extension of a project to investigate interaction with large high resolution displays. It was initially set up in a busy laboratory where the device proved to be no more than a curiosity, since it could not be practically used for long periods of time and offered little integration with other

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Abstract. The Personal Server is a mobile device that enables you to readily store and access the data and applications you carry with you through interfaces found in the local environment. Unlike conventional mobile computers with relatively poor user interfaces, it does not have a display at all, instead wirelessly utilizing displays, keyboards and other IO devices found nearby. By co-opting large screens such as those found on desktop PCs, public display monitors, information kiosks, and other computers, a Personal Server is more effective than relying on a small mobile screen. This model goes beyond the mobile context and has wider implications for how we think about computing in general. A prototype system, including applications, system infrastructure, and a mobile platform, has been built to fully explore this model. This prototype sheds light on the suitability of standard components to support such a computing model, and from this illuminates directions for the design of future ubiquitous computing systems.

this article, we examine today's ubiquitous systems, focusing on software infrastructure, and discuss the road that lies ahead

In order to give people ubiquitous access to software applications, device controllers, and Internet services, it will be necessary to automatically adapt user interfaces to the computational devices at hand (e.g., cell phones, PDAs, touch panels, etc.). While previous researchers have proposed solutions to this problem, each has limitations. This paper proposes a novel solution based on treating interface adaptation as an optimization problem. When asked to render an interface on a specific device, our Supple system searches for the rendition that meets the device’s constraints and minimizes the estimated effort for the user’s expected interface actions. We make several contributions: 1) precisely defining the interface rendition problem, 2) demonstrating how user traces can be used to customize interface rendering to particular user’s usage pattern, 3) presenting an efficient interface rendering algorithm, 4) performing experiments that demonstrate the utility of our approach.

The iStuff toolkit of physical devices, and the flexible software infrastructure to support it, were designed to simplify the exploration of novel interaction techniques in the post-desktop era of multiple users, devices, systems and applications collaborating in an interactive environment. The toolkit leverages an existing interactive workspace infrastructure, making it lightweight and platform independent. The supporting software framework includes a dynamically configurable intermediary to simplify the mapping of devices to applications. We describe the iStuff architecture and provide several examples of iStuff, organized into a design space of ubiquitous computing interaction components. The main contribution is a physical toolkit for distributed, heterogeneous environments with run-time retargetable device data flow. We conclude with some insights and experiences derived from using this toolkit and framework to prototype experimental interaction techniques for ubiquitous computing environments.

The personal universal controller (PUC) is an approach for improving the interfaces to complex appliances by introducing an intermediary graphical or speech interface. A PUC engages in two-way communication with everyday appliances, first downloading a specification of the appliance's functions, and then automatically creating an interface for controlling that appliance. The specification of each appliance includes a high-level description of every function, a hierarchical grouping of those functions, and dependency information, which relates the availability of each function to the appliance's state. Dependency information makes it easier for designers to create specifications and helps the automatic interface generators produce a higher quality result. We describe the architecture that supports the PUC, and the interface generators that use our specification language to build high-quality graphical and speech interfaces.

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Smart Messages, a distributed computing platform for networks of embedded systems based on execution migration. A Smart Message (SM) is a user-defined distributed program which executes on nodes of interest, named by their properties, and uses an explicit lightweight migration to reach these nodes. During migrations, an SM carries its code and execution state, and it self-routes at each intermediate node between two nodes of interest. The nodes in the network cooperate to support the SM execution by providing a virtual machine and a shared memory region addressable by names (tag space). To illustrate the flexibility of SMs to program real world applications, we describe EZCab, an application for booking cabs in densely populated urban areas. We also present experimental results to quantify the performance achieved by the SM prototype. 1.

Abstract. The current interest in programming models and software infrastructures to support ubiquitous and environmental computing is heightened by the falling cost of hardware and the ubiquity of local-area wireless networking technologies. Interactive workspaces are technologically augmented team-project rooms that represent a specific sub-domain of ubiquitous computing. We argue both from related work and from our own experience with a prototype that the tuplespace model of communication forms the best basis for a coordination infrastructure for such workspaces. This paper presents the usage and characteristics expected of interactive workspaces, from which we derive a set of key system properties for any coordination infrastructure in an interactive workspace. We show that the design aspects of tuplespaces, augmented with some new extensions, yield a system model, which we call the Event Heap, that satisfies all of the desired properties. We also briefly discuss why other coordination models fall short of the desired properties, and describe our experience using our implementation of the Event Heap model. The paper focuses on a justification of the use of tuplespaces in interactive workspaces, and does not provide a detailed discussion of the Event Heap implementation or our more general experience with interactive workspaces, each of which is treated in detail elsewhere. 1

Users in ubiquitous computing environments need to be able to make serendipitous use of resources that they did not anticipate and of which they have no prior knowledge. The Speakeasy recombinant computing framework is designed to support such ad hoc use of resources on a network. In addition to other facilities, the framework provides an infrastructure through which device and service user interfaces can be made available to users on multiple platforms. The framework enables UIs to be provided for connections involving multiple entities, allows these UIs to be delivered asynchronously, and allows them to be injected by any party participating in a connection.