WiFi, Ubicomp & Smart Mobs
• Smart Mobs
• System Directions for Pervasive Computing
- Are we there yet?
• Unplugged U
- If not now, what’s changed?
• T-Spaces: The Next Wave
How do we recognize the future?
• Does it have to “land on you”?
• What role does experience (or inexperience) play in
adoption of ideas & technology?
• Analogies help
- “It’s like X, but with Y”
- It’s like radio, but with two-way communications
• What change doesn’t begin within a subculture?
- Early adopters (innovator’s Dilemma)
- “Ground truths” and working knowledge
• Nothing goes away, but it can get repurposed
• Technologies “enable people to act together in new
ways & in situations where collective action was not
before possible” p xviii
Smart Mobs
Chapter 1: Mobile/Context-Aware Computing
• “Texters” – European/Japanese youth
- Altered notions of home/place/time
- Presence uncoupled from physicality
• Addition of simple iconography (tools for social
interaction) improved marketability of mobile
computing devicces
• Device becomes “remote control” for your life
• Swarming: cyber-negotiated public flocking
behavior
• Location-sensitive technology gives locally
relevant information to citizens/travelers
Smart Mobs
• Short text messages (SMS) changing social
dynamics
- New terminology, customs, social norms
- Read together, composed together, passed around,
edited between users
- Broadcast messages for parties, fare jumpers, gathering
• Text messaging allows maintenance of social
relationships not amenable to “real-world”
relationships
• Continuous connections, regardless of place
• 2 simultaneous “spaces” of social
interaction: physical and virtual
- BUT, they also change “faces” depending on
which world they attend to
Smart Mobs
Chapter 2: Technologies of Cooperation
• Why choose to cooperate on line?
- Input a little knowledge to commons, but access larger
(better) collective knowledge
- Give to get, pay to play
• Design characteristics for self-governing & selforganizing groups
Clear boundaries
Rules match local needs/conditions
Most people affected by rules can also modify them
Right to design own rules respected by external
authorities
- Monitoring system for behavior
-
Smart Mobs
• Design characteristics for self-governing & self-organizing
groups
- Community members themselves do the monitoring
- Graduated system of sanctions
- Conflict-resolution mechanisms
• Mechanisms to overcome “tragedy of commons”
• Group = Game Theory Prisoners’ Dilemma – Titfor-Tat, Zero-sum
• Cooperators can thrive in population of defectors
if they can recognize each other (social network)
- Outperform non-cooperative/self-centered resource
consumption strategies
• Power of social network (not just a group)
- Metcalfe’s Law: total value of network of nodes grows
w/square of # of nodes
- Reed’s Law: total value grows at rate of 2 to power of #
nodes
Smart Mobs
Chapter 3: Computation Nations and Swarm
Supercomputers
• Distributed sharing of disc space – more storage
than single device
• Distributed sharing of CPU cycles – more
processing power than individual CPU
- SETI@home
- Distributed crack of RSA encryption
- Folding@home – examine medical data to devise better
disease treatment
• P2P – Every client is also a server
• Grid-computing
• “Node computing” or “Continuous Computing”
Smart Mobs
Chapter 4: Era of Sentient Things
• Information in places: media linked to
location
• Smart rooms: sensing and responsive
• Sentient objects: adding
info/communications to everyday objects
• Tangible bits: manipulating virtual world
through interaction w/physical
• Wearable computers
Smart Mobs
Chapter 4: Era of Sentient Things
• Intel adding radio transponder to every
chip
• Ubicomp: not just computing devices
everywhere, but invisible integration
w/environment
• “Augmented reality”—using computing
power to sense beyond limits of human
senses
• “Perceptual intelligence”—computers
responsive to characteristics of their
users
Smart Mobs
Cooltown
- virtual information overlays on real-world
objects/locations
- Seamless integration of computing devices
and file formats (print any document on any
device from any local printer)
• Attentive billboards: Minority Report
consumerism
• Code reading devices—click on object in
real world and expect something to
happen
• Google Maps, Satellite photos,
Ridesharing, Taxi availability
Smart Mobs
• RFID
- Track movement of objects, people,
information and how they are used
- “Smart money”
• Wheel of Zeus
- Radio tagging for keeping found things found
- Bookmarking your tennis shoes, loaning a
book
• Cyborgspace – Steve Mann
- Personally mediate reality on YOUR terms
- Record all your experiences from your PoV &
others
Smart Mobs
Chapter 5: Evolution of Reputation
• Overview of getting know-how on line
- Usenet
- Collaborative filtering
- FAQs
• Building trust along w/reputation
-
eBay
Epinions
Blogs
Slashdot
Smart Mobs
• Online anonymity can also be a shield for
irrational/unproductive behavior
- Drives away legitimate contributors if too many
“freeloaders” of freely accessible information
• Biological theories of cooperation
- “Restores shadow of future” to each transaction
- Threat of future consequences mediates present
behavior
• Reputation allows loosely related people to
cooperate and collectively create value beyond
capabilities of action on local/individual levels
Smart Mobs
Chapter 6: Wireless Quits
• LOTS of technology and spectrum management
review
- History of wireless infrastructure development
- Spectrum access methods
• Spread spectrum
• Frequency hopping
• “Mini-burst” transmissions
• What if every receiver is also a mini transmitter—
total production of ad-hoc networks
- WiFi, Bluetooth, low-power transmitters
Smart Mobs
Chapter 7: Smart Mobs - The Power of the Mobile
Many
• Less effort to perpetuate information movement
than information production
• Rise of P2P journalism
- Constant surveillance mitigates our social behavior
• Notion of personal area network – wearable
computers + context & location awareness
• New task-based economy (WALID)
- Agents exchange lists of personally relevant tasks
between actors in close proximity (see Good Old
Fashioned Future)
Smart Mobs
Chapter 7: Smart Mobs - The Power of the
Mobile Many
• Swarm intelligence: thresholds of
individual action actually a social function
• 4 characteristics of swarm systems
-
Absence of centralized control
Autonomous subunits
High connectivity between subunits
Peers influencing peers
Smart Mobs
Chapter 8: Always-On Panopticon
• Dangers of smart mob technologies
- Threats to liberty – ubiquitous surveillance
- Threats to quality of life – too much
information
• Digital neuroses: is someone constantly
watching me or piecing together a picture of
my activities?
