Sense and Sensibility

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Sense and Sensibility

• Professor Paddy NixonSchool of Computer Science
  and Informatics

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What Ill tell you

• A brief history of computer time
• What does Moores Law imply?
• What does Nixons Law imply?
• What is Adaptive Information
• Big issues in Adaptive Information
• From Computer Science to Informatics
• Conclusions

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The future is relative

• Only six electronic computers would be needed to
  satisfy all the United States computing needs.
• Howard Aitken, 1947

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Put this in perspective

• There are still less than 400 million machines
  currently connected and about 600 million users
  of the Internet
• A tiny percentage of the world's population.
• In 2001, the PC industry reported its first dip
  in sales.
• Over 2 billion mobile phones
• My mobile phone is comparable in power to my
  first PC

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A timeline

• 1948 The baby is built in Manchester
• 1949 The EDSAC, Memory 1K words, 17 bits,
  Speed714 operations per second
• 1951 UKs first commercial computer at Lyons TEA
  they started making computers and TEA
• 1956 MIT build first general purpose computer
• 1959 - IBM's 7000 series mainframes were the
  company's first transistorized computers.
• 1960 - The precursor to the minicomputer, DEC's
  PDP-1 sold for 120,000. One of 50 built, the
  average PDP-1 included with a cathode ray tube
  graphic display and first computer game!
• 1964 CDC 6600 3 MIP machine
• 1966 ILLIAC, 200 MIP DARPA machine

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More of the timeline

• 1972 Hewlett-Packard announced the HP-35 as "a
  fast, extremely accurate electronic slide rule"
  with a solid-state memory similar to that of a
  computer.
• 1974 Researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research
  Center designed the Alto
• 1976 The Cray I made its name as the first
  commercially successful vector processor. The
  fastest machine of its day, its speed came partly
  from its shape, a C, which reduced the length of
  wires and thus the time signals needed to travel
  across them. Speed 166 million floating-point
  operations per second, Size 58 cubic feet,
  Weight 5,300 lbs.
• 1979 Visicalc 'responsible' for 25 of all Apple
  II sales.
• 1980 Sinclair's ZX-80 launched
• 1981 First IBM PC - 1365, Xerox Star - 16,000.
• 1982 BBC's "The Computer Programme" broadcast.
  Many people buy the BBC Micro made by Acorn.
• January 23rd 1984 Macintosh launched

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Baby - 1948 Successfully executed its first
program on 21st June 1948
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Baby 1967
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Baby - 2000

• Source http//www-ccs.cs.umass.edu/shri/iPic.htm
  l

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Moores Law

• Gordon Moore (Co founder of HP) in the 1970s
  predicted that wed be able to squeeze twice as
  many transistors into a chip every 24 months.
• This prediction, minorly modified, still holds.

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Moores law

• Source Kurtzweilai.net

Molecular Transistors
Silicon Transistors
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100,000,000
100
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lt100 cm3
10,000 m3
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The consequences
All of humanitys computational power by 2050
One human brain
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Nixons Law
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All this power and it wont do what I want!
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Conclusion 1
We know all about that, and Moores Law gives us
a good idea of what the future holds at the
processing level
So its no longer about what computers can do
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The Third Wave Sensing the world
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Pervasive Computing

• Ubiquitous (or Pervasive) computing names the
  third wave in computing, just now beginning.
  First were mainframes, each shared by lots of
  people. Now we are in the personal computing era,
  person and machine staring uneasily at each other
  across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous
  computing, or the age of calm technology, when
  technology recedes into the background of our
  lives.
• Mark Weiser, Xerox

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What is Pervasive Computing?

• The correct information, delivered at the correct
  time, to the correct place, in the correct
  format.

One solution Provide everything in one place.
You might ever, conceivably need
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Sense the world and action
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Some Sensor Examples

• Contextual device interaction

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Floodnet

• Tidal channel at low and high tide

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GIS Visualisation Real-time output/ Simulator
Web
Model
Database
Field Side
IBM/MQ
Mini Broker
Mobile Phone Network
Database Side
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Grid-based Medical Devices for Everyday Health

• Patients are remotely monitored using a series of
  small mobile and wearable devices constructed
  from an arrangement of existing sensors
• Information collected from these remote devices
  includes accelerometer and GPS information in
  order to provide context
• Information is made available using Grid
  technology
• Medical professionals have tools to analyse
  on-line medical information and are able to
  access these through remote interfaces.

