Mobile and Pervasive Computing - 7 Projects for Groups

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Mobile and Pervasive Computing - 7Projects for
Groups
Assoc.Prof. Halûk Gümüskaya Department of
Computer Engineering Fatih University

• Presented by Dr. Adeel Akram
• University of Engineering and Technology,
  Taxila,Pakistan
• http//web.uettaxila.edu.pk/CMS/SP2014/teMPCms

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Outline

• Principles of Pervasive Computing
• Evolution Related Fields
• Problem Space
• Example Projects
• Other Scenarios
• References

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Principles of Pervasive Computing

• The most profound technologies are those that
  dissappear. They weave themselves into the fabric
  of everyday life until they are indistinguishable
  from it.
• Creation of environments saturated with computing
  and communication capability, yet gracefully
  integrated with human users.
• Scientific American,Vol. 265 N.9, pp. 66-75, 1991

Mark Weiser
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Principles of Pervasive Computing

• During one of his talks, Weiser outlined a set of
  principles describing pervasive computing (also
  called ubiquitous computing)
• The purpose of a computer is to help you do
  something else.
• The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
• The more you can do by intuition the smarter you
  are the computer should extend your unconscious.
  
• Technology should create calm.
• Calm technology
• A technology that informs but doesn't demand our
  focus or attention. (Designing Calm Technology,
  Weiser and John Seeley Brown)

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Principles of Pervasive Computing
Figure 1. The major trends in computing.

• "Ubiquitous 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."

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Principles of Pervasive Computing

• Promoters of this idea hope that embedding
  computation into the environment and everyday
  objects would enable people to interact with
  information-processing devices more naturally and
  casually than they currently do, and in ways that
  suit whatever location or context they find
  themselves in.

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Principles of Pervasive Computing

• Pervasive computing integrates computation into
  the environment, rather than having computers
  which are distinct objects.
• Other terms for pervasive computing
• Ubiquitous computing
• Calm technology
• Things that think
• Everyware
• Pervasive internet
• Ambient intelligence
• Proactive computing
• Augmented reality

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Principles of Pervasive Computing

• Central aim of pervasive computing invisibility
• One does not need to continually rationalize
  one's use of a pervasive computing system.
• Having learnt about its use sufficiently well,
  one ceases to be aware of it.
• It is "literally visible, effectively invisible"
  in the same way that a skilled carpenter engaged
  in his work might use a hammer without
  consciously planning each swing.
• Similarly, when you look at a street sign, you
  absorb its information without consciously
  performing the act of reading.

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• Principles of Pervasive Computing
• Evolution Related Fields
• Problem Space
• Example Projects
• Other Scenarios
• References

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Evolution Related Fields

• Pervasive computing represents a major
  evolutionary step in a line of work dating back
  to the mid-1970s.
• Two distinct earlier steps in this evolution
• Distributed systems
• Mobile computing

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Evolution Related Fields
Figure 2. Taxonomy of computer systems research
problems in pervasive computing.
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Evolution Related Fields

• Distributed systems
• Arose at the intersection of personal computers
  and local area networks.
• The research that followed from the mid-1970s
  through the early 1990s created a conceptual
  framework and algorithmic base that has proven to
  be of enduring value in all work involving two or
  more computers connected by a network whether
  mobile or static, wired or wireless, sparse or
  pervasive.
• Spans many areas that are foundational to
  pervasive computing (Figure 2).

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Evolution Related Fields

• Mobile computing
• The appearance of full-function laptop computers
  and wireless LANs in the early 1990s led
  researchers to confront the problems that arise
  in building a distributed system with mobile
  clients. The field of mobile computing was thus
  born.
• Many basic principles of distributed system
  design continued to apply.
• Four key constraints of mobility forced the
  development of specialized techniques
• Unpredictable variation in network quality
• Lowered trust and robustness of mobile elements
• Limitations on local resources imposed by weight
  and size constraints
• Concern for battery power consumption

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Evolution Related Fields

• Other related fields
• Sensor networks
• Human-computer interaction
• http//www.sigchi.org/
• Artificial intelligence

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Evolution Related Fields

• Other related fields
• Sensor Networks
• A sensor network consist of a large number of
  tiny autonomous computing devices, each equipped
  with sensors, a wireless radio, a processor, and
  a power source.
• Sensor networks are envisioned to be deployed
  unobtrusively in the physical environment in
  order to monitor a wide range of environmental
  phenomena (e.g., environmental pollutions,
  seismic activity, wildlife) with unprecedented
  quality and scale.

