DOCSLIB.ORG

Toward Building a Safe, Secure, and Easy-To-Use Internet of Things

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Toward Building a Safe, Secure, and Easy-To-Use Internet of Things IOT CONNECTION Toward Building a Safe, Secure, and Easy-to-Use Sal glances at the display near her office door and sees that her next meeting is in 10 Internet of Things minutes. One participant is out of town and the other two people are running late, but the meeting room is still occupied Infrastructure by several people. The display also suggests it might be a Yuvraj Agarwal and Anind K. Dey, Carnegie Mellon University good time to get coffee because the lines are short at the cafe downstairs. Her good friend Joe Carnegie Mellon University is leading a happens to be at the cafe, too. multi-institutional effort to build an open Sal checks an app she recently built and sees that the coffee is infrastructure to support the Internet of Things. freshly brewed. “That simplifies things,” she thinks to herself as she heads toward the cafe. safe and secure world enabled by the Inter- This is the unique promise of a successful IoT, and is net of Things (IoT) promises to lead to truly what we are aiming for with GIoTTO, the IoT program connected environments, where people and at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) named after the things collaborate to improve the overall famous Renaissance painter. qualityA of life. The IoT will give us actionable informa- tion at our fingertips, without us having to ask for it or NEED FOR AN OPEN INFRASTRUCTURE even recognizing that it might be needed. Consider this Although numerous commercial and academic programs example that combines many simple uses of the IoT to cu- focus on building IoT systems, it’s clear that for any IoT mulatively form an omnipotent assistant: stack to be widely adopted, it must be open—without a 40 COMPUTER PUBLISHED BY THE IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY 0018-9162/16/$33.00 © 2016 IEEE EDITOR ROY WANT Google; [email protected] singular organization claiming own- ership. We must involve the commu- FROM THE EDITOR nity with the IoT’s design, develop- Building on our inaugural column from February, this month’s article presents an open ment, and deployment—that means program that sets out to explore the Internet of Things’ (IoT’s) value proposition. Just truly open source development, as as the Internet belongs to all of us, I believe this program embodies the principles we exemplified by Linux and Android. hope will be the driving forces behind an equally successful IoT architecture. In this We also believe that an IoT stack must column, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University eloquently outline the tenants provide immediate value to anyone and goals of the GIoTTO software stack. —Roy Want wanting to deploy and use it, with- out requiring substantial integration work upfront. Practically, this means that it must provide important first- software, and services to develop an IoT apps/App store/End-user environments class features such as robust machine interconnected world. Although the IoT development environments learning, easy end-user programming, vision of an IoT-enabled future is enor- security, and privacy. Our vision of the mously compelling, several key chal- Abstractions/Analytics/Machine learning GIoTTO stack, which we are develop- lenges must be addressed before it can Time-series datastore/Controls ing at CMU, is shown in Figure 1. become a reality. These challenges are GloTTO stack Edge analytics and cloudlets GIoTTO is an open source infra- related to three critical questions: structure intended to support the con- Data integration and middleware struction, maintenance, and use of › How can we build an IoT infra- Sensors and actuators IoT-enabled environments. We formed structure that is safe, secure, our team at CMU shortly after Google and private from the ground up? held an open call for proposals on the Safety implies that IoT devices Figure 1. The GIoTTO open source stack. Open Web of Things. We responded won’t do anything unexpected and received the lead award on what or unintended. Security implies is now known as the IoT Expedition that IoT devices only allow au- with the multitude of other (www.iotexpedition.org), which in- thorized entities, whether com- technologies that showed much cludes partners at Cornell Tech, the puter programs or humans, to promise only to be ignored after University of Illinois, and Google. The access their services. Privacy im- deployment. IoT Expedition’s goals match those of plies that IoT devices don’t access GIoTTO, and the project has adopted or leak private user data either SECURITY, PRIVACY, GIoTTO as its software infrastructure. directly or indirectly without a AND SAFETY Each partner will contribute to and clearly defined, and verifiable, A key design decision we’re address- build on GIoTTO to demonstrate its purpose being presented to and ing in our GIoTTO software stack is to value through a series of living labora- accepted by users. face these concerns from the ground tories at each site. › How can we leverage the huge up rather than retrofitting later. Al- amount of data being collected by though these concerns have some IOT CHALLENGES sensors embedded in all objects? natural overlaps (for example, safety The number of IoT-connected devices This calls for machine learning concerns sometimes imply security is- is expected to grow to 21 billion by and data analytics to be inte- sues), we’re looking to devise solutions 2020 (www.gartner.com/newsroom grated at every level from sensors for each one. Safety in IoT means being /id/3165317), presenting a major mar- and actuators to end users. able to reason about the behavior of ket opportunity for established hard- › How can we enable end users IoT devices, especially actuators, and ware (such as Intel, Apple, Qualcomm, of varying technical ability to being able to detect and prevent