Convergent Devices

1
Convergent Devices

• Common Solutions Group
• May, 2005
• Paul B. Hill, MIT

2
Perception?
3
Convergent Devices vs. Convergent Media
4
Context of the User
5
Devices

• Phones
• Cameras (still and video)
• Music Players
• Audio recorders
• GPS
• TVs (VCR, DVD, )
• OCR scanners
• Instruments

• Game stations (Xbox, Sony portable play station)
• Tablets, PDAs, Laptops
• Bar code scanners
• Sensors (accl., temp., chemical,)
• Braille output
• 3d plotters

6
Media

• Text
• Interactive Voice
• Audio recording
• Audio playback
• Still photos
• Video

• Interactive video (simulations)
• Ink / paper
• Haptics

7
Current focus of the trade and financial press

• The convergence of cell phones and PDAs
• The convergence of cell phones and WiFi

8
The case for convergence

• Convenience of carrying a single device

9
The case against convergence

• Cost
• Compromise
• Forces the phones to be too big
• Forces the screens to be too small
• May slow adoption of new technology
• High cost slows replacement
• Users reluctant to replace the device to gain the
  benefit of one new feature
• more than three-quarters of respondents say
  mobile computing blurs the line between personal
  and work time, and nearly half believe it leads
  to long working hours.

10
Email users suffered a 10 per cent drop in IQ
scores

• Does this explain why GPS appears to be one of
  the most popular after market additions to PDAs?

11
Applications of note in the world

• Practical
• Weather Channel, Presentation / Powerpoint
  related, MovieGoer, Video Voice Mail
• Social
• Crunkie (mobile blogs), Instant Messaging (AIM,
  MSN,)
• Weird Stuff
• Bathroom finder, disgusting ring-tones, voodoo
  doll

12
Applications of note for HigherEd

• Class-in-Hand from Wake Forest University
• CMUs Pebbles Project
• Reference books
• Adobe Reader for Pocket PC, Palm OS, and Symbian
• ePocrates clinical drug reference guide
• Variety of calculators
• DataHarvest

13
Some of the numbers

• 182 million U.S. wireless subscribers at the end
  of 2004
• 63 penetration rate of cellular subscribers
• 40 portion of 12 to 14 year olds who have cell
  phones
• 2.5 billion text messages sent each month

14
of revenue derived from data services

• U.S. 4 (85 was only used for text messaging,
  only 1/3 of the users have even done that)
• Asia 30

15
Metrics from the CSG survey
School Palm Pocket PC Blackberry Symbian
Chicago 300 200 130
Duke 295 65 or 22 not medical
Stanford 8000/1000 500 400
Michigan 900 50 850
MIT 264 43 From 2002 data
Brown 120 Purchased centrally
Columbia 300 Blackberry and Treo
Georgetown 1000 200 200

16
More Metrics
MP3 cell phone smart phone pda
Penn State 42 88 1 11
Harvard 96 12 Undergrad population
Yale 10 15
Texas 7 14
17
Security

• Risks
• Infection vector
• A stepping stone into other systems
• Accidental data export

18
Security Policy Topics

• Authentication onto the device
• Remote destruction and disabling
• Back and restore
• Storage cards
• Access to applications
• Information transfer methods
• Device deployment

19
MIT and convergent devices

• Central IT and Departmental Projects

20
MIT IST Supported Software and Devices

• IST supports VersaMail and SnapperMail for
  e-mail on cell phones and PDAs running Palm OS
  3.5 or higher.
• IST supports the Oracle Calendar Sync for Palm
  clients on Macintosh OS X and Windows systems,
  for synchronizing between MIT TechTime and Palm
  devices running Palm OS 3.3 or higher.

21
Adaptive Technology and Information Technology

• Provides some information about PDAs and portable
  Braille displays

22
MIT ITAG statement

• Mobil computing devices such as PDAs running
  various operating systems, such as Palm OS and
  Windows CE, are becoming increasingly used by the
  MIT community. IST is beginning to add support
  for these devices. At the present time there is
  no requirement for Enterprise systems to work or
  be tested on these platforms. Although it is
  desirable for Enterprise applications to run on a
  wide variety of platforms, it is up to the
  individual project team to determine when support
  of these platforms is needed.