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Evolution Related Fields

• Other related fields
• Human Computer Interaction
• HCI is the study of interaction between people
  (users) and computers.
• A basic goal of HCI is to improve the interaction
  between users and computers by making computers
  more user-friendly and receptive to the user's
  needs.
• A long term goal of HCI is to design systems that
  minimize the barrier between the human's
  cognitive model of what they want to accomplish
  and the computer's understanding of the user's
  task.

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Evolution Related Fields

• Other related fields
• Artificial Intelligence
• AI can be defined as intelligence exhibited by an
  artificial (non-natural, manufactured) entity.
• AI is studied in overlapping fields of computer
  science, psychology and engineering, dealing with
  intelligent behavior, learning and adaptation in
  machines, generally assumed to be computers.
• Research in AI is concerned with producing
  machines to automate tasks requiring intelligent
  behavior.

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• Principles of Pervasive Computing
• Evolution Related Fields
• Problem Space
• Example Projects
• Other Scenarios
• References

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Problem Space

• Pervasive computing incorporates four additional
  research thrusts
• Effective use of smart spaces
• Invisibility
• Localized scalability
• Masking uneven conditioning

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Problem Space

• Effective use of smart spaces
• By embedding computing infrastructure in building
  infrastructure, a smart space brings together
  physical and virtual worlds that have been
  disjoint until now.
• The fusion of these worlds enables sensing and
  control of one world by the other.
• Automatic adjustment of heating, cooling, and
  lighting levels in a room based on an occupants
  electronic profile.

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Problem Space

• Invisibility
• The ideal expressed by Weiser is complete
  disappearance of pervasive computing technology
  from a users consciousness (minimal user
  distraction).
• If a pervasive computing environment continuously
  meets user expectations and rarely presents him
  with surprises, it allows him to interact almost
  at a subconscious level.

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Problem Space

• Localized scalability
• As smart spaces grow in sophistication, the
  intensity of interactions between a users
  personal computing space and his/her surroundings
  increases.
• This has severe bandwidth, energy, and
  distraction implications for a wireless mobile
  user.
• The presence of multiple users will further
  complicate this problem.
• Good system design has to achieve scalability by
  severely reducing interactions between distant
  entities.

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Problem Space

• Masking un-even conditioning
• Huge differences in the smartness of different
  environments what is available in a
  well-equipped conference room, office, or
  classroom may be more sophisticated than in other
  locations.
• This large dynamic range of smartness can be
  jarring to a user, detracting from the goal of
  making pervasive computing technology invisible.
• One way to reduce the amount of variation seen by
  a user is to have his/her personal computing
  space compensate for dumb environments.

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Problem Space

• Design and implementation problems in pervasive
  comp.
• User intent
• Cyber foraging
• Adaptation strategy
• High-level energy management
• Client thickness
• Context awareness
• Balancing proactivity and transparency
• Privacy and trust

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Problem Space

• User intent
• For proactivity to be effective, it is crucial
  that a pervasive computing system track user
  intent. Otherwise, it will be almost impossible
  to determine which system actions will help
  rather than hinder the user.
• For example, suppose a user is viewing video over
  a network connection whose bandwidth suddenly
  drops. Should the system
• Reduce the fidelity of the video?
• Pause briefly to find another higher-bandwidth
  connection?
• Advise the user that the task can no longer be
  accomplished?
• The correct choice will depend on what the user
  is trying to accomplish.

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Problem Space

• Cyber foraging (also called living off the
  land)
• The idea is to dynamically augment the computing
  resources of a wireless mobile computer by
  exploiting wired hardware infrastructure.
• As computing becomes cheaper and more plentiful,
  it makes economic sense to waste computing
  resources to improve user experience.
• In the forseeable future, public spaces such as
  airport lounges and coffee shops will be equipped
  with compute servers or data staging servers for
  the benefit of customers, much as table lamps are
  today. (Today, many shopping centers and
  cafeterias offer their customers free wireless
  internet access.)