unin- ARM, Samsung, and LG) and software manage, interact with, and even tended or unexpected behavior. This vendors (such as Google, Microsoft, control and program IoT-enabled is a very difficult problem because it and IFTTT) across the world, in addi- environments? For the IoT to requires not only understanding “nor- tion to spawning new entrepreneur- be truly pervasive, IoT systems mal” behavior, but also being able to ship opportunities. These companies must be accessible to end users, develop models for device interactions are working on producing IoT devices, or they might be discarded along and devising mechanisms to enforce APRIL 2016 41 IOT CONNECTION safety properties. The challenges in en- more conservative data model might apparent that people won’t be able to suring the safety of IoT devices are also only reveal whether a user is “on cam- consume all the data. Most IoT efforts due to extreme heterogeneity, lack of pus” or “in a meeting.” This approach support sensing, simple computation, standardization, and ineffectiveness of controls who has access to which tier communication, distribution, and traditional defenses like end-host fire- of data, but also supports privacy pol- actuation, but not analytics and ma- walls and antivirus software. We be- icies and audits. Our goal is to even- chine learning. In contrast, we treat lieve the underlying network provides tually expose mechanisms where IoT all these aspects as core functions of a key vantage point to not only observe applications must specify a clearly any IoT infrastructure. these device-to- device and device-to- defined set of purposes of data access At the lowest level (collecting data cloud interactions, but also to enforce that can be checked by our GIoTTO from sensors embedded in the environ- safety and security using techniques stack and reported to users who own ment or objects), data analytics can be from network middleboxes. We’re ex- that data. applied to reduce overall power usage. Instructions sent to sensors to collect data at a particular rate can be config- ured in real time using power consump- A key design decision we’re addressing tion analytics. The configuration must in our GIoTTO software stack is to face security satisfy all current requests for data (in- and privacy concerns from the ground up cluding just storing the data), while op- rather than retrofitting later. timizing for power consumption. As another example, we’re cur- rently working on developing algo- ploring methods to represent these Security in IoT means providing ac- rithms to identify novel patterns IoT device interactions (for example, cess control mechanisms and policies present in sensor data and in people’s crowdsourcing) and devise models for and being able to enforce them, par- behaviors (as captured by sensors). safety policies that can be dissemi- ticularly in the face of the tremendous Identifying these patterns creates nated to IoT users. number of heterogeneous devices. In new, higher forms of data from low- IoT privacy challenges stem from the GIoTTO stack, we’ve implemented a level data. We call these components sensors directly or indirectly leaking robust access control layer to allow flex- that can capture complex high-level private information about users, often ible security policies to be expressed patterns—or even ones that perform unbeknownst to them. Although use- as well as abstractions to manage the simple ana lyses such as averaging ful for controlling appliances when number of rules that must be specified. across sensors—virtual sensors. Vir- users aren’t home, occupancy sensors Done naively, one would need to have tual sensors take input from one or can also be used by attackers to deter- as many rules as the number of devices more physical or virtual sensors and mine how often homeowners are out multiplied by the number of users. We produce some new output. An IoT in- of town. Information about users and leveraged ideas from role-based access frastructure must be able to support their behavior can be inferred from control, and mechanisms for grouping the production of simple and sophisti- sensors indirectly or by combining in- users and sensors to reduce the num- cated virtual sensors.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Building Blocks for Tomorrow's Mobile App Store
    Building Blocks for Tomorrow’s Mobile App Store by Justin G. Manweiler Department of Computer Science Duke University Date: Approved: Romit Roy Choudhury, Supervisor Jeffrey S. Chase Landon P. Cox Victor Bahl Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Computer Science in the Graduate School of Duke University 2012 Abstract (0984) Building Blocks for Tomorrow’s Mobile App Store by Justin G. Manweiler Department of Computer Science Duke University Date: Approved: Romit Roy Choudhury, Supervisor Jeffrey S. Chase Landon P. Cox Victor Bahl An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Computer Science in the Graduate School of Duke University 2012 Copyright c 2012 by Justin G. Manweiler All rights reserved Abstract In our homes and in the enterprise, in our leisure and in our professions, mobile computing is no longer merely “exciting;” it is becoming an essential, ubiquitous tool of the modern world. New and innovative mobile applications continue to inform, entertain, and surprise users. But, to make the daily use of mobile technologies more gratifying and worthwhile, we must move forward with new levels of sophistication. The Mobile App Stores of the future must be built on stronger foundations. This dissertation considers a broad view of the challenges and intuitions behind a diverse selection of such new primitives. Some of these primitives will mitigate exist- ing and fundamental challenges of mobile computing, especially relating to wireless communication. Others will take an application-driven approach, being designed to serve a novel purpose, and be adapted to the unique and varied challenges from their disparate domains.
