Weekly Discussion Group on Future Computing Environments

Spring Quarter 1997

CS 8011D

Ubiquitous Computing

Time and Place: Tuesdays 4:30-6:00pm, Room 102, College of Computing

Moderators

Gregory Abowd (abowd@cc.gatech.edu)
Chris Atkeson (cga@cc.gatech.edu)

General information

Current week

Previous quarters

The general focus this quarter is on ubiquitous computing. We will spend half of our time looking at work outside of Georgia Tech and the other half focussing on particular efforts within the FCE Group.

Schedule

4/1

Introduction (Seminar Notes)
Chris Atkeson

4/8

CHI'97 workshop (Seminar Notes)

On March 23-24, Gregory Abowd and Bill Schilit (FX-PAL) hosted a workshop on Ubiquitous Computing as part of the activities for the CHI'97 conference in Atlanta. We will provide an overview of what went on during that 2-day workshop.

Reading material

Read the position papers submitted by the various workshop.

4/15

Emerging themes in ubiquitous computing at FCE (Seminar Notes)
Gregory Abowd

On alternate weeks this quarter, we are going to have a discussion on work inside of FCE by one of the various FCE Lab researchers. To kick-start things this quarter, Gregory will provide an overview FCE research activities outlining a number of emerging research themes.

Reading

Gregory D. Abowd. Ubiquitous Computing: Research Themes And Open Issues From An Applications Perspective. GVU Center, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Technical Report GIT-GVU-96-24, September 1996. (PostScript version)

If you want to relive the experience of the presentation, go here. We'd love to hear your further comments on the topics discussed.

4/22

Ubicomp papers at CHI'97
Michael Koetter

Readings

Thomas P. Moran, Laysia Palen, Steve Harrison, Patrick Chiu, Don Kimber, Scott Minneman, William van Melle, Polle Zellweger (Xerox PARC) "I'll Get That Off the Audio": A Case Study of Salvaging Multimedia Meeting Records. In Proceedings of CHI'97.
The analogy to salvage is a good one. Just as physical objects become set in a linear geologic strata over time, so do media artifacts. By uncovering these layers in a meticulous fashion, and under a strict methodology, context may be observed and information gleaned. By capturing media with many time stamped contextual cues, one can later sift through the layers with much more speed and accuracy. This research focuses on the creation of tools to accurately capture the fluid communication of a meeting, and then utilize the multimedia records within a larger work process. By observing a subject at PARC over a period of several months (after he had been given time to become familiar with the system), they observed the development of multiple salvaging strategies. These strategies became extremely integrated with both the act of capture and retrieval. This integration of activity may be the most compelling results to emerge from the study.
Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer. Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms. In Proceedings of CHI'97.
We touched on some of this research the other day, speaking about the string which wiggled in response to network activity. While the original implementation of the Live Wire was done by an artist in residence at Xerox PARC, this is a good example of Ishii and Ullmer's concept of background information display. Pushing the idea of foreground/background communication, they propose the three key concepts of Tangible Bits: interactive surfaces, graspable physical objects, and ambient media. There is some very interesting associated with this research, with no key concept receiving more attention than the other. Graspable icons (phicons) are being used to symbolize real world objects, as well as store data. They are being associated with ubiquitous environments as well as with traditional optical displays as alternatives to wimp input. particularly interesting is their allusion to the use of light, shadow, and transparency in future displays.

During the seminar we were talking about the "Sound of the Net Breathing" site and I also mentioned a book on ambient noise/music called "Elevator Music." Here are more detailed references.

Sound of the Net: http://park.org/Japan/Theme/sware/

Joseph Lanza, "Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other Moodsong" (Picador: New York), 1995.

4/29

Design/Representation issues for Ubicomp
Bob Waters

Our overriding theme will be on issues of design and representation of the services (OS and Comm) that might be necessary to support ubicomp. For operating systems, we have the challenge of providing complex services with a device that is bandwidth-challenged both in peripheral and communications support. For multimedia nomadic services, the authors look at how best to provide personal services such as paging, fax, telephone, etc in an environment where the user is not stationary. Finally, for those of us who are software engineers, the representation of ubicomp systems that dynamically change configurations based upon users will be a real challenge. Our current box and arrow methods work great for static systems, but how will we handle dynamic ones?? That's the issue the third paper tackles.