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MIAS - Devices

• Exploring the development of mobile medical
  technologies that can be remotely connected onto
  a distributed grid infrastructure
• Continuous monitoring of multiple signals via
  wearable devices
• Periodic monitoring using Java phones and blood
  glucose measures
• All signals available to a broad community and
  can be processed using standard Grid Services

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Grid protocol
Java Phone Blood Monitor
StandardGrid Service for feature detection
Proxy Buffers Material for sending on
Grid based Storage Services
Grid protocol
Grid protocol
Patients
Visualisation Services
Proxy Converts Signals to database record
Wearable Devices
Grid protocol
Display
Clinicians
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Wearable Device
Sensor bus

• Easy Plug and Play of Sensors
• Wireless connection using 802.11
• Positioning information from GPS
• Nine wire sensor bus running through wearable to
  allow new sensors

GPS aerial
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Range of different sensors

• ECG
• Oxygen saturation
• Body movement
• Accelerometers
• GPS
• All plug and play to standard bus
• Changes reported to the underlying infrastructure

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Blood Glucose Monitoring

• Exploring medical devices that rely on
  self-reporting
• Extends web based system developed by Oxford
  University and e-San Ltd
• Off-the-shelf GPRS (General Packet Radio Service)
  mobile phone
• Blood Glucose meter

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Self Reporting

• Patient takes measurement
• Measurement sent via mobile phone to remote
  infrastructure
• Series of lifestyle questions asked as part of
  the clinical trial
• Users promoted for compliance.
• Current trial involves 100 patients

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Invisible interfaces

• Inserting the chip

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Video AIC Novel Interfaces

• Contextual device interaction

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Smart Textiles Wearable sensors

• Current Situation - Wearable sensors are usually
  discrete sensors and electronic components
  attached to the fabric
• Move to Functionalised Fabrics, e.g. lycra coated
  with conducting polymer
• can be used to functionalise discrete locations
  on a garment
• can sense stretch, bending, pressure, movements.
• Can pick up breathing, heart function
• Innocuous to the wearer
• Project (with Prof. Gordon Wallace, Wollongong,
  Australia, and Prof. Alan MacDiarmid, UPENN) aims
  to produce all polymeric devices (electronics and
  sensing materials)

From Rod Shepherd, NCSR
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Vmax 229 machine
Exercise Shirt
Logging Laptop
Base Station
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• Wish to monitor underfoot pressure distribution
  during movement
• Communication via Crossbow Mica 2 Dot
• Advantage over previous methods Simultaneous
  real-time measurements across a number of
  channels (up to 4)
• Wireless data transfer between the mote which is
  sensor bound and the basestation

• Useful for biomemedic studies e.g. technique
  during walking / running

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• Shoe can be used to detect gait changes when
  performing different movement activities.
• For e.g. the difference between the heel strike
  and front foot lift-off for walking and running
  is significant
• Other movements can also be detected where
  movement may not occur but pressure under-foot is
  experienced

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Pervasive Computing is about sensing

• Every device and every artefact is now
  potentially a sensor
• Information collected now dwarfs volumes on the
  web
• Huge range of applications
• These sensory inputs provide a context of use for
  applications which can drive information delivery
  and computation.
• BUT - there is a ridiculously large amount of
  information to deliver and compute over

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Demonstration Context can work

• Contextual device interaction

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Summary of a Pervasive System

• Pervasive
• Accessible everywhere in the environment
• Embedded
• Appear in everyday devices
• Nomadic
• Not tied to a location, can move with the user
• Adaptable
• Change behaviour based on the users
  circumstances
• Powerful and efficient
• Leverage computing power to provide services
• Intentional
• Match their behaviour to the users tasks and
  intentions
• Eternal
• No re-booting, no loss of service or data

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A Systems Research View

• A massive spectrum of research from Ethnographic
  Studies, through programming models and systems
  infrastructure, to networked sensors
• Each necessarily characterised by stunning
  point-examples of technology and problem solving.
• Some toolkits are emerging, such as Smart-ITS,
  EQUIP, TRH, I-AM, SCINET, Context Toolkit,
• A challenge to draw together these advances to
  provide coherent building blocks, frameworks and
  tools to build small or large scale Pervasive
  Systems.

