CHAPTER ONE

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Individuals, organizations and groups have defined pervasive technology as they see it. Sometimes the emphasis is upon the devices that are designed to enable pervasive computing; sometimes the emphasis is upon the human aspects associated with it. Briefly, pervasive computing is a significant evolution of computing technology that integrates three main trends in current computing:

numerous, casually accessible, often invisible computing devices

mobile devices or technology embedded in the environment

connection to an increasingly ubiquitous network structure

According to SD Forum, Pervasive computing is a vision of the next generation of computing devices. Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown of Xerox PARC, defined it in 1996 as

'The third wave in computing, just now is 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.

The computer science journal IEEE Pervasive Computingi states,

'The essence of [the vision of pervasive computing] is the creation of environments saturated with computing and wireless communication, yet gracefully integrated with human users. Many key building blocks needed for this vision are now viable commercial technologies: wearable and handheld computers, high bandwidth wireless communication, location sensing mechanisms, and so on. The challenge is to combine these technologies into a seamless whole. This will require a multidisciplinary approach, involving hardware designers, wireless engineers, human-computer interaction specialists, software agent developers, and so on.'

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The area of pervasive computing and all it encompasses is daunting in its scope, as the following extracts show:

'As computing dissolves into the environment it will become as pervasive as the electricity flowing through society. In a controversial prediction, some scientists suggest the earth will be wrapped in a "digital skin", transmitting signals over the Internet almost as a living creature relays impulses through its nervous system. Millions of sensors will probe and monitor highways, cities, factories, forests, oceans, and the atmosphere. Some will be linked to orbiting satellites - extending the reach of this digital infrastructure into outer space.

Neil Gershenfeld, the co-director of the Things That Think consortium [at the MIT Media Lab], admits he no longer tries predicting when some futuristic technology might appear because it almost invariably turns up years before he thought it would. Much of the basic infrastructure for ubiquitous computing is actually already here - the Internet is up and running, processing power is increasing daily, and advances in wireless technology are exploding. For example, emerging systems will soon increase wireless data rates to two megabits per second; fast enough to download songs and movies from the Web. This capacity points to a future in which handheld devices are used to access a wide range of databases and other kinds of networked tools.

Gershenfeld also states, reflecting on the bits and the atoms, "The bits are the good stuff," referring to these units of digital information. "They consume no resources, they travel at the speed of light, we can copy them, they can disappear, and we can send them around the globe and construct billion dollar companies." Contrasting them with physical objects, he says, "The atoms are the bad stuff. They consume resources, you have to throw them away, and they’re old-fashioned." A challenge for the millennium, he explains, is to find ways to "bring the bits into the physical world."

“The basic idea behind linking bits and atoms is finding ways of getting physical objects to communicate with computers through a digital network.

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Technologists see this as a way to liberate computing from the confines of the PC and bring it out into the world at large. John Seely Brown, the chief scientist at Xerox, compares computing today to "walking around with your peripheral vision blocked by a pair of tubes on your glasses." And Gershenfeld says the problem with PCs now is that they only touch that "subset of human experience spent sitting in front of a desk." Both scientists say that to be truly useful, computers should be brought into the stuff of everyday life, in part by embedding them into ordinary objects and machines.”

Pervasive computing can also be explained in two different perspectives:i. User viewii. Technology view

User view

For an end user Pervasive approach act as a method of augmenting human abilities in context of tasks. It provides Interaction transparency which means that the human user is not aware that there is a computer embedded in the tool or device that he or she is using.

Technological view

It means access to information and software applications are available everywhere and anywhere. Technically pervasive computing involves in embedding intelligence and computing power to devices which are part of our daily life. As the word ‘Pervasive’ means, we create an environment with intelligence and which can communicate with each other. This technology is intended for mobile as well as localized devices. It must also possess the ability to locate an object or a user using provisions such as Global Positioning System (GPS). After positioning, a dynamic link must be setup for communication which may use the recent concept of ADHOC networking. User can interact with and control these devices using steerable interfaces, using voice and gesture recognition facilities.

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Terminologies Used In These Seminar Work

There are a lot of terminologies used in this seminar work that I would like to explain before I go further into my explanation.

IEEE- Institute of Electrical Electronics Engineering

PARC- Palo Alto Research Center.