So come to class Tuesday where the topic will be : "Fitting 20 pounds of stuff in a 5 pound bag" or "Everything I ever wanted to know about the PI calculus, but was afraid to ask".

Readings

Marvin Theimer, Alan Demers and Brent Welch. Operating Systems Issues for PDAs. In the Proceedings for the Fourth IEEE Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems, Napa, CA, pp. 2-8, October 1993.
Chris Schmandt. Multimedia Nomadic Services on Today's Hardware. IEEE Network, pp. 12-21, September/October 1994.
Jeff Magee and Jeff Kramer. Dynamic Structure in Software Architectures. In the Proceedings of the Fourth ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (SIGSOFT'96/FCE-4), San Francisco, CA, pp. 3-14, October 1996.

5/6

Auditory representation of data
John Tolva

This week's readings are all taken from the International Conference on Auditory Design (ICAD).

Traditionally, data sonification has been concerned with creating interfaces for the visually impaired and for providing means of monitoring data when the user's vision sense is otherwise preoccupied (as in a jet cockpit or in a surgical environment). While none of the writings below address ubiquitous computing, per se, I think the research suggests many ways that we can reach the goal of an "invisible interface" with the world in a future computing environment. Sonified data has many advantages over visualized data that seem appropriate for an interface that has no physical characteristics. I'd like to highlight some of the ways that data sonification could benefit (and, in fact, could be inappropriate for) a ubiquitous computing device or environment.

Readings

Data Sonification from the Desktop: Should Sound be part of Standard Data Analysis Software?
An introduction to current methodologies in data sonification.
Micronarratives in Sound Design: Context, Character, and Caricature in Waveform Manipuation
A less technical investigation of the way sound works to create a narrative/conceptual structure for the places we inhabit -- very interesting as it relates to FCE!
Artificial Sythesthesia via Sonification: A Wearable Augmented Sensory System
A short report on a head-mounted scanner that converts visual data directly into sonic data.

5/13

Domisilica
Jen Mankoff

(Seminar Notes)

Readings

UIST'97 paper and video
Domisilica Web pages
AROMA (a project which explores _peripheral_awareness_ as a way of supporting distributed communities). Available outside gregory's door. it's also in the CHI '97 proceedings, pg. 51. When reading AROMA, try to think about what sort of data streams we might gather in the home.

5/20

Classroom 2000: Ubiquitous computing in education
Jason Brotherton

Readings

Multimedia'96 paper
Pointer to C 2000 Web pages

This week's papers give a brief look at context awareness and voice-only applications. I'll be talking about Savoir, a project I'm working on (originally prototyped by Anind Dey and Lara Catledge) that gives voice-only access to e-mail, news, weather reports, stock quotes, etc. I'm currently working on using position and orientation data to enhance the ability of the voice-recognition system in doing it's job. We'll be talking about the basics of this project as well as the basics of voice-recognition and what context means and can do in this area. The papers are: "Context Awareness in Wearable and Ubiquitous Computing" ~abowd/papers/wearable/context.ps and "MailCall: Message Presentation and Navigation in a Nonvisual Environment" www.acm.org/sigchi/chi96/proceedings/papers/Marx/mtm_txt.htm

5/27

Savoir
Rob Orr

Readings

Dey, Orr and Abowd. Context Awareness in Wearable and Ubiquitous Computing. Paper submitted to First International Wearable Computing Symposium.
Matthew Marx and Chris Schmandt. MailCall: Message Presentation and Navigation in a Nonvisual Environment. In Proceedings of CHI'96.

6/3

LlamaShare
Mike Pinkerton

Readings

UIST'97 paper
Web pages

General Information

Readings for each week will either be included on this page as links or will be made available a week in advance and announced to the FCE mailing list.

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