Run to the Hills! Ubiquitous Computing Meltdown

1. Run to the Hills! Ubiquitous Computing Meltdown Huuskonen, Pertti

2. How Far We Have Come Ubiquitous computing has arrived, but not in the form it was imagined. • Boards -> Projectors • Pads -> Laptops • Tabs - > Mobiles Location systems v. important -> Person centric data Mobile phones the most rapid technological development ever, now reaching half planetary population.

3. How Far We Have Come The Internet is a key enabler for daily life, common activities largely occurring in electronic domain. Key shortcoming: net is human readable, not machine readable. Mitigation: • Search engines • information starvation • information overload. • Semantic Web • humans encoding into metadata required • tagging, which suffers noise, ambiguity, spam, etc.

4. How Far We Have Come There exists a trend of increasing connectivity across all devices • Bicycles, coffee machines, toasters, refrigerators. A major trend in the future of ubicomp then: the rise of net connected machinery. Ubiquitous research always seeks far future, emphasising different aspects of one dream: • Omnipresent, all-encompassing computational environment that can sense, adapt, automate, inform and stay out of sight. This may be impossible to achieve.

5. The Ubicomp Overload “We believe a ubicomp overload is inevitable.” More machinery, more problems. • TVs don’t connect, fridge door passwords get lost, living room lights complain of “invalid command”. • Numerous situations where systems do not work as intended. Failure to standardise and integrate systems as fast as new ones developed. The essence of ubicomp, defined as countless subsystems working together to realise applications. Systems suffer unexpected interdependencies. The more there are, more likely it is to break. This will not change.

6. The Ubicomp Overload Example: Air traffic control. • Successful, but expensive, hard to maintain, limited by legacy systems. Many companies are moving into adding smart functions or web access. It will take time for expertise to be acquired. • Usability, reliability, privacy as secondary concerns: too costly, given price margins. • Result: thousands of products unfit for human-machine relations.

7. The Ubicomp Overload Maintenance is not the answer. • Classic maintenance fixes problems internal to a device, not inherent in interactions between devices. • Likely third party support agencies arise to fill gap. Standards are important. • Slow, hard, costly to develop. • Unclear who enforces them.

8. The (Anti)Social Ubicomp Major internet movement: rise of user-generated content. • What is the equivalent in ubicomp? People index data by source: person, location. Major drivers behind Web 2.0 are digital images, videos, metadata generated in passing. Ubicomp 2.0: Build a data framework and allow users to populate it. Use world and people as a mass sensor grid for data gathering. • “Build the database, and they will come.”

9. The (Anti)Social Ubicomp Problems with Web 2.0: • spam, trojans, bots, other stealth attacks, bullies, predators. Similarly, a great deal of contributions to ubicompdatabases will be of poor quality, some actively harmful. • How can ubicompbe saved from data pollution? • If part of grid, how is your outgoing data managed? These questions must be answered before deployment.

10. Calm or Dazzling Computing? To see the future of ubicomp, look at current browsers. • Blinking banners, animations, pop ups, adwords. Extend the principle to everywhere. • Fridge, coffee maker, car, elevator, every single device with displays. • Everything becomes a dynamic, context aware advertising platform. One key aspect of calm computing was that it recedes to background unless needed. This has been poorly implemented. Compare a walk in the woods and a run through a Las Vegas casino.

11. Calm or Dazzling Computing? Why will this happen? Because it can. Business drivers call for overload. Key information services are used as advertising platforms: • Newspapers, TV, radio, film, phonebooks, maps, internet, mobiles. • Tolerate largely unwanted information to keep platforms alive. People may dislike this, or not care. • People may accept inconvenience for lower running costs. • They may find ways around the intrusive elements. Generational gap predicted, younger adapting to ad-supported ubicomp. Or not: we don’t know. • Fear of new mental disorders emerging driven by such a society.

12. Calm or Dazzling Computing? Rogers vs. Weiser: Dazzle against calm. • People are different. Personalities, cultures, lifestyles, goals... • Try to design systems such that people are offered the choice. The price of Zen: A new digital divide based on wealth. • When information is free, silence is expensive.

13. Context Awareness Considered Risky Context awareness is important. Humans are highly so; to integrate, machines need some too. • Mobiles more urgent: no assumed context as with desktops. Some tasks are difficult to solve eg. Phones ringing at awkward moments. • Very hard to calculate when to ring, social adaptation instead. Location awareness: most popular in context literature, but ability to find people being dropped. • Users happy to pull location data but not publish it. • May change, but not in current user lifetimes. Presence and activity recognition: Presence data manually set, currently used. Automated detection, unsuccessful.

14. Context Awareness Considered Risky Many avenues of presence detection; motion analysis, social networking, device ID broadcasts. Another potential avenue for data overflow, update flood based on proximity. • What data should be sent, to who, under what circumstances, how much data visible to receiver? What’s the Right Domain? Foolproof generic context awareness unlikely. Limited contexts more useful: must be carefully tested and slowly introduce successful models into general ubicomp. Some applications inherently unusable for context awareness. Gaming, imaging potentially brighter areas, incorporation of AR into game environment, sensing of metadata. Autobiographical records. Allows human orientated searching.