Studies of daily life in non-Western environments, even those that are richly populated with wireless and embedded technologies, are remarkably rare in ubiquitous computing research publications, even when, as in these cases, they would seem to be paradigmatic examples of ubiquitous computing. There are a range of differences between the settings we have been describing and those that more conventionally appear in Ubiquitous Computing research, and these may account for the absence of these sorts of accounts as parts of the ubicomp vision. Perhaps it is that in Singapore computational technology is both embedded in daily life (e.g. CCTV, sensors) and carried around (e.g. cell phones), disappearing into the fabric of everyday life. In other words, by looking outside of the research laboratory, we are looking at ubiquitous computing as it is currently developing rather than it might be imagined to look in the future. In these settings, we certainly see concerns with mobile devices, with infrastructures for partial connectivity, and with optimizing applications for devices with restricted input and restricted power. But at the same time, we also see that the ubiquitous computing agenda is one that is fundamentally tied to other important but neglected issues such asmultigenerational living, high density housing, public transit, religious observance, the practicalities of calling a cab, the politics of domesticity and the spatialities of information accessthe messiness of every day practice. A focus on current practice and on the diversity of settings in which ubiquitous computing is currently being put to work can, perhaps, help us avoid visions of ubicomp application that are, in their own way, as misguided as 1950s science fictions speculations about twenty-first century clothing and gender relations.

5.1 APPLICATIONS
Applications are of course the whole point of ubiquitous computing. Two examples of applications are locating people and shared drawing. Ubicomp permits the location of people and objects in an environment. This was first pioneered by work at Olivetti Research Labs in Cambridge, England, in their Active Badge system [Want 92]. In ubiquitous computing we continue to extend this work, using it for video annotation, and updating dynamic maps. This map is updated every few seconds, permitting quick locating of people, as well as quickly noticing a meeting one might want to
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go to (or where one can find a fresh pot of coffee). PARC, EuroPARC, and the Olivetti Research Center have built several different kinds of location servers. Generally these have two parts: a central database of information about location that can be quickly queried and dumped, and a group of servers that collect information about location and update the database. Information about location can be deduced from logins, or collected directly from an active badge system. The location database may be organized to dynamically notify clients, or simply to facilitate frequent polling. Some example uses of location information are: automatic phone forwarding, locating an individual for a meeting, and watching general activity in a building to feel in touch with its cycles of activity (important for telecommuting).

Fig: 5.1 PARC has investigated a number of shared meeting tools over the past decade, starting with the CoLab work,and continuing with videodraw and commune .Two new tools were developed for investigating problems in ubiquitous computing. The first is Tivoli, the second Slate, each based upon different implementation paradigms. First their similarities: they both emphasize pen-based drawing on a surface, they both accept scanned input and can print the results, they both can have several users at once operating independently on different or the same pages, they both support multiple pages. Tivoli has a sophisticated notion of a stroke as spline, and has a number of features making use of processing the contents and relationships among strokes. Tivoli also uses gestures as input control to select, move, and change the properties of objects on the screen. When
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multiple people use Tivoli each must be running a separate copy, and connect to the others. On the other hand, Slate is completely pixel based, simply drawing ink on the screen. Slate manages all the shared windows for all participants, as long as they are running an X window server, so its aggregate resource use can be much lower than Tivoli, and it is easier to setup with large numbers of participants. In practice we have used slate from a Sun to support shared drawing with users on Macs and PCs. Both Slate and Tivoli have received regular use at PARC. Shared drawing tools are a topic at many places. For instance, Bellcore has a toolkit for building shared tools ,and Jacobsen at LBL uses multicast packets to reduce bandwidth during shared tool use. There are some commercial products ,but these are usually not multi-page and so not really suitable for creating documents or interacting over the course of a whole meeting. The optimal shared drawing tool has not been built. For its user interface, there remain issues such as multiple cursors or one, gestures or not, and using an ink or a character recognition model of pen input. For its substrate, is it better to have a single application with multiple windows, or many applications independently connected? Is packet-multicast a good substrate to use? What would it take to support shared drawing among 50 people, 5,000 people? The answers are likely both technological and social. Three new kinds of applications of ubiquitous computing are beginning to be explored at PARC. One is to take advantage of true invisibility, literally hiding machines in the walls. An example is the Responsive Environment project led by Scott Elrod. This aims to make a building's heat, light, and power more responsive to individually customized needs, saving energy and making a more comfortable environment. A second new approach is to use so-called "virtual communities" via the technology of MUDs. A MUD, or "Multi-User Dungeon," is a program that accepts network connections from multiple simultaneous users and provides access to a shared database of "rooms", "exits", and other objects. MUDs have existed for about ten years, being used almost exclusively for recreational purposes. However, the simple technology of MUDs should also be useful in other, non-recreational applications, providing a casual environment integrating virtual and real worlds

