UK-UbiNet

Day One: Monday 13th September 2004

Introduction

Prof. Morris Sloman,
Imperial College London

Wireless Networks

John Dunlop
University of Strathclyde

HCI Issues

Tom Rodden
University of Nottingham

Wearable Computers

Phil Stenton
HP Labs

Speckled Computing

D.K. Arvind
University of Edinburgh

Specks are intended to be minute (eventually around 1 mm³) semiconductor grains that can sense, compute, and communicate wirelessly. Each speck will be autonomous, with its own captive energy source. Thousands of specks, scattered or sprayed on the person or surfaces, will collaborate as programmable computational networks called Specknets.

Computing with Specknets will enable linkages between the material and digital worlds with a finer degree of spatial resolution than hitherto possible, and will be a fundamental enabler for truly ubiquitous computing.

Speckled Computing is the culmination of a greater trend. As the once-separate worlds of computing and wireless communications collide, a new class of information appliances will emerge. Where once they stood proud - the PDA bulging in the pocket, or the mobile phone nestling in one's palm, the post-modern equivalent might not be explicit after all. Rather, data sensing and information processing capabilities will fragment and disappear into everyday objects and the living environment. At present there are sharp dislocations in information processing capability - the computer on a desk, the PDA/laptop, mobile phone, smart cards and smart appliances. In our vision of Speckled Computing, the sensing and processing of information will be highly diffused - the person, the artefacts and the surrounding space, become, at the same time, computational resources and interfaces to those resources. Surfaces, walls, floors, ceilings, articles, and clothes, when sprayed with specks (or "speckled"), will be invested with a "computational aura" and sensitised post hoc as props for rich interactions with the computational resources.

The talk will explain the challenges to be overcome, and early demonstrators of specks will be used as props during the talk to highlight the issues and proposed solutions.

Day Two: Tuesday 14th September 2004

Context Awareness

Hans Gellersen
University of Lancaster

Location

Gaetano Borriello
University of Washington

Location estimates are a central part of ubiquitous computing.  The positions of users as well as objects are important context information that enable applications to adjust their behavior to better meed user needs.  Many location systems have been proposed as there is no single solution that meets every applications' requirements for resolution and coverage.  This lecture will have three basic parts: (1) a history of location systems highlighting their important characteristics and outline current trends, (2) a brief tutorial on some of the probabilistic methods now being applied to location estimation that allow the fusion of a variety of sensor data, and (3) an overview of some recent efforts to take location systems out of instrumented laboratory environments and make them truly ubiquitous.

Middleware

Paddy Nixon
University of Strathclyde

Middleware has been defined as software that facilitates interoperability by mediating between an application program and a network, thus masking differences or incompatibilities in network transport protocols, hardware architecture, operating systems, database systems, and other system components. Ubiquitous computing systems increase the number of, and degrees of variability between, these systems components. Couple these issues with the problems of increased scale and speed of adaptation implied by the ubiquitous computing vision only serves to highlight the critical role middleware in its various forms will play in the realisation of truly ubiquitous systems.

This lecture will provide a historical perspective on middleware through some examplar systems; it will elaborate the new problems posed by ubiquitous computing systems and detail existing work in the area; and it will conclude by presenting a personal view on the open research issues for systems software in this domain.
session materials

Theory

Vladimiro Sassone
University of Sussex

The lecture will focus on the foundations of trust in ubiquitous scenarios, and its evolution and propagation in ad-hoc communities of principals. Such communities are obviously very dynamic, lack central authorities, and their principals have only a limited knowledge of their surroundings. We will explain how in the presence of delegation, trust between principals can be explained as (global) fixed-points of their policies taken upon suitable mathematical structures, called trust domains, and we will illustrate how these can be approximated in practice. We will present foundational calculi, and introduce semantic mechanisms which rely on observational equivalences to assess and compare trust policies and trust-based systems.

Day Three: Wednesday 15th September 2004

Systems Deployment

Paul Garner
BT

Security for Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing

Chris Mitchell
Royal Holloway College

Co-operation between ubiquitous computing elements has huge potential to create new services and business opportunities. There are also major risks arising from computing elements operated by malicious entities. The threats arising to current PCs from malicious software are already considerable and growing, and the arrival of large number of self-configuring, personal devices, on which we will increasingly depend in all apsects of our lives, make the threats even more serious. Security is thus a hugely important issue, and a major challenge, since we cannot seem to make the existing world secure! The main purpose of this talk is to give an idea of the magnitude of the security challenge by discussing some of the security issues which will arise in a future environment of mobile and ubiquitous computing. Some of the existing and emerging security technologies which will probably be key to addressing these security threats will also be introduced. The talk will be a personal view of security, and in the time available only a flavour of the topic can be given - however, pointers will also be provided for further reading.

Privacy

Marc Langheinrich
ETH Zurich

Privacy is undoubtedly a hot topic when it comes to ubiquitous computing. I'd like to begin this session with exploring the nature of privacy, its history and driving factors, and how these will influence the way we perceive and value our privacy in a world full of smart, communicating objects that monitor our every moves. After briefly summarizing some major legal privacy frameworks that provide our privacy protection today, I will then examine how technology can be used to support such laws and regulations in a future world of ubiquitous computing. In particular, I will present and discuss solutions in the area of rfid-systems, location-systems, and smart environments.

Information in UbiComp Environments

David DeRoure
University of Southampton