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Problem Space

• Adaptation strategy
• Adaptation is necessary when there is a
  significant mismatch between the supply and
  demand of a resource (e.g. wireless network
  bandwidth, energy, computing cycles or memory).
• There are three alternative strategies for
  adaptation in pervasive computing
• A client can guide applications in changing their
  behavior so that they use less of a scarce
  resource. This change usually reduces the
  user-perceived quality, or fidelity, of an
  application.
• A client can ask the environment to guarantee a
  certain level of a resource (reservation-based
  QoS systems). From the viewpoint of the client,
  this effectively increases the supply of a scarce
  resource to meet the clients demand.
• A client can suggest a corrective action to the
  user. If the user acts on this suggestion, it is
  likely (but not certain) that resource supply
  will become adequate to meet demand.

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Problem Space

• High-level energy management
• Sophisticated capabilities such as proactivity
  and self-tuning increase the energy demand of
  software on a mobile computer in ones personal
  computing space.
• Making such computers lighter and more compact
  places severe restrictions on battery capacity,
  requiring advance energy efficient memory
  management.
• One example is energy-aware memory management,
  where the operating system dynamically controls
  the amount of physical memory that has to be
  refreshed.
• Another example is energy-aware adaptation, where
  individual applications switch to modes of
  operation with lower fidelity and energy demand
  under operating system control.

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Problem Space

• Client thickness (hardware capabilities of the
  client)
• For a given application, the minimum acceptable
  thickness of a client is determined by the
  worst-case environmental conditions under which
  the application must run satisfactorily.
• A very thin client suffices if one can always
  count on high-bandwidth low-latency wireless
  communication to nearby computing infrastructure,
  and batteries can be recharged or replaced
  easily.
• If there exists even a single location visited by
  a user where these assumptions do not hold, the
  client will have to be thick enough to compensate
  at that location.
• This is especially true for interactive
  applications where crisp response is important.

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Problem Space

• Context awareness
• A pervasive computing system must recognize
  users state and surroundings, and must modify
  its behavior based on this information.
• A users context can be quite rich, consisting of
  attributes such as physical location,
  physiological state (e.g., body temperature and
  heart rate), emotional state (e.g., angry,
  distraught, or calm), personal history, daily
  behavioral patterns, and so on.
• If a human assistant were given such context, he
  or she would make decisions in a proactive
  fashion, anticipating user needs.
• In making these decisions, the assistant would
  typically not disturb the user at inopportune
  moments except in an emergency.
• A pervasive computing system should emulate such
  a human assistant.

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Problem Space

• Balancing proactivity and transparency
• Unless carefully designed, a proactive system can
  annoy a user and thus defeat the goal of
  invisibility.
• A mobile users need and tolerance for
  proactivity are likely to be closely related to
  his/her level of expertise on a task and
  familiarity with his/her environment.
• A system that can infer these factors by
  observing user behavior and context is better
  positioned to strike the right balance.
• For transparency, a user patience model can be
  implemented to predict whether the user will
  respond positively to a fetch request. So the
  user interaction is suppressed and the fetch is
  handled transparently.

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Problem Space

• Privacy and trust
• As a user becomes more dependent on a pervasive
  computing system, it becomes more knowledgeable
  about that users movements, behavior patterns
  and habits.
• Exploiting this information is critical to
  successful proactivity and self-tuning
  (invisibility), but also may cause serious loss
  of privacy.
• User must trust the infrastructure to a
  considerable extent and the infrastructure needs
  to be confident of the users identity and
  authorization level before responding to his/her
  requests.
• It is a difficult challenge to establish this
  mutual trust in a manner that is minimally
  intrusive and thus preserves invisibility.

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• Principles of Pervasive Computing
• Evolution Related Fields
• Problem Space
• Example Projects
• Other Scenarios
• References

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Example Projects

• After a decade of hardware progress, many
  critical elements of pervasive computing that
  were exotic in 1991 are now viable commercial
  products
• Handheld and wearable computers
• Wireless LANs
• Devices to sense and control appliances.
• We are now better positioned to begin the quest
  for Weisers vision.