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A third new approach is the use of collaboration to specify information filtering. Described in the December 1992 issue of Communications of the ACM, this work by Doug Terry extends previous notions of information filters by permitting filters to reference other filters, or to depend upon the values of multiple messages. For instance, one can select all messages that have been replied to by Smith (these messages do not even mention Smith, of course), or all messages that three other people found interesting. Implementing this required inventing the idea of a "continuous query", which can effectively sample a changing database at all points in time. Called "Tapestry", this system provides new ways for people to invisibly collaborate. Cellular systems inherently need to know the location of devices and their use in order to properly route information. For instance, the traveling pattern of a frequent cellular phone user can be deduced from the roaming data of cellular service providers. This problem could be much worse in ubiquitous computing with its more extensive use of cellular wireless. So a key problem with ubiquitous computing is preserving privacy of location. One solution, a central database of location information, means that the privacy controls can be centralized and so perhaps done well -- on the other hand one break-in there reveals all, and centrality is unlikely to scale worldwide. A second source of insecurity is the transmission of the location information to a central site. This site is the obvious place to try to snoop packets, or even to use traffic analysis on source addresses. Our initial designs were all central, initially with unrestricted access, gradually moving towards controls by individual users on who can access information about them. Our preferred design avoids a central repository, but instead stores information about each person at that person's PC or workstation. Programs that need to know a person's location must query the PC, and run whatever gauntlet of security the user has chosen to install there. EuroPARC uses a system of this sort. Accumulating information about individuals over long periods is both one of the more useful things to do, and also most quickly raises hackles. A key problem for location is how to provide occasional location information for clients that need it while somehow preventing the reliable accumulation of long-term trends about an individual. So far at PARC we have experimented only with short-term accumulation of information to produce automatic daily diaries of activity .

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It is important to realize that there can never be a purely technological solution to privacy, that social issues must be considered in their own right. In the computer science lab we are trying to construct systems that are privacy enabled, that can give power to the individual. But only society can cause the right system to be used. To help prevent future oppressive employers or governments from taking this power away, we are also encouraging the wide dissimenation of information about location systems and their potential for harm. We have cooperated with a number of articles in the San Jose Mercury News, the Washington Post, and the New York Times on this topic. The result, we hope, is technological enablement combined with an informed populace that cannot be tricked in the name of technology.

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6. EXAMPLES OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING

TABS, PADS AND BOARDS

Fig: 6.1 The Tab is a tiny information doorway. For user interaction it has a pressure sensitive screen on top of the display, three buttons underneath the natural finger positions, and the ability to sense its position within a building. The display and touchpad it uses are standard commercial units. The Pad is a prototype pen computer. It can communicate through infrared, nearfield radio, and through a 1Mbps tether. Yard-size displays (boards) serve a number of purposes: in the home, video screens and bulletin boards; in the office, bulletin boards, whiteboards or flip charts.

ACTIVE BADGES

Fig: 6.2 The Active Badge system provides a means of locating individuals within a building by determining the location of their Active Badge.

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LIVING ROOM-INTERACTIVE WALL PAPER

Fig: 6.3 As technologies merge and miniaturise, we will have flatter displays and sound systems, possibly becoming a 'living wallpaper' of sound and vision. This would create a living room with less clutter, where there are no 'black boxes', but only the sound and vision we wish to experience. These large, flat displays will be able to show multiple images at any size and in any position. Sound and light would also be intelligently controlled to optimise the ambience in the room.

