. The proliferation ofcomputing into the physical world promises more than the ubiquitous availability of computing infrastructure; it suggests new paradigms of interaction inspired by constant access to information and computational capabilities. For the past decade, applicationdriven research in ubicomp has pushed three interaction themes: natural interfaces, context-aware applications, and automated capture and access. To chart a course for future research in ubiquitous computing, we review the accomplishments of these efforts and point to remaining research challenges. Research in ubiquitous computing implicitly requires addressing some notion of scale; whether in the number and type of devices, the physical space of distributed computing or the number of people using a system. We posit a new area of applications research, everyday computing, focussed on scaling interaction with respect to time. Just as pushing the availability of computing away from the traditional desktop fun...

embedded, interactive spaces that we call Intelligent Environments. The motivation for building these systems is to bring computation into the real, physical world to support what is traditionally considered non-computational activity.

Piconet is a general-purpose, low-power ad hoc radio network. It provides a base level of connectivity to even the simplest of sensing and computing objects. It is our intention that a full range of portable and embedded devices may make use of this connectivity. This article outlines the Piconet system, under development at the Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory (ORL). The authors discuss the motivation for providing this low-level "embedded networking," and describe their experiences of building such a system. The article concludes with a commentary on some of the implications that power saving, and other considerations central to Piconet, have on the design of the system.

This paper describes a system for ubiquitous interaction that does not require users to carry any physical devices. The environment is instrumented with camera/processor combinations that watch users while protecting their privacy. Any visible surface can be turned into an interactive widget that uses hand gestures. Light widgets are tied to the XWeb cross-modal interaction platform to integrate them with interactive feedback.

<E-213> Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is an emerging paradigm for interaction between people and computers. A<E-443> guiding principle of ubicomp is to break away from desktop computing to provide computational services<E-419> to a user when and where required. Although there has been a lot of experimental work in ubicomp, there<E-431> has been little effort to define an agenda in ubicomp for HCI researchers. In this paper, we attempt to<E-442> remedy that problem by defining the space of ubicomp applications in terms of the level of user mobility<E-415> and transparency of interaction. Increases in user mobility will come with technological advances, but<E-437> increased interaction transparency will come only with breakthroughs in HCI research. We conclude the<E-438> paper with a discussion of two functional themes that we have found important across a number of ubicomp<E-416> systems ---context-awareness and automated capture, integration and access. Each of these themes raises<E-...

Towards having computers understand human users context information, this dissertation proposes a systematic context-sensing implementation methodology that can easily combine sensor outputs with subjective judgments. The feasibility of this idea is demonstrated via a meeting-participants focus-of-attention analysis case study with several simulated sensors using prerecorded experimental data and artificially generated sensor outputs distributed over a LAN network. The methodology advocates a top-down approach: (1) For a given application, a context information structure is defined

Abstract. Intelligent environments promise to drastically change our everyday lives by connecting computation to the ordinary, human-level events happening in the real world. This paper describes a new model for tracking people in an intelligent room through a multi-camera vision system that learns to combine event predictions from multiple video streams. The system is intended to locate and track people in the room, determine their postures, and obtain images of their faces and upper bodies suitable for use during teleconferencing. This paper describes the design and architecture of the vision system and its use in Hal, our most recently constructed intelligent room. 1

Palplates are a collection of touch-screen terminals placed around the office enabling human-computer interactions at the point of need. Supporting a community of mobile authenticated workers with a small number of stationary devices is an alternative to providing each person with a portable wireless computer. In contrast to the PC's desktop metaphor, Palplates use a place metaphor that reflect the actual rooms, corridors, and buildings that are part of the office place. Users interact graphically with applications supported by a geographic database. The user interface is generated dynamically based on the user's identity, the point-of-access, and the changing collection of physical office equipment, electronic documents and applications present at any given location. Keywords ubiquitous computing, context-aware computing, mirror worlds, mobile computing, kiosk systems,MUDs

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