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Example Projects

• Pervasive computing projects have emerged at
  major universities and in industry
• Project Aura (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Oxygen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Portalano (University of Washington)
• Endeavour (University of California at Berkeley)
• Place Lab (Intel Research Laboratory at Seattle)

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Example Projects Project Aura (1)

• Aura (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Distraction-free (Invisible) Ubiquitous Computing.

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Example Projects Project Aura (2)

• Moores Law Reigns Supreme
• Processor density
• Processor speed
• Memory capacity
• Disk capacity
• Memory cost
• ...
• Glaring Exception
• Human Attention

Human Attention
Adam Eve
2000 AD
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Example Projects Project Aura (3)

• Aura Thesis
• The most precious resource in computing is human
  attention.
• Aura Goals
• Reduce user distraction.
• Trade-off plentiful resources of Moores law for
  human attention.
• Achieve this scalably for mobile users in a
  failure-prone, variable-resource environment.

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Example Projects Project Aura (4)

• The Airport Scenario
• Jane wants to send e-mail from the airport before
  her flight leaves.
• She has several large enclosures
• She is using a wireless interface
• She has many options.
• Simply send the e-mail
• Is there enough bandwidth?
• Compress the data first
• Will that help enough?
• Pay extra to get reserved bandwidth
• Are reservations available?
• Send the diff relative to older file
• Are the old versions around?
• Walk to a gate with more bandwidth
• Where is there enough bandwidth?
• How do we choose automatically?

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Example Projects Project Aura (5)

• The Mobile Task Scenario
• Aura saves Scotts task.
• Scott enters office and gets strong
  authentication and secure access.
• Aura restores Scotts task on desktop machine and
  uses a large display.
• Scott controls application by voice.
• Bradley enters room.
• Bradley gets weak authentication, Scotts access
  changes to insecure.
• Aura denies voice access to sensitive email
  application.
• Scott has multi-modal control of PowerPoint
  application.
• Aura logs Scott out when he leaves the room.

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Example Projects Oxygen

• Oxygen (MIT)
• Pervasive human-centered computing.
• Goal of Oxygen is bringing abundant computation
  and communication, as pervasive and free as air,
  naturally into people's lives.

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Example Projects Oxygen (2)

• To support highly dynamic and varied human
  activities, the Oxygen system must be
• pervasive it must be everywhere, with every
  portal reaching into the same information base
• embedded it must live in our world, sensing and
  affecting it
• nomadic it must allow users and computations to
  move around freely, according to their needs
• adaptable it must provide flexibility and
  spontaneity, in response to changes in user
  requirements and operating conditions
• powerful, yet efficient it must free itself from
  constraints imposed by bounded hardware
  resources, addressing instead system constraints
  imposed by user demands and available power or
  communication bandwidth
• intentional it must enable people to name
  services and software objects by intent, for
  example, "the nearest printer," as opposed to by
  address
• eternal it must never shut down or reboot
  components may come and go in response to demand,
  errors, and upgrades, but Oxygen as a whole must
  be available all the time.

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Related Projects Portalano

• Portolano (University of Washington)
• An expedition into invisible computing.
• Expedition goals
• Connecting the physical world to the world-wide
  information fabric
• Instrument the environment sensors, locators,
  actuators
• Universal plug-and-play at all levels devices to
  services
• Optimize for power computation partitioning,
  comm. opt.
• Intermittent communication new networking
  strategies
• Get computers out of the way
• Dont interfere with users tasks
• Diverse task-specific devices with optimized
  form-factors
• Wide range of input/output modalities
• Robust, trustworthy services
• High-productivity software development
• Self-organizing, active middleware, maintenance,
  monitoring
• Higher-level, meaningful services

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Related Projects Portalano (2)

• Scenario
• Alice begins the day with a cup of coffee and her
  personalized newspaper.
• When her carpool arrives, she switches to reading
  the news on her handheld display, where she
  notices an advertisement for a new 3-D digital
  camera.
• It looks like something that would interest her
  friend Bob, so Alice asks her address book to
  place the call.

