A little bit about Alvin Chin and his research

1. A little bit about Alvin Chin and his research Alvin Chin PhD student Computer Systems Group Dept. of Computer Sciencehttp://www.cs.toronto.edu/~achin achin@cs.toronto.edu

2. Background • PhD student (1st year) with Eyal de Lara • Aka Gadget Man • Graduated from Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering, June 2004, University of Waterloo • Bachelors in Computer Engineering, 1999, University of Waterloo • Website: http://www.the-gadgetman.com for more info about me!

3. Research Interests • Pervasive or ubiquitous computing • accessing information anytime, anywhere on any device blended into a human, non-obtrusive, ubiquitous environment • “conceive a new way of thinking about computers, one that takes into account the human world and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background” Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21st Century, Scientific American, 1991. • Is pervasive computing new?

4. What is pervasive computing? M. Satyanarayanan, Pervasive Computing: Vision and Challenges, IEEE Personal Communications, August 2001.

5. Objective of Research • Want to make computing environment easier to use in our everyday lives – everyday computing • Things still too complicated in our world • Problem is that we have to adapt to computers • Should be other way around

6. Areas of interest • Context-awareness • Adding context from physical environment to computer environment to infer user behaviour • Bridge the gap between human and computer • Eg. Location • Personalization • Customized according to what you want • profiling

7. Areas of interest • Human-computer interaction • A bit of HCI, human-computer interfaces • Mobile, wireless computing • 802.11, Bluetooth, roaming • Semantic web • Wearable computing • Smart environments • Recall: Minority Report movie

8. Current Research • Community-Driven Adaptation (Alvin Chin, Iqbal Mohomed, Jim Cai, Eyal de Lara) • Users have different perception as to how they view content, what may be considered good quality for one may not be for the other • Our research intends to investigate the feasibility of adapting images and content to an optimal fidelity that will provide for a personal rich interaction experience for a community of users. • We need users for our study, if interested, please contact me!

9. Current Research • Investigating User Mobility for Ad-Hoc Networks (Alvin Chin, Jing Su, Ashvin Goel, Eyal de Lara) • Current mobility studies use theoretical models and/or some kind of randomized movement • View time as a propagation factor, not networking feature • Use real user mobility, not simulation • Study: equipped users with Palm Tungsten T Bluetooth devices and detected pair-wise communications • Results: network can exist, a node can reach other nodes even though it does not directly contact it

10. Previous Research • Service invocation and roaming in pervasive computing(Alvin Chin, Kostas Kontogiannis) • Masters thesis at University of Waterloo • How to dynamically invoke services and continue to access them when moving to a different location or network

11. PhD Thesis • Still in investigation phase • Would like to combine HCI, wearable computing, context-awareness, smart environments areas with pervasive computing focus

12. Comments, Feedback? • I value and appreciate any feedback on my research • achin@cs.toronto.edu • http://www.the-gadgetman.com