Conclusions and directions for future work

Abstract

We will reflect on what has been achieved and outline what we believe to be the major avenues for future research that have been opened by the work presented here. Roughly, the ultimate goal is to construct flexible protocols under the refined models of Chapters 4 and 8. The starting point, however, is to develop our understanding of how to construct systems that support sensing for various concrete goals of interest. In short, we believe that the “scaffolding” of such concrete goals and protocols is essential to provide the context in which meaningful improvements in the protocols’ efficiency can be developed. Given such concrete examples, the respective models of Chapters 4 and 8 provide rather different directions of research. The main challenge raised by Chapter 8 is to obtain richer kinds of feedback that allow richer classes of protocols to be learned efficiently, whereas the main challenge of Chapter 4 lies in the design of servers that are “easy to use” with respect to some “natural” distribution on protocols. We will see that this latter question seems quite closely related to the problem of designing usable computer interfaces.