    [Show full text]
  • Passing the Torch
    From the Editor in Chief Editor in Chief: M. Satyanarayanan ■ Carnegie Mellon University ■ [email protected] Passing the Torch M. Satyanarayanan his issue marks the end of my sec- a highly portable information appliance LOOKING BACK, T ond two-year term as editor in that transforms nearby displays and LOOKING FORWARD chief. I am delighted to introduce my input devices into a transient personal- In August 2001, 10 years after the successor, Roy Want of Intel Research, computing environment. Roy has pub- publication of Mark Weiser’s seminal who will begin his term on 1 January lished extensively over his research career paper introducing the concept of ubiq- 2006. I will continue to serve as active and has over 50 patents to his credit. uitous computing,1 I summarized the editor in chief until that time and will It is hard to imagine a person more field’s progress and reflected on the work closely with Roy to ensure a qualified than Roy to be the next editor challenges ahead in a paper entitled smooth and efficient transition. My in chief of IEEE Pervasive Computing. “Pervasive Computing: Vision and involvement with this publication will In 2001, he was part of the founding edi- Challenges.”2 Looking back, it is grat- continue even after I step down, as I will torial board that created this publication ifying to see how much progress has remain on the editorial board. occurred in just four short years. Many forces have converged to make IN GOOD HANDS It is hard to this progress possible, one of which was Roy received his PhD from Cambridge imagine a substantial industry investment in prod- University in 1988, under the supervision person more uct development relevant to mobile and of Roger Needham.
    [Show full text]
  • Curriculum Vitae: Roy Want
    Curriculum Vitae: Roy Want E-mail: roywant AT google.com ; roywant AT acm.org Google Inc, Mail-Stop: US-MTV-B43 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043, USA Office/Cell: (650) 691 3600 Date: January, 2019 Up-to-date CV: http://www.roywant.com/cv/vita.htm Research Interests Mobile & ubiquitous computing, location & context-aware systems, electronic tagging(RFID/NFC/BLE), hardware design, electronic commerce, smart cards, distributed systems, multimedia systems, cellular automata, novel UI, and MEMS. Professional ACM Fellow: 2005, and ACM (Association of Computer Machinery) member since 1996. IEEE Fellow: 2005 and IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers) member since 1991. Lillian Gilbreth lectureship, National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Washington DC, Oct 12th, 2003 Education Ph.D. Cambridge University UK, Churchill College, Computer Science, Advisor: Roger Needham, 1983-88 o Thesis title: "Reliable Management of Voice in a Distributed System" BA hons. Cambridge University UK, Churchill College, Nat. Science/Computer Science, Tutor: Frank King, 1980-83 o Dissertation title: “A Local Area Network (LAN) Based on the Domestic Mains Supply” High School: William Ellis Grammar School, London UK, 1972-79 Experience Google Inc. (2011-present) o Senior Research Scientist: Google Research and Android Location & Context Team Intel Corporation (2001-2011) o Senior Principal Engineer (SPE) 2008-2011 -Assoc. Director: ILSC (2009-10) & Director (NPL) 2010-11 o Principal Engineer (PE) 2000-2007 Xerox - Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Computer Science Laboratory (CSL). 1991 - 2001 (reporting to Mark Weiser, Laboratory Manager for CSL; CTO) o Principal Scientist 2000-2001 o Area Manager for Embedded Systems Area 1992-1999 o Member of Research Staff II 1991-1992.