23
Has there been central development?

• Kerberos for Newton released the same week that
  Apple cancelled the Newton
• MIT Webmail modified so that mail composition
  would work on mobile devices
• Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) talking
  about mobile support for performing inventories

24
Integrated Communications at MIT

• Planning in progress for shaping the development
  of next generation integrated communications
  strategy
• Opportunities for Education, Research Community
  Activities
• http//mit.edu/icp/

25
Small form factor departmental projects

• PDA Participatory Simulations
• PDA Participatory Simulations use Palm OS
  handheld computers (for now only Palm OS is
  supported) to embed people inside of simulations.
  
• Environmental Detectives and Software Tools for
  Environmental Study
• Enviornmental Detectives is designed to integrate
  GPS, Bluetooth, and handheld computing
  technologies in one platform.
• Classroom Communicator and Next Generation Mobile
  Classroom
• To develop innovative technologya cell phone
  equipped with a web browserto enable instructors
  and students to communicate more comfortably and
  effectively in large classes.

26
More small form factor projects

• iMatch
• users equipped with iMatch-enabled PocketPCs can
  able to dynamically locate resources
  corresponding to a match request. For example,
  iMatch agents could match a student with the
  nearest available study partner, or a faculty
  member who is seeking research assistants.
• GloBuddy
• Smartphone hosted language translator

27
Oxygen and TParty

• Large initiatives with MIT CSAIL
• Oxygen
• Bringing abundant computation and communication,
  as pervasive and free as air, naturally into
  people's lives.
• TParty
• Quanta Computer, Inc. and the Massachusetts
  Institute of Technology today announced a
  five-year, 20M joint research collaboration
  project ("TParty") aimed at developing the next
  generation of platforms for computing and
  communication beyond personal computers.

28
Cricket

• Cricket is an indoor location system for
  pervasive and sensor-based computing
  environments, such as those envisioned by MIT's
  Project Oxygen. Cricket provides fine-grained
  location information---space identifiers,
  position coordinates, and orientation---to
  applications running on handhelds, laptops, and
  sensor nodes.

29
Wearable Computing

• A person's computer should be worn, much as
  eyeglasses or clothing are worn, and interact
  with the user based on the context of the
  situation. With heads-up displays, unobtrusive
  input devices, personal wireless local area
  networks, and a host of other context sensing and
  communication tools, the wearable computer can
  act as an intelligent assistant, whether it be
  through a Remembrance Agent, augmented reality,
  or intellectual collectives.

30
What about digital ink?
31
John San Giovanni, Microsoft

• Notice
• There is a standing 100 cash reward for the
  first person to find any piece of paper with John
  SanGiovanni's handwriting anywhere in his office,
  or on his person.
• The following are fair game
• Any hand-written meeting notes whatsoever
• Any Post-it notes
• Any hand-written reminders of any kind
• The following items are exempt
• Signatures
• Hand-written personal notes(which are always
  more expressive)
• Written labels on physical objects boxes, discs,
  videos, cables, and envelopes
• Ruled forms (checks, cab receipts, etc.)
• Digital ink technologies, including Tablet PC
  Rich Ink, and paper with Anoto optical
  watermarking.
• Happy hunting.
• Become Digital.
• - JSG

32
Ink Uses

• Markup PDF, Word, Powerpoint, Outlook
• Now appearing in web applications Wikis and
  Blogs
• Portable ink between Pocket PC and Tablet PC
  applications

33
The Paperless Classroom

• This project is the systematic replacement of
  paper by tablets for the students as well as the
  replacement of the chalkboard for the professor.
  We are attempting to understand the limiting
  factors associated with the use of this
  technology on a daily basis. To this end we are
  recording reliability, usability and the increase
  in learning that is derived from the use of
  Tablet PCs. We are also attempting to measure
  the fundamental shift required to eliminate paper
  and to create instantaneous access to the
  information for the students. This will serve to
  increase the speed of learning.
• We started with two highly visual classes,
  Neuroanatomy and Mandarin. We then extended
  Tablet PCs to include special projects in
  various other subjects, such as Biomedical
  Engineering, Health Science and Technology,
  Business and a class at the University of Hong
  Kong Medical Faculty.
• http//web.mit.edu/acs/Crosstalk/