MIT- Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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CHAPTER TWO

2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW

Mark Weiser coined the phrase "pervasive computing" around 1988, during his tenure as Chief Technologist of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Both alone and with PARC Director and Chief Scientist John Seely Brown, Weiser wrote some of the earliest papers on the subject, largely defining it and sketching out its major concerns. Recognizing that the extension of processing power into everyday scenarios would necessitate understandings of social, cultural and psychological phenomena beyond its proper ambit, Weiser was influenced by many fields outside computer science, including "philosophy, phenomenology, anthropology, psychology, post-Modernism, sociology of science and feminist criticism". He was explicit about "the humanistic origins of the ‘invisible ideal in post-modernist thought'", referencing as well the ironically dystopian Philip K. Dick novel Ubik.

Andy Hopper from Cambridge University UK proposed and demonstrated the concept of "Teleporting" - where applications follow the user wherever he/she moves.

Roy Want, while a researcher and student working under Andy Hopper at Cambridge University, worked on the "Active Badge System", which is an advanced location computing system where personal mobility that is merged with computing.

Bill Schilit (now at Google) also did some earlier work in this topic, and participated in the early Mobile Computing workshop held in Santa Cruz in 1996.

Dr. Ken Sakamura of the University of Tokyo, Japan leads the Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory (UNL), Tokyo as well as the T-Engine Forum. The joint goal of Sakamura's Ubiquitous Networking specification and the T-Engine forum is to enable any everyday device to broadcast and receive information.

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Girardin et al. (2008) use a reference to O’Neill et al. in the introduction to their paper and don’t subsequently refer back to it, but seem to follow on from the latter’s work by using mobile technologies to track patterns of movement across an urban area: in this case, Rome (as did Reades, Calabrese and Ratti 2009). They make a useful distinction between passive tracks (“left through interactions with an infrastructure”) and active prints (“from the users themselves when they expose locational data in photos, messages and measurements”) (p.79), where O’Neill et al. considered only the former. They analyze mobile phone traffic data provided by Telecom Italia (an Italian network operator with 40% market share), which is used to overlay a 250m x 250m grid of call densities on a map of Rome (and thus infer the relative population of each grid cell). This gives a less specific view of individual behavior than the 10m-scale geolocation of individuals which Bluetooth offered O’Neill et al., but a much larger audience size (over a million people). This data was augmented by selections of geolocated public photos taken from Flickr.

The geolocation data for these photos was frequently user-supplied and subject to either misplacement or placement by varying criteria (sometimes supplied locations were the position of the photographer, sometimes the object being photographed). It could be argued that their combination of two different data-sets repeats the preference that O’Neill et al. showed for combinations of electronic and human observation, if one classifies Flickr as a means of human observation.

McNamara, Mascolo and Capra (2008), like Su (2006) refer to the paper only in their introduction when describing the prevalence of Bluetooth devices amongst commuters. Their work looked at predictive mechanisms to identify nearby Bluetooth devices which might be available long enough to facilitate a file transfer. They made an assumption that the movements of commuters are regular enough to be predictable, whilst attempting to take into account the idea that co-location patterns might shift over time, due to shifting seasons or other long-term patterns.

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CHAPTER THREE

3.1 DISCUSSION (PERVASIVE COMPUTING)

Based on my research I have characterized pervasive computing environment as one saturated with computing and communication capability, yet so gracefully integrated with users that it becomes a ‘‘technology that disappears.’’ Since motion is an integral part of everyday life, such a technology must support mobility; otherwise, a user will be acutely aware of the technology by its absence when he moves. Hence, the research agenda of pervasive computing subsumes that of mobile computing, but goes much further. Specifically, pervasive computing incorporates four additional research thrusts into its agenda.

3.1.1 Effective Use of Smart Spaces

The first research thrust is the effective use of smart spaces. A space may be an enclosed area such as a meeting room or corridor, or it may be a well-defined open area such as a courtyard or a quadrangle. By embedding computing infrastructure in building infrastructure, a smart space brings together two worlds that have been disjoint until now. The fusion of these worlds enables sensing and control of one world by the other. A simple example of this is the automatic adjustment of heating, cooling and lighting levels in a room based on an occupant’s electronic profile. Influence in the other direction is also possible — software on a user’s computer may behave differently depending on where the user is currently located. Smartness may also extend to individual objects, whether located in a smart space or not.

