IM 2001 Panel

Will Pervasive Computing be Manageable?

Panel chair: Morris Sloman, Imperial College, London, UK

Computers are being integrated into everything. Domestic appliances such as refrigerators, video recorders or door locks could act as web servers for remote access; your mobile communicator will seamlessly switch between Blue Tooth, wireless LAN or UMTS to give you the most appropriate communication links depending on whether you are at home, in the office or travelling; wearable computers in smart garments will monitor your medical well-being to alert both you and, if necessary, emergency services of any potential problem; similarly your car will alert you if about potential problems and indicate the components that need to be replaced; intelligent paper with integrated radio will provide a light-weight, unbreakable, high-resolution output media for e-books and e-newspapers; smart paint and smart glass may be used to adapt our indoor environment to current temperature or the mood of the occupants. Mobile computers carried by users or robots will interact with their pervasive computing environment to obtain information, be entertained, purchase goods or clean streets.

It is obvious that the time and effort to configure a typical web server or workstation will be impractical for the forecasts of 100K pervasive computers per person which will be embedded around our future homes, offices and leisure facilities, so there is a need for self-organising systems that can dynamically adapt to form ad-hoc collaborating groups.

This panel will address the following issues raised by pervasive computing:

• Will communication facilities be able to cope with the required bandwidth and give guaranteed quality of service for future mobile, multi-media traffic?
• Can we develop intelligent context-aware systems which can determine our activity and react appropriately eg to distinguish a heart problem from exertion due to running for a bus.
• How do mobile computers locate the required services from the local environment to form ad-hoc collaborative groups?
• How can we develop self-organising hardware and software architectures for pervasive computing?
• Is there a distinction between management and normal functionality for adaptive and self-organising systems?
• Will interaction techniques based on biological organisms be an appropriate solution for coherent behaviour from vast numbers of unreliable sensors, actuators and communication devices?
• How will personal-privacy be affected by constant monitoring and location tracking?
• Will current security and management mechanisms scale to cater for millions of mobile computers interacting with a pervasive computing environment.
  

The panellists are:

• Gaetano Borriello
  http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gaetano/
  Leader Portolano Expedition into Invisible computing, University of Washington
  Slides
• Steven Shafer
  http://www.research.microsoft.com/users/stevensh/
  Manager EasyLiving Project, Microsoft Research Lab, Seattle
  Slides
• Richard Graveman
  Director of the Security Research Group, Telcordia Technologies
  slides
• Victor Bahl,
  http://www.research.microsoft.com/~bahl/HomePage.htm
  Editor in chief ACM Mobile Communications Review
  Microsoft Research, Seattle
  slides