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Related Projects Portalano (3)

• Scenario (2)
• Bob's home entertainment system softens the
  volume of his custom music file as his phone
  rings.
• Alice begins telling Bob about the camera, and
  forwards him a copy of the advertisement which
  pops up on his home display.
• Bob is sold on the product, and after hanging up
  with her, he asks his electronic shopping agent
  to check his favorite photography stores for the
  lowest price and make the purchase.

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Related Projects Portalano (4)

• Scenario (3)
• When the camera arrives, Bob snaps some photos of
  his neighbor's collection of antique Portuguese
  navigation instruments.
• After reviewing the photo album generated
  automatically by a web-based service, Bob directs
  a copy of his favorite image to the photo album
  folder.
• He also sends a pointer to the photo album to
  Alice and instructs his scheduling agent to set
  up a lunch date so that he can thank her for the
  suggestion.

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Example Projects Endeavour

• The Endeavour Expedition (UC Berkeley)
• Charting the Fluid Information Utility
• Endeavour Goal
• Enhancing human understanding through the use of
  information technology.

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• Principles of Pervasive Computing
• Evolution Related Fields
• Example Projects
• Other Scenarios
• References

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Other Scenarios

• Buy drinks by Friday (1)
• Take out the last can of soda
• Swipe the cans UPC label, which adds soda to
  your shopping list
• Make a note that you need soda for the guests you
  are having over this weekend
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Product_Cod
  e

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Other Scenarios

• Buy drinks by Friday (2)
• Approach a local supermarket
• AutoPC informs you that you are near a
  supermarket
• Opportunistic reminder If it is convenient,
  stop by to buy drinks.

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Other Scenarios

• Buy drinks by Friday (3)
• Friday rolls around and you have not bought
  drinks
• Deadline-based reminder sent to your pager

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Other Scenarios

• Screen Fridge
• Provides
• Email
• Video messages
• Web surfing
• Food management
• TV
• Radio
• Virtual keyboard
• Digital cook book
• Surveillance camera

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Other Scenarios

• The Active Badge
• This inch-scale computer contains a small
  microprocessor and an infrared transmitter.
• The badge broadcasts the identity of its wearer
  and so can trigger automatic doors, automatic
  telephone forwarding and computer displays
  customized to each person reading them.
• The active badge and other networked tiny
  computers are called tabs.

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Other Scenarios

• The Active Badge

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Other Scenarios

• Edible computers The pill-cam
• Miniature camera
• Diagnostic device
• It is swallowed
• Try this with an ENIAC computer!

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Other Scenarios

• Artificial Retina
• Direct interface with nervous system
• Whole new computational paradigm

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Other Scenarios

• Smart Dust
• Nano computers that couple
• Sensors
• Computing
• Communication
• Grids of motes (nano computers)

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• Principles of Pervasive Computing
• Evolution Related Fields
• Problem Space
• Example Projects
• Other Scenarios
• References

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References

• Mark Weiser, "The Computer for the Twenty-First
  Century," Scientific American, pp. 94-10,
  September 1991.
• Wikipedia
• Mark Weiser, Ubiquitous Computing, HCI, AI
• M.Satyanarayanan, Pervasive Computing Vision
  and Challenges, IEEE Personal Communications,
  August 2001.
• D.Saha, A.Mukherjee, Pervasive Computing A
  Paradigm for the 21st Century, IEEE Computer
  Society, March 2003.
• Roberto Siagri, Presentation of "Computer you can
  eat or Portable, High-Performance Systems",
  Eurotech Spa, December 2004
• Andrew C. Huang, Presentation of Pervasive
  Computing What is it good for?, August 1999
• CMU Project Aura Web Site, http//www.cs.cmu.edu/
  aura/
• MIT Project Oxygen Web Site, http//oxygen.csail.m
  it.edu/
• UW Project Portalano Web Site, http//portolano.cs
  .washington.edu/
• UC Berkeley Project Endeavour, http//endeavour.cs
  .berkeley.edu/

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Assignment 3

• Give Presentation on any of 5 projects discussed
  on Slide 35 and submit report in next class
• Highlight Unique aspects
• Components of the System
• Other Related projects

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• Questions???