ubiquitous computing

Ubiquitous computing is considered as a promising technological path of innovation. Intensive R&D activities and political strategies are addressing the objective to foster mar- ketable technologies and applications. This article explores the state-of-the-art on the way towards the ‘‘Internet of things”. Which application fields have already proved their poten- tial for realising the vision and promises related to the new technology? What are the tech- nical, legal and social challenges that have to be addressed – and how can policy-makers contribute? We deal with these questions in the light of recent developments in research and business, illustrating the findings by examples in retail, logistics and health care. The article concludes that further efforts by all stakeholders from businesses, society and pol- itics are necessary to make ubiquitous computing applications economically sustainable and socially compatible in order to tap its full potential.

Communications of the ACM, 2009

Introduction The field of ubiquitous computing was inspired by Mark Weiser's vision of computing artifacts that disappear. "They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." Although Weiser cautioned that achieving the vision of ubiquitous computing would require a new way of thinking about computers, that takes into account the natural human environment, to date no one has articulated this new way of thinking. Here, we address this gap, making the argument that ubiquitous computing artifacts need to be physically and cognitively available. We show what this means in practice, translating our conceptual findings into principles for design. Examples and a specific application scenario show how ubiquitous computing that depends on these principles is both physically and cognitively available, seamlessly supporting living. The term 'ubiquitous computing' has been used broadly to include pervasive or context-aware com...

Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 2010

The success of all-IP networking and wireless technology has changed the ways of living for the people around the world. The progress of electronic integration and wireless communications is going to pave the way to offer people the access to the wireless networks on the fly, based on which all electronic devices will be able to exchange the information with each other whenever necessary.

Micro, IEEE, 2002

Book Chapter in “Embedded Systems and Wireless Technology: Theory and Practical Application”, Editors: Raúl Aquino Santos and Arthur Edwards Block (University of Colima, Mexico), Chapter No. 1, pp. 1-40, CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, USA., 2012

We are witnessing the advent and the evolution of a revolutionary computing paradigm that promises to have a profound effect on the way we interact with the computers, devices, physical spaces, and other people. This new paradigm, called ubiquitous computing, envisions a world where embedded processors, computers, sensors, and digital communication technologies are inexpensive commodities that are available everywhere. Ubiquitous computing will surround users with a comfortable and convenient information environment and a smart space that merges physical and computational infrastructures into an integrated habitat. This habitat will feature a proliferation of hundreds or thousands of computing devices and sensors that will provide new functionality, offer specialized services, and boost productivity and interaction among the devices and the users. This chapter provides a comprehensive discussion on the central trends and the emerging impacts of ubiquitous computing considering them form technical, social and economic perspectives. It also identifies various application areas and sectors that will potentially be benefitted and will be able to provide enhanced and rich experience to the users. The challenges of ubiquitous computing that require active research and technological advancements are also discussed.

Humboldt Universität Berlin, 2005

The historic development of computing can be broadly described by three historic waves: (1.) the ‘many persons, one computer’ era, (2.) the ‘one person, one computer’ era, and (3.) the ‘one person, many computers’ era. The first wave (starting in the 1950s) is aptly termed the ‘many persons, one computer’ era. The one computer, coming in the form of a mainframe or minicomputer, was mostly used by specialists and deployed in industrial environments to reliably handle large scale data processing tasks. The second wave of computing set in the late 1970s, the ‘one person, one computer’ era, is characterized by every employee or private person owning or using a computer, either for professional purposes or for leisure. By now, some industries (such as banking) see over 95% of their employees1 working on computer terminals and 87% of German households2 owned a PC in 2006. Thus, this second wave of computing is reaching saturation in recent years, at least in the industrialised part of the world. The third wave of computing, which can be said to have started in the mid 1990s, is called the ‘one person, many computers’ era. It is characterized by computer chips increasingly being embedded in a vast array of consumer devices, such as smart phones, digital cameras, toys, cars, etc. The end-vision of this computing era is what some scholars have termed ‘Ubiquitous Computing’. Ubiquitous Computing (hereafter often abbreviated as ‘UC’) refers to environments where most physical objects are enhanced with digital qualities. It is technically based on two building blocks: embedded computing and mobile communications (Lyytinen and Yoo 2002). Embedded computing implies that just about any kind of every day object, as well as the natural environment, human beings and animals, are infused with computing capabilities. Active and passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, sensors, video cameras and the fusion of information stemming from these diverse systems are on the verge of leading to a ‘naturally’ computerized environment, while mobile wireless communication technologies such as RFID, Bluetooth or Wireless-LANs are used to hook up to these distributed computing devices and ‘capture and access’ information from them for aggregation, integration and service creation at the backend.

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2007

Ubiquitous computing is unusual amongst technological research arenas. Most areas of computer science research, such as programming language implementation, distributed operating system design, or denotational semantics, are defined largely by technical problems, and driven by building upon and elaborating a body of past results. Ubiquitous computing, by contrast, encompasses a wide range of disparate technological areas brought together by a focus upon a common vision. It is driven, then, not so much by the problems of the past but by the possibilities of the future. Ubiquitous computing's vision, however, is over a decade old at this point, and we now inhabit the future imagined by its pioneers. The future, though, may not have worked out as the field collectively imagined. In this article, we explore the vision that has driven the ubiquitous computing research agenda and the contemporary practice that has emerged. Drawing on crosscultural investigations of technology adoption, we argue for developing a ''ubicomp of the present'' which takes the messiness of everyday life as a central theme.

World Wide Web, 1998

The goal of ubiquitous computing is the production of devices that are so commonplace and natural to use that they become almost invisible. The devices being ubiquitous means there will be hundreds of tiny computers in an office or home, each doing it's own specialized task.

Ubiquitous computing refers to embedding computers and communication in our environment. Ubiquitous computing provides an attractive vision for the future of computing. The idea behind the ubiquitous computing is to make the computing power disappear in the environment, but will always be there whenever needed or in other words it means availability and invisibility.These invisible computers will not have keyboards or screens, but will watch us, listen to us and interact with us. Ubiquitous computing environments involve the interaction, coordination, and cooperation of numerous, casually accessible, and often invisible computing devices. One is happy when ones desires are fulfilled.The highest ideal of ubicomp is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it. Ubiquitous computing is referred as pervasive computing throughout the paper. One of the goals of ubiquitous computing is to enable devices to sense changes in their environment and to automatically adapt and act based on these changes based on user needs and preferences The prime goal of this technology is to make human life more simple, safe and efficient by using the ambient intelligence of computers. Ubiquitous computing therefore induces a paradigm shift in the way we use computers: Instead of bringing the world into the computer (the Virtual Realityparadigm), computational power is now brought to the objects of the physica world. Eventually, the vision of Ubiquitous Computing induces a new way of thinking about computers in the world, one that takes into account the natural human environment and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background. This paper presents a number of compelling applications using ubiquitous computing and addresses the associated security and usability concerns.

Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications

This chapter gives a brief history of ubiquitous computing, highlights key issues, and assesses ubiquitous computing research and development under the broad categories of design architecture and systems, implementation challenges, and user issues. Using Singapore as a case example, the chapter then concludes with selected scenarios, presenting exciting possibilities in the future ubiquitous landscape.