A significant problem with telephone communication is that callers do not have enough awareness about the Personal Presence of people they want to call. The result can be unwanted, interrupting calls. The live addressbook is an application that helps users make more informed telephone calls and teleconferences, from anywhere, via their wireless PDA or desktop browser. Unlike other network-based address books, which maintain static information, the live addressbook can display dynamic information about where the recipient currently is (i.e., reach number), and how available he/she currently is for calls. The system accomplishes this by applying to telephony the “Buddy List ” concepts made popular in Instant Messaging applications. User trials assess the applicability of Personal Presence information in a telephone context.

Events are an emerging paradigm for composing applications in an open, heterogeneous distributed world. In Cambridge we have developed scalable event handling based on a publish-register-notify model with event object classes and server-side filtering based on parameter templates. After experience in using this approach in a home-built RPC system we have extended CORBA, an open standard for distributed object computing, to handle events in this way. In this paper, we present the design of COBEA - a COrba-Based Event Architecture. A service that is the source of (parameterised) events publishes in a Trader the events it is prepared to notify, along with its normal interface specification. For scalability, a client must register interest (by invoking a register method with appropriate parameters or wild cards) at the service, at which point an access control check is carried out. Subsequently, whenever a matching event occurs, the client is notified. We outline the requirements on the...

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In this paper, we argue that localization solution based on cellular phone technology, specifically GSM phones, is a sufficient and attractive option in terms of coverage and accuracy for a wide range of indoor, outdoor, and placebased location-aware applications. We present preliminary results that indicate that GSM-based localization systems have the potential to detect the places that people visit in their everyday lives, and can achieve median localization accuracies of 5 and 75 meters for indoor and outdoor environments, respectively. 1

Abstract. There are endless possibilities for the next generation of mobile social applications that automatically determine your social context. A key element of such applications is ubiquitous and precise sensing of the people you interact with. Existing techniques that rely on deployed infrastructure to determine proximity are limited in availability and accuracy. Virtual Compass is a peer-based relative positioning system that relies solely on the hardware and operating system support available on commodity mobile handhelds. It uses multiple radios to detect nearby mobile devices and places them in a two-dimensional plane. It uses adaptive scanning and out-of-band coordination to explore trade-offs between energy consumption and the latency in detecting movement. We have implemented Virtual Compass on mobile phones and laptops, and we evaluate it using a sample application that senses social interactions between Facebook friends. 1

Cell phones connected to high-speed 3G networks constitute an increasingly important class of clients on the Internet. From the viewpoint of the servers they connect to, such devices are virtually indistinguishable from conventional endhosts. In this study, we examine the IP addresses seen by Internet servers for cell phone clients and make two observations. First, individual cell phones can expose different IP addresses to servers within time spans of a few minutes, rendering IP-based user identification and blocking inadequate. Second, cell phone IP addresses do not embed geographical information at reasonable fidelity, reducing the effectiveness of commercial geolocation tools used by websites for fraud detection, server selection and content customization. In addition to these two observations, we show that applicationlevel latencies between cell phones and Internet servers can differ greatly depending on the location of the cell phone, but do not vary much at a given location over short time spans; as a result, they provide fine-grained location information that IPs do not.

When a mobile user dials 911, a key to arriving to the emergency scene promptly is knowing the location of the mobile user. This paper presents SkyLoc, a GSM fingerprinting-based localization system that runs on a mobile phone and identifies the current floor of a user in tall multi-floor buildings. Knowing the floor in a tall building significantly reduces the area that emergency service personnel have to canvas to locate the individuals in need. We evaluated our system in three multi-floor buildings located in Washington DC, Seattle and Toronto. Our system identifies the floor correctly in up to 73 % of the cases and is within 2 floors in 97 % of the cases. The system is robust as it works for different network operators, when the training and testing sets were collected with different hardware and up to one month apart. In addition, we show that feature selection techniques that select a subset of highly relevant radio sources for fingerprint matching nearly double the localization accuracy of our system. 1

Much of the research into intelligent environments has focused on how an environment might sense and respond to the presence and/or actions of a single individual in that environment. MUSICFX is a system that responds to the presence of a group of people in a shared environment by using a Group Preference Agent to select music that will best accommodate the musical preferences of that group.

Intelligent environments are physical spaces that can sense and respond to the people and events taking place within them, providing opportunities for people to influence environmental factors that affect them, such as the lighting, temperature, dcor or background music in the common areas of an office building. The designer of an environment that can be influenced by a group of collocated people rather than a single individual must decide how to accord influence among the individuals in the group. We have designed two multi-agent group preference arbitration schemes and tested them out in an intelligent environment, MUSICFX, which controls the selection of music played in a fitness center. One scheme seeks to maximize the average satisfaction of the inhabitants , the other seeks to maximize the equitable distribution of satisfaction among the inhabitants. We present the results of a series of experiments using real data collected from the deployed system, and discuss the ramifications...

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