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Down to the detail

• The big problem we address is context

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Distributed systems

• The goal of location transparency has been
  assiduously pursued
• The web, CORBA, e-mail,
• Remove significance of and usually any
  knowledge of the (absolute or relative)
  locations of agents in a system
• Allow arbitrary interactions

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But the world isnt like that 1

• Networks especially the Internet arent flat
  they have a distinctly non-trivial topology
• Firewalls etc introduce disconnectedness
• Objects semantics are critically dependent on
  their location
• and in a smart space, location changes

This observation also underpins Cardelli and
Gordons ambient calculus
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But the world isnt like that? 2

• Everything doesnt happen everywhere
• Certain activities occur (at least
  preferentially) in particular locations
• People arent in two places at once
• Task and space impose a certain degree of
  orderliness on events
• This happens after that, although not necessarily
  without interruption
• If I do this here and that there, I have to get
  from here to there
• The information and support I need while doing
  this may change when I start doing that
• Not everything is allowed or disallowed, for
  that matter
• Permission is a remarkably subtle concept
• Not everything that happens happens for a reason..

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Relationships
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Synthesis

• Each dimension of the system defines a particular
  part of its behaviour, with the dimensions
  inter-related
• A persons location affects the tasks they may
  (preferentially) perform
• A person belongs to an organisation, and that
  affects the information they should be able to
  access
• Many current systems hard-wire some of these
  dimensions together, weakening their capabilities
• If youre off-site, youre an enemy if you
  acquire this information, you can keep it if
  youre in here, you belong

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Adaptive Information
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Food for thought

• There is more information available at our
  fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any
  computer system, yet people find a walk among
  trees relaxing and computers frustrating.
  Machines that fit the human environment, instead
  of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make
  using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk
  in the woods
• Mark Weiser, Xerox (1991)

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Its Information Jim, but now as we know it
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Pervasive systems in context

• Pervasive
• Accessible everywhere in the environment
• Embedded
• Appear in everyday devices
• Nomadic
• Not tied to a location, can move with the user
• Adaptable
• Change behaviour based on the users
  circumstances
• Powerful and efficient
• Leverage computing power to provide services
• Intentional
• Match their behaviour to the users tasks and
  intentions
• Eternal
• No re-booting, no loss of service or data

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Adaptive Information
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An outline software system micro-level
Aggregate materials
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An outline software system macro
Device
Material
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Adaptive Information Cluster

• 9m SFI Multi-Disciplinary Research Cluster
• UCD DCU
• Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs
• Environmental Protection Agency
• Ericsson
• IBM
• 6 Principal Investigators over 60 Researchers

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Informatics
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Information is critical

• This new sensorised world with eternal memory
  changes everything!
• A few hints of this change
• 10 Billion Web Documents
• 60 terabytes a day growth
• Climatologists predict 15 billion gigabytes of
  collected data by 2010
• This exponential growth in information provides
  a set of new problems which will dominate
  scientific research in information and
  communication technology over the next twenty
  years.

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From Computer Science to Informatics

• Informatics is about the engineering of complex
  computational systems that are built on a strong
  theoretical foundation and that respond to
  real-world problems.
• My view is that UCD provides an environment in
  which Informatics can flourish where this
  separation between Economists and Engineers,
  Information Scientists and Physical Scientists is
  removed. An environment that does not exist in
  any institution internationally. More
  importantly an environment where truly new
  science is envisaged.

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Integrated Informatics
Diagnostic Imaging
CSI , EEM, Maths, Conway Institute Architecture,
Lanscape Civil Eng
Conway Institute EEM Engineering CSI
Geary Institute
Imaging Viz
Health Informatics
Informatics
Physiotherapy Performance Science
Systems Biology
Medical devices
Climotology.
CONWAY
NCSR / DCU
EEM Engineering
Mathematical Science Complex Systems
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Conclusions

• A new era for computing (billions of devices,
  personalised interactions, ubiquitous data
  access, social interaction)
• This demands fundamental and applied research
• on novel device technologies (building the
  computer of tomorrow)
• on computers systems research (building the
  Internet of tomorrow)
• on knowledge extraction and information delivery
• on privacy, trust and security.
• on human interaction with technology
• on social impact of this new world

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Conclusions

• The Systems Research Group is rapidly
  establishing a unqiue test environment for
  Adaptive Information research
• Through the combination of SRG with NCSR, CDVP,
  and the Personalisation Group, the Adaptive
  Information Cluster now represents the largest
  grouping of Pervasive Computing Researchers in
  Europe.
• Our vision of Informatics demands
  multi-disciplinary research
• UCD is uniquely placed to develop realise this
  multi-displinary research capability

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AcknowledgementsThis work is support by Science
Foundation Ireland, the EU, Enterprise Ireland,
IRCSET, Microsoft and IBM.

• Professor Paddy NixonSchool of Computer Science
  and Informatics