INTELLIGENT GARBAGE CAN

The Intelligent Garbage Can will optimise waste disposal by sorting, compacting and removing odour ready for collection. As the problems of waste increase and landfills become less attractive as a solution for waste management, more pressure will be placed on individuals to sort their waste into its constituent parts so that these may be recycled more easily and more efficiently. The Intelligent Garbage Can will aid this process by making sorting more convenient.

EXPERT CHEF

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Fig:6.4 Expert Chef is an interactive tool which enables the user to learn various cooking skills and experiment with cuisines from around the world. Master chefs show us how it is done. We can look up recipes and find information about the history of dishes and the culture they derive from. Searches can be made for recipes which are appropriate to the amount of time available, the skills of the cook and the ingredients to hand. If so desired, the Expert Chef will take the user through all the stages of buying and preparing the ingredients, and then cooking and serving the meal. The information and guidance can be given in real time, as we cook. Expert Chef is an interactive on-line service for the kitchen that guides users in the preparation of dishes from around the globe. Different chefs can be chosen to present the recipes with a style, pace and level of detail to suit individual users.

REMOTE EYES

Fig: 6.5

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Remote eyes are small video cameras for the home. Once charged they are nomadic, the only limitation being the signal-transmission range. These cameras are ideal for security applications, remote monitoring of young children in the playroom, or checking the progress of a meal in the kitchen while in the garden. The applications are numerous. For children, it is a fun and engaging toy to play with.

INTERACTIVE BOOKS

Fig:6.6 Interactive Books combine the traditional intimate and personal qualities of books with interactive touch-screen technology. Text, moving images and sound can be downloaded to provide a never-ending variety of stories. The books will grow up with their readers, taking them from the simple telling of stories with pictures, through learning to read, to embarking on learning another language. The stories combine text, voice, animations and still images.The interactive story book makes its content more stimulating through touch, sound and moving pictures. The stories become more personal through the reader's own input, choosing voices and faces for characters, making one's own pictures, or affecting the outcome.

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A PEN-STYLE PERSONSL NETWORKING GADGET PACKAGE

It seems that information terminals are infinitely getting smaller. However, we will continue to manipulate them with our hands for now. We have visualized the connection between the latest technology and the human, in a form of a pen.

Fig:6.7 P-ISM is a gadget package including five functions: a pen-style cellular phone with a handwriting data input function, virtual keyboard, a very small projector, camera scanner, and personal ID key with cashless pass function. P-ISMs are connected with one another through short-range wireless technology. The whole set is also connected to the Internet through the cellular phone function. This personal gadget in a minimalistic pen style enables the ultimate ubiquitous computing.

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7. CONCLUSION
Ubicomp has been tremendously successful, on two counts. First, it has been successful as a research endeavor. In addition to being a topic in its own right, it is also a central aspect of the research agenda of many other areas of computer science research, from theory to embedded systems. On the second front, it has been successful as a technological agenda, so that Weisers model of a single person making use of tens or hundreds of embedded devices networked togetheris a reality for many people. We live in a very monumental moment in time, for the extent of communication has vastly extended itself across the world in a relatively short amount of time. Computing technology has been fuel to that fire. The computer is a central piece of society at this time and is at a height in popularity. The future of computing likely will see its everyday appearance decrease while its effect increases. It will soon become something we take for granted and ignore. We will get to the point where we do not even notice its effects, for computing will be invisible and unobtrusive, or in a word, ubiquitous.

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8. REFERENCES
Weiser M (1991) The computer for the 21st Century. Weiser M, Gold R, Brown JS (1999) The origins of ubiquitous computing research at PARC. Article by Genevieve Bell Paul Dourish published in 2006-Yesterdays tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computings dominant vision. http://www.ubicomp.com http://www.wikipedia.com http://www.britanica.com http://www.bcs.org http://www.dictionary.reference.com http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com

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