- Threats to human dignity – are we becoming
too automated and tied to technology?
• Favor virtual relationships for face-to-face
• Lose social skills in “real” interaction
Smart Mobs
Chapter 8: Always-On Panopticon
• Key to influence in future: network capital
- Ability to use technical and social networking
resources to your advantage
• Smart mob technology may change how
we view the world and relate to each other
the way printing and literacy transformed
our society once before
Pervasive Computing
• Pervasive computing: focus on users & tasks
vs. computing devices & technology
- Seamless infrastructure
- Invisible technology
• HW is approaching, but little software
operates in this environment
• 3 primary problems to be solved in pervasive
computing system architecture
New Devices, Old Interfaces
• Each new device builds on the assumptions
of the previous devices & designs
- Who has read all of the documentation for their
phone, iPod, PDA, bluetooth device?
- Who can use all of the functions on any of these
devices?
• How many steps does it take to do a common
task?
- Infrequent tasks like configuration,
synchronization, sequential tasks need more
support, not less
Working with PVC Devices?
• Connections?
- How are the bits interlinked?
- How do they get into the PIM?
• All in one place?
- Is centralized necessarily better?
• Client or Server for storage & help?
• Integration among tools
- Formats
- Importing & Exporting
• Integration for tasks
- Sequences
- Automation
• Integration among users
- Shared contacts, bookmarks, lists, filters
- Common formats or meta information
Pervasive Computing
1: Objects don’t scale well in large networks
- Single abstraction for data AND function
- Assumes interfaces don’t change often
• WWWeb consortium standards driving
standardized data types/formats
• Private companies compete for functionality
making for many different interfaces
- Assumes we can design interfaces that handle
object implementations w/stability & over time
• Static data easy to handle (html, pdf, etc.)
• Active data harder to control/secure (active
content)
Pervasive Computing
2: Resource availability limited/intermittent
- Data/resource locations transparent in distributed
environment
- Programmer’s folly – applications assume
continuity of resource access
3: Program/distributing apps unmanageable
- No common platform
- Many “classes” of computing devices
- Installation/functionality differ between classes
Pervasive Computing
Solutions: one.world architecture
1. Keep data and functionality separate
-
Data = tuples (named & typed fields)
Functionality = components (units of functionality)
Both unified in environments = tuples + components +
other environments (nested data/functionality)
2. Program for change
-
-
Applications must acquire all resources (local and
distributed) incl. storage & communication channels
Store resources as primitives movable to other
devices (environment tree of all tuples + components
from execution state)
Constantly renew/refresh resources
Pervasive Computing
Solutions: one.world architecture
3. Common platform w/integrated API &
single binary format
-
Single instruction set implemented across
classes
Should be virtual machine-based technology
Smaller devices emulate networking
protocols or communicate through proxies
elsewhere on network
Unplugged U
• Wireless experiments/trendsetting @
Dartmouth
- Locators (laptops, PDAs, panic-button boxes)
• Where are your friends (or at least their
laptops)?
- In the classroom
• Aggregate responses – like a game show
• Avoids “performance anxiety”
• PDA appointment reminders adjusted!
- Social analysis (network traffic patterns)
- E-mail (“Blitzes”) for idle chat
T-Spaces: The Next Wave
• T-Spaces: combination of dbase, tuplespace, mobile
computing and Java
- Promises total internetworking for every/any computing
device on the network
- “Middleware” that manages data exchange between mobile
devices, PCs, mainframes, etc.
• Tuplespace: simple agents communicating through
tuples exchange asynchronously & anonymously
- Globally shared, visible and addressable memory space
- Allows number of agents to work simultaneously
- Allows variable receivers to register interest in message
T-Spaces: The Next Wave
• How they work
- Data generating programs create a tuple and pushes it out to
tuplespace (data store)
- Program requiring data requests some or all of the tuple for
its own purposes and reads it in
- Beyond simple message passing – addressing is associative
not determinative
• Early example – blackboard system (Hearsay II)
- Knowledge sources (agents) communicate through the
blackboard (a global database)
- Knowledge sources search blackboard for problem
descriptions matching their domains of expertise
- Write solutions for these problems back to the blackboard
T-Spaces: The Next Wave
• Evolution of Tuple-based systems included
database/query/join functions
• Renewed interest thanks to distributed applications
apps on WWW and platform-independent
environment of Java
• T-Space application:
- Tuplespace component = flexible communications model
- Dbase component adds stability, durability, advanced query
& data storage
- Java provides instant portability and instant download for
changes in functionality on the fly
What are the myths of new tech?
• We’ll automatically be better, smarter & faster
• Society will embrace the change
• Organizations will adapt
- Workers will like it
- Shareholders will be pleased (quarterly)
• Everyone gets a voice
• Coordination is easy, we just needed the tools
What’s next?
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Personal Area Networks
Separating Space vs. Location
Phone as remote control for your life
Swarming technologies
Distributed computing
Keys, tunnels and tokens