    [Show full text]
  • SOUL: an Edge-Cloud System for Mobile Applications in a Sensor-Rich World
    2016 IEEE/ACM Symposium on Edge Computing SOUL: An Edge-cloud System for Mobile Applications in a Sensor-rich World Minsung Jang∗, HyunJong Lee†, Karsten Schwan‡, Ketan Bhardwaj‡ ∗AT&T Labs - Research, [email protected] †University of Michigan, [email protected] ‡Georgia Institute of Technology, {karsten, ketanbj}@gatech.edu Abstract—With the Internet of Things, sensors are becoming In order for such apps to efficiently interact with and ever more ubiquitous, but interacting with them continues manage the dynamic sets of currently accessible sensors with to present numerous challenges, particularly for applications the associated actuators and software services, SOUL (Sensors running on resource-constrained devices like smartphones. The Of Ubiquitous Life) SOUL abstractions in this paper address two issues faced • by such applications: (1) access to sensors with the levels of externalizes sensor & actuator interactions and process- convenience needed for their ubiquitous, dynamic use, and only ing from the resource-constrained device to edge- and by parties authorized to do so, and (2) scalability in sensor remote-cloud resources, to leverage their computational and access, given today’s multitude of sensors. Toward this end, storage abilities for running the complex sensor processing SOUL, first, introduces a new abstraction for the applications to functionality; transparently and uniformly access both on-device and ambient • sensors with associated actuators. Second, potentially expensive automates reconfiguration of these interactions when sensor-related processing needs not just occur on smartphones, better-matched sensors and actuators become physically but can also leverage edge- and remote-cloud resources. Finally, available; SOUL provides access control methods that permit users to easily • supports existing sensor-based applications allowing define access permissions for sensors, which leverages users’ social ties and captures the context in which access requests them to use SOUL’s capabilities without requiring modi- are made.
    [Show full text]
  • Getmobile MOBILE COMPUTING & COMMUNICATIONS REVIEW
    GetMobile MOBILE COMPUTING & COMMUNICATIONS REVIEW Volume 21, Issue 2 • June 2017 CONTENTS 3 Message from the Editor-in-Chief 16 22 (ALMOST) UNPUBLISHABLE HIGHLIGHTS 5 RESULTS 22 EmotionCheck: A Wearable Device 16 Experiences Deploying an to Regulate Anxiety through False EXPERIMENTAL METHODS Always-On Farm Network Heart Rate Feedback 5 How Do You Know If 85% Accuracy Is Good Enough for Your Application? 26 9 31 26 HemaApp: Noninvasive Blood Screening of Hemoglobin Using Smartphone Cameras MOBILE PLATFORMS 9 Beyond Reality: Head-Mounted 31 Who Are the Smartphone Users? Displays for Mobile Systems Identifying User Groups with Researchers Apps Usage Behaviors 35 Interpretable Machine Learning for Mobile Notification Management: An Overview of PrefMiner 35 2 GetMobile June 2017 | Volume 21, Issue 2 MESSAGE FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF CONTRIBUTORS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF IN THIS ISSUE, we highlight four papers Eyal de Lara, University of Toronto from ACM UbiComp 2016. MANAGING EDITOR Donna Paris “EmotionCheck: A Wearable Device DESIGNER JoAnn McHardy to Regulate Anxiety through False Heart SENIOR ADVISORS (Past Editors-in-Chief) Rate Feedback,” by Jean Costa, Alexander Paramvir Bahl, Microsoft Research T. Adams, Malte F. Jung, François Suman Banerjee, University of Wisconsin, Madison Guimbretière, and Tanzeem Choudhury, Srikanth Krishnamurthy, University of California, Riverside describes a device that generates subtle Jason Redi, BBN Technologies vibrations on the wrist to resemble a pulse, Mani Srivastava, University of California, Los Angeles which helps users regulate their anxiety Eyal de Lara Nitin Vaidya, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign through false feedback of a slow heart rate. SECTION EDITORS In “HemaApp: Noninvasive Blood Screening of Hemoglobin Ardalan Amiri Sami, University of California, Irvine Using Smartphone Cameras,” Edward Jay Wang, William Li, Doug Aruna Balasubramanian, Stony Brook University Nilanjan Banerjee, University of Maryland, Hawkins, Terry Gernsheimer, Colette Norby-Slycord, and Shwetak N.
    [Show full text]
  • Activating the Internet of Things
    COVER FEATURE ACTIVATING THE INTERNET OF THINