Goals
The principal aim of
this project is to overcome the ad hoc nature of investigations into ubiquitous
computing environments, and to develop a sound foundation for Smart
Surroundings both in terms of building the required infrastructure and
platforms, and of understanding the emerging applications and interaction
models.
More specifically, our
research is guided by the following set of key objectives:
- open platform for ubiquitous computing systems that integrates the required infrastructure
components and provides an extensible set of universally installable tools,
devices, and services for the developers, operators and users of Smart Surroundings.
The platform development will be driven with an engineering ethos of providing
solutions that are practical and sustainable in the face of real world, and
effective in reducing the cost for development and installation. Our
ambition is to establish this platform as a standard for research and
development of ubiquitous computing environments.
- To lay the foundations for understanding interactions in ubiquitous computing
with the conceptual frameworks, models and notations needed to describe the structure
and behavior of system components from a variety of research perspectives. The
work on foundations will is aimed to overcome the current ad hoc nature of
designs and evaluations. The expected result is a set of fundamental models
and frameworks that will support evaluation and comparison of designs and
systems.
- To study ubiquitous computing in concrete and complex settings to ensure that development of platforms and
foundations remains firmly grounded in reality. The concrete settings will
investigate ambient system environments ranging from small and dense to large
and sparse, and from digitally well provisioned to digitally impoverished. The
scenarios explored in these settings will not be focused on selected
applications as such but on the complex situations that arise from interaction
of diverse stakeholders with many different threads of activity. Our target
is to design and implement real world experiments that expose ubiquitous
computing systems to the challenge of supporting a multitude of competing
applications and user experiences.
