Ubiquitous Devices, Mobility and Context Awareness

Abstract

We all have access today to many devices of all sort: computers, TVs, mobile phones, music players, cameras, video game consoles, navigation systems,... Without some sort of connectivity between then, most of these devices would be useless. What would you do with a music player if you were not able to connect it to an external source of music? One way or another, with or without wires, you must be able connect it to a computer, local or remote, in order to transfer the music you are interested in. The challenge here is to make this as transparent as possible since, from a user perspective, the only thing that counts is that you like this music and you want to have access to it whenever and wherever you want, be it on your music player, on your computer or on your home cinema. Once your music is on one of them, you would like it to be available everywhere else where it makes sense.

Smart synchronization is thus the first piece of infrastructure that has to be built. Synchronizing music between a computer and a music player is one example, synchronizing personal information like contacts or calendars between a computer and a mobile phone is another one. But it should not be limited to local synchronization between a computer and a device, synchronizing two computers over the internet is a technology that is now a must have, computer at home, computer at work. Synchronizing a mobile phone over the air is also becoming a necessity. And all this should happen transparently, mere mortals do not want to have to think about ”uploading” or ”downloading”, these are just geeks concepts they should not even know about. Once your data becomes ubiquitous through transparent synchronization, once it is omnipresent, everywhere at the same time, you do not have anymore to administer your devices, you can start using them. We shall go over some scenarios showing the growing importance of ubiquitous data in the years to come.Early mobile devices have usually been designed with only one task in mind. A mobile phone to give and receive calls, a music player, to listen to music, a camera to take pictures... Then technology made it possible to compress everything in a single device, and now most mobile phones offer also music player and camera capabilities among others. Unfortunately it seems that for these devices where external connectivity is so important as we have shown above, internal connectivity or inter-application communication within the device has been totally forgotten. You may well have your address book inside the phone, a satellite navigation system with embedded maps, but no way to show a vicinity map for one of your contacts because these two applications cannot talk to each other. This is where we consider most ”smart phones” fail to be smart, because they are just a juxtaposition of features, not an integrated set of features leveraging on each other. If the initial lack of true operating systems for phones has certainly be the cause of this situation, the brutal introduction of computers operating systems inside phones more recently has lead to a even worse situation: while before it was still possible to make a call in an easy way, you now have to go through an unbelievable computer-like menu system to perform any kind of operation. We shall analyze in details during this talk how Apple did a very clever job with the iPhone by introducing the power of a true operating system together with a user interface designed for a phone, not for a computer.

Another key feature for these new devices will be the capacity to adapt to the environment in which they find themselves: capacity to switch transparently to a different network using a different protocol, ability to discover another device around with which it can interact is around... We shall go over such examples during the presentation.