3.1.2 Invisibility

The second thrust is invisibility. The ideal expressed by Weiser is complete disappearance of pervasive computing technology from a user’s consciousness. In practice, a reasonable approximation to this ideal is minimal user distraction. If a pervasive computing environment continuously meets user expectations and rarely

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presents him with surprises, it allows him to interact almost at a subconscious level. At the same time, a modicum of anticipation may be essential to avoiding a large unpleasant surprise later — much as pain alerts a person to a potentially serious future problem in a normally-unnoticed body part.

3.1.3 Localized Scalability

The third research thrust is localized scalability. As smart spaces grow in sophistication, the intensity of interactions between a user’s personal computing space and his 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. Scalability, in the broadest sense, is thus a critical problem in pervasive computing. Previous work on scalability has typically ignored physical distance — a web server or file server should handle as many clients as possible, regardless of whether they are located next door or across the country. The situation is very different in pervasive computing. Here, the density of interactions has to fall-off as one move away otherwise both the user and his computing system will be overwhelmed by distant interactions that are of little relevance. Although a mobile user far from home will still generate some distant interactions with sites relevant to him, the preponderance of his interactions will be local.

Like the inverse square laws of nature, good system design has to achieve scalability by severely reducing interactions between distant entities. This directly contradicts the current ethos of the Internet, which many believe heralds the ‘‘death of distance.’’

3.1.4 Masking Uneven Conditioning

The fourth thrust is the development of techniques for masking uneven conditioning of environments. The rate of penetration of pervasive computing technology into the infrastructure will vary considerably depending on many non-technical factors such as organizational structure, economics and business models.

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Uniform penetration, if it is ever achieved, is many years or decades away. In the interim, there will persist 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 personal computing space compensate for ‘‘dumb’’ environments. As a trivial example, a system that is capable of disconnected operation is able to mask the absence of wireless coverage in its environment. Complete invisibility may be impossible, but reduced variability is well within our reach.

3.2 Example Scenarios

What would it be like to live in a world with pervasive computing? To help convey the ‘‘look and feel’’ of such a world, we sketch two hypothetical scenarios below. We have deliberately chosen scenarios that appear feasible in just a few years. These examples use Aura as the pervasive computing system, but the concepts illustrated are of broad relevance.

3.2.1 Scenario 1

Jane is at Gate 23 in the Pittsburgh airport, waiting for her connecting flight. She has edited many large documents, and would like to use her wireless connection to e-mail them. Unfortunately, bandwidth is miserable because many passengers at Gates 22 and 23 are surfing the web.Aura observes that at the current bandwidth Jane won’t be able to finish sending her documents before her flight departs. Consulting the airport’s network weather service and flight schedule service, Aura discovers that wireless bandwidth is excellent at Gate 15, and that there are no departing or arriving flights at nearby gates for half an hour. A dialog box pops up on Jane’s screen suggesting that she go to Gate 15, which is only three minutes away. It also asks her to prioritize her e-

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mail, so that the most critical messages are transmitted first. Jane accepts Aura’s advice and walks to Gate 15. She watches CNN on the TV there until Aura informs her that it is close to being done with her messages, and that she can start walking back. The last message is transmitted during her walk, and she is back at Gate 23 in time for her boarding call.

3.2.2 Scenario 2

Fred is in his office, frantically preparing for a meeting at which he will give a presentation and a software demonstration. The meeting room is a ten-minute walk across campus. It is time to leave, but Fred is not quite ready. He grabs his

PalmXXII wireless handheld computer and walks out of the door. Aura transfers

the state of his work from his desktop to his handheld, and allows him to make his final edits using voice commands during his walk. Aura infers where Fred is going from his calendar and the campus location tracking service. It downloads the presentation and the demonstration software to the projection computer, and warms up the projector.

Fred finishes his edits just before he enters the meeting room. As he walks in, Aura transfers his final changes to the projection computer. As the presentation proceeds, Fred is about to display a slide with highly sensitive budget information. Aura senses that this might be a mistake: the room’s face detection and recognition capability indicates that there are some unfamiliar faces present. It therefore warns Fred. Realizing that Aura is right, Fred skips the slide. He moves on to other topics and ends on a high note, leaving the audience impressed by his polished presentation.

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3.3 The Work of Pervasive Computing In the Two Scenarios

These scenarios embody many key ideas in pervasive computing. Scenario 1 shows the importance of proactivity: Jane is able to complete her e-mail transmission only because Aura had the foresight to estimate how long the whole process would take. She is able to begin walking back to her departure gate before transmission completes because Aura looks ahead on her behalf. The scenario also shows the importance of combining knowledge from different layers of the system. Wireless congestion is a low-level system phenomenon; knowledge of boarding time is an application or user-level concept. Only by combining these disparate pieces of knowledge can Aura help Jane. The scenario also shows the value of a smart space. Aura is able to obtain knowledge of wireless conditions at other gates, flight arrival/departure times and gates, and distance between gates only because the environment provides these services.

Scenario 2 illustrates the ability to move execution state effortlessly across diverse platforms, from a desktop to a handheld machine, and from the handheld to the projection computer. Self-tuning, or automatically adjusting behavior to fit

circumstances, is shown by the ability to edit on the handheld using speech input

rather than keyboard and mouse. The scenario embodies many instances of proactivity: inferring that Fred is headed for the room across campus, warming up the projector, transferring the presentation and demonstration, anticipating that the budget slide might be displayed next, and sensing danger by combining this knowledge with the inferred presence of strangers in the room. The value of smart spaces is shown in many ways: the location tracking and online calendar services are what enable Aura to infer where Fred is heading; the software-controlled projector enables warm-up ahead of time; the camera-equipped room with continuous face recognition is key to warning Fred about the privacy violation he is about to commit.

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CHAPTER FOUR

4.0 CONCLUSION

Pervasive computing will be a fertile source of challenging research problems in computer systems for many years to come. Solving these problems will require us to broaden our discourse on some topics, and to revisit long-standing design assumptions in others. We will also have to address research challenges in areas outside computer systems. These areas include human-computer interaction (especially multi-modal interactions and human-centric hardware designs), software agents (with specific relevance to high-level proactive behavior), and expert systems and artificial intelligence (particularly in the areas of decision making and planning).

Capabilities from these areas will need to be integrated with the kinds of computer systems capabilities discussed in this research. Pervasive computing will thus be the crucible in which many disjoint areas of research are fused. When describing his vision, Weiser was fully aware that attaining it would require tremendous creativity and effort by many people, sustained over many years.

The early decades of the 21st century will be a period of excitement and ferment, as new hardware technologies converge with research progress on the many fundamental problems discussed in this paper. Like the Frontier of the American West in the early 19th century, pervasive computing offers new beginnings for the adventurous and the restless — a rich open space where the rules have yet to be written and the borders yet to be drawn.

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RECOMMENDATION

Based on my research work I would recommend pervasive computing to be used in any kinds of works especially: REAL TIME LOCATING SYSTEM (RTLS) and also the UBI

REAL TIME LOCATING SYSTEM (RTLS)- is a local positioning system where small, inexpensive electronic tags are attached to people and objects, such as equipment, patients and caregivers in a hospital, to help track interactions and improve services. This means hospitals can better track when doctors and nurses entered the room interacted with the equipment and patient etc. This non-intrusive logging means that the system could alert nurses when a patient hasn’t been checked on for a while. It could also be used for better asset-tracking; Hospital staff no longer need to manually log every time a piece of equipment moves rooms, but can locate equipment instantly even in large hospitals. Tags on the patient’s wrist can pull up their electronic medical records immediately and accurately, reducing the risk of dangerous errors.

THE UBI- is an always-on voice-activated computer ready to help. Just plug it in, talk to it and it’ll help you connect with your world. You talk to the Ubi and it talks back. It directly connects to the Internet through wifi. We believe people want to do things when they’re at home - they clean, they fold laundry, they cook, they eat, they spend time with loved ones. These are all things that (for the most part) take up use of our arms and hands. When we’re at home, we’d rather use our limbs for other activities than typing, scrolling, or swiping. Ubi is short for ubiquitous computer because it’s always on, always listening, always ready to help.

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REFERENCES

Dr. Norman, “The invisible computer”, MIT Press 1998.

J.L Crowley, J.COUTAZ and BERARD, “Perceptual user interfaces” 2000.

R. MILNER “Elements of interaction: Turning Award Lecture”1993.

Wieser Mark, “The Computer for the 21st Century” 1999.

Rheingold Howard, “Virtual Reality Summit Books” 1991.

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