CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Workshops
Ubiquitous Computing: The Impact on Future Interaction Paradigms and HCI Research
Gregory D. Abowd
GVU Center & College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 USA
+1 404 894-7512
abowd@cc.gatech.edu
Bill N. Schilit
FXFuji-Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory
3400 Hillview Avenue, Bldg 4.
Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA
+1 408 813 7220
schilit@pal.xerox.com
Keywords
ubiquitous computing, future computing environments, applications
research
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
INTRODUCTION
As we look to the future of computing, and particularly to the future
of HCI research, the vision of we point to ubiquitous computing as an
emerging area of principal concern emerges as a principal theme. The
focustheme of this workshop is applications-centered research in
ubiquitous computing. We define ubiquitous computing as the attempt
to break the patternparadigm of the traditional relationships between
users and computational services by extending the computational
interface into the user's environment. Over the past few years
researchers in wireless networking and distributed systems have worked
to build infrastructures supporting mobile and ubiquitous
computing. There are many researchers, with interests in wireless
networking and operating systems, who have worked over the past few
years to develop infrastructure to support mobile computing and
distributed computing resources. That line of Infrastructure research
is, of course, necessary for the advancement of ubiquitous computing,
but it is not sufficient to we must also examine higher-level issues
such as ignore the kinds of tasks and interaction patterns that emerge
as the user is allowed to break away from the desktop.
We can compare the emergence of wearable computing with that of
ubiquitous computing. Both share the mission of having the interface
to computational resources follow the user, as opposed to the desktop
paradigm of the user following the interface. Whereas wearable
computing takes the approach of attaching computation to the user, the
approach in ubiquitous computing is to provide computational services
in more amore those parts of the environment that the user naturally
encounters. There is, therefore, a contrast in emphasis but a common
goal of augmenting the capabilities of people as we perform tasks in
everyday life
The purpose of this workshop is to assemble a community of HCI researchers with
particular interest in the impact of ubiquitous computing from an applications
perspective.
Workshop goals
The goals of this workshop are:
- increase awareness within the HCI community of the various centers for
research in ubiquitous computing, with a particular focus on
applications-centered research;
- better articulate and understand the goals of ubiquitous computing,
especially as it influences a shift in interaction paradigms in single- and
multi-user applications;
- develop a set of evaluation criteria that researchers can use to judge the
impact of individual research efforts; and
- identify major research themes of ubiquitous computing of interest to the HCI
community that will direct research and applications for the next 10-15 years.
Research Issues
A major goal of this workshop is to heighten our own awareness as a community
of what work has been done already and how an understanding of that work can
direct future efforts. The organizers will draft a survey article on
ubiquitous computing prior to the workshop and all participants will receive
this draft. Our preliminary work has identified these major topic areas
Scaleable Interfaces
As the number of devices we interact with increases, so too does the
complexity of the task of providing similar computational services for
each device. It is inconvenient to provide similar yet isolated
services on multiple devices. For example, take the task of
scheduling. Scheduling services are available on desktop platforms
and personal digital assistants and soon will be available with phone
interfaces. However, most of these scheduling services work in
isolation, meaning that in order to keep each service in synch with
the others requires extra effort by the user. A scaleable interface
to a scheduling service would provide a unified service with multiple
device interfaces. The challenge in this case is to provide
programming capability to enable radically different interaction
methods with the same underlying data and service.
Ubiquitous software services
A scaleable interface is only one part of
what we call a ubiquitous software service, a service that actively searches
out the user at convenient and salient times. Users interact with a variety of
services (e.g., e-mail, scheduling, contact management) and there are some
obvious connections between the information that each service manipulates.
Furthermore, this set of services is constantly subject to change. How can we
provide ways to integrate the behavior of these different services without
requiring additional programming effort by both the designer of a service and
the end user? And how does this new paradigm of ubiquitous software services
affect our everyday lives?
Ubiquitous information
The success of the Web shows the power of
ubiquitous access for creating, publishing, manipulating, and consuming
information. There are two areas of interest here. First, what application
areas are enabled by ubiquitous information access? What impact, for example,
does it have on education or health care or collaborative research? Second, how
can we distinguish different applications? One possibility is to separate them
based on access privileges to the information, ranging from personal access for
individuals taking notes for their own use, trusted access for colleagues
within a work group or within a family unit, or global access intended for
public consumption.
Support for Automated Capture and Access
Much of our life in business
and academia is spent listening to and recording, more or less accurately, the
events that surround us. It is often desirable to recount those past events
but our imperfect recording practices make this difficult. Several researchers
have investigated the use of ubiquitous computing technology to support this
general problem or recording, or capturing, experiences to facilitate later
access to that information. Apart from the interesting question of which
technologies best support automated capture and access, we want to investigate
how different application areas (business meetings versus the classroom, for
example) are impacted by these capabilities. In terms of technology,
affordable digital audio and video will soon allow us to realize applications
using personalized vision.
Context-aware computing
As mobility increases, it becomes possible to
customize the interface in accordance with the user's changing physical
context. An obvious part of the physical context is location and orientation,
and many researchers have investigated both infrastructure and applications
that benefit location-aware computing. There is much more, however, to a user's
context (time, mood, history) that can be observed and used to better tailor
and adapt computational services to better suit user needs.
Technology
What infrastructure is out there today and available to researchers
interested in applying it to everyday problems? What technology is
emerging but which should be commonplace within 10-15 years? How much
does it cost us to experiment with ubiquitous technology today?
These themes are not necessarily the exact themes that will be
discussed at the workshop, as that will be dictated by the position
papers and desires of the group.
Novel use of technology
To assist in the capture of important discussions, we are hosting the
workshop in a new classroom within the College of Computing at Georgia
Tech. This classroom Classroom is being built now to support the is a
venue for research in ubiquitous computing in education, the Classroom
2000 project, under the supervision of Gregory Abowd and his Future
Computing Environments (FCE) Group. Use of the capture/access
utilities developed for Classroom 2000 will assist rapporteurs in
summarizing research theme discussions. The results of our discussions
will be made available to the general research community after the
workshop.
We also encourage participants to bring working prototypes of their own
research that can be tested live to support this workshop endeavor. This will
help further support our own beliefs that we can only truly understand the
impact of ubiquitous computing technology in our everyday lives by experiencing
it in everyday tasks.
ORGANIZERS' BACKGROUND
Gregory D. Abowd
Dr. Abowd is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing and the GVU
Center at Georgia Tech. In April 1995, he initiated a research group in Future
Computing Environments. The purpose of the group is to design and prototype
experimental systems that apply mobile and ubiquitous computing technology for
various everyday application domains. His group has worked on a number of
experimental systems; further informeation can be found at
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce. Prior to coming to Georgia Tech in August 1994,
Dr. Abowd held postdoctoral appointments with the Software Engineering
Institute and Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University and
with the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the University of York in England.
Dr. Abowd received a D.Phil. in Computation from the University of Oxford in
1991.
Bill N. Schilit
Dr. Bill Schilit is a Senior Research Scientist at FX Palo Alto Laboratory in
California. At FX PAL his research focuses on ubiquitous information access:
recording, reviewing, retrieving, and reusing information anytime, anyplace.
Previously, Bill was a Member of the technical staff at AT&T's Bell Labs
where he led the TeleWeb project. TeleWeb examines application and system
level issues of providing loosely connected access to the World Wide Web. In
1995 Bill received a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University for studies in
location-dependent computing. His thesis research was performed at Xerox PARC
where he worked on the Ubiquitous Computing initiative as a student intern and
visiting scientist.
CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Workshops
