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August 2002
Han
Assistant Professor Richard Han
is the recent recipient of the
National Science Foundation's
CAREER
award. His award, entitled "Fostering Scoped Multi-Device Interaction in
Ubiquitous Computing Environments", will support research in context-aware
interaction and wireless (sensor/device) networking for pervasive smart spaces.
The NSF CAREER Award is offered to outstanding young faculty early in their
professional careers. From the abstract:
Ubiquitous computing offers the vision of a fundamentally more responsive
physical environment in which users benefit from seamless interaction with a
pervasively internetworked world of myriad wireless and wired devices, e.g.
wireless personal digital assistants, video-enabled mobile phones, wearable
computers, appliances, kiosks, toys, and sensors. A key component of the
developing infrastructure for ubiquitous computing is based on the discovery
and advertisement of services.
In a typical ubiquitous computing scenario, a user who walks into a room is
able to interact with a variety of services offered by the devices in the room.
The goal of the service discovery framework is to assist the user's application
in determining what services are available for interaction in this room. While
the current service discovery framework represents an essential initial
component of the ubiquitous computing infrastructure, additional capabilities
are needed to address the challenges introduced by multidevice multi-user
contexts.
The objectives of this CAREER proposal are to explore the means for fostering
scoped multi-device interaction in ubiquitous computing environments. Several
key research areas are identified in this proposal as challenging problems that
must be solved in order to enable multidevice multi-user ubiquitous computing:
Active device resolution among multiple devices, with special emphasis on social context Active user resolution among multiple users, with special emphasis on social context Composing joint wide-area and local-area multi-device meta-services Beyond remote control: enabling new classes of ubiquitous computing applications
The intent of this proposal is to first understand the implications and
requirements of multi-device multiuser contexts, and to then design and develop
the mobile computing applications, distributed middleware systems,
meta-services, and wireless and application-level networking protocols that
will assist in making the vision of multi-device ubiquitous computing a
reality. The initial goal is to build the infrastructure necessary for
ubiquitous computing in a departmental Smart Spaces Lab. A course taught on
ubiquitous computing will allow students to make hands-on contributions to
building portions of the infrastructure in the Smart Spaces Lab, even as the
curricula is upgraded to reflect recent research innovations. The
infrastructure will eventually be able to support remote control applications,
wireless peer-to-peer applications, and event-notification applications, just
to name a few.
Once the research lab technology matures, the goal is to deploy this
infrastructure throughout the university campus. The impact on the university
at large will be highly beneficial, as the most mature technology should be
immediately available throughout campus. As soon as the event notification,
wireless message passing and remote-control infrastructures are in place,
students, professors, and citizens should be able to immediately benefit from
the fruits of our ubiquitous computing research. Campus-wide deployment is
expected to begin about halfway through this five year research plan.
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide
activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards
for new faculty members. The CAREER program recognizes and supports the early
career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to
become the academic leaders of the 21st century.
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