Call for Participation
Workshop on
Infrastructure for Smart Devices - How to Make Ubiquity an Actuality
Bristol (UK), Wed September 27
Held as part of HUC 2k,
The Second International Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing
Organisers:
- Tim Kindberg, HP Labs, Palo Alto
- Friedemann Mattern, ETH Zurich
- Joachim Posegga, SAP Corporate Research
We solicit position statements or half-page abstracts of potential
presentations (15 to 20 minutes). Please send them to smart@inf.ethz.ch
before August 25 (preferably in PDF format); the organisers will select
the presentations within a week. (Participation is not bound to a
presentation)
Motivation:
The main hardware ingredients needed for Ubiquitous Computing exist or are
upon us, and yet software developments have not kept pace. Technology
has turned mobile consumer devices and various personal appliances
into reality, mobile telecommunication networks will soon offer more
bandwidth, and devices are increasingly connected by short-range wireless
networks. Even non-electronic everyday objects will be linked to the
virtual space via various tagging techniques.
These developments form the technological basis for turning tomorrow's
interconnected devices into components of ubiquitous distributed systems,
but it is still largely unclear what requirements Ubiquitous Computing
applications actually have in general, and how these can be met.
Ubiquitous Computing is today a largely application-driven discipline, led
by the opportunities that newly arising devices and network technologies
offer. Researchers have come up with various systems and scenarios
tailored to specific applications, but comparably little effort has been
spent on investigating common ground for the infrastructure and services
underlying large populations of smart devices.
There is, however, a clear need to address the issues around
infrastructure, common services, cooperation paradigms, and security for
communicating and cooperating smart devices in general, and not just as
they are tailored to specific applications.
The proposed workshop intends to bring together people interested in
these infrastructural issues, and aims to:
- clarify the requirements given by the proliferation of smart
devices, spontaneous networking, nomadic users etc.
- analyse the existing situation in infrastructure for
smart devices and Ubiquitous Computing applications
- identify common ground and differences in today's
systems and research prototypes
- explore future steps towards laying out the technological
foundations of Ubiquitous Computing
Reports on work in progress centered around these themes or similar
issues are welcome. We also expect contributions that initiate
discussions on themes such as
- suitability of existing middleware and infrastructure technologies
- support by infrastructures for accommodating evolving devices
- division of functionality between the resource-limited device
and the infrastructure
- methodologies for handling context awareness and location management
To encourage controversal discussions, proposals might also be formulated
as a one-sentence 'statement', with up to a page of abstract that shows
how the proposer intends to argue for it. We also plan a panel discussion
on security and privacy in ubiquitous computing.
DEADLINE for contributions: August 25
Submit contributions to: smart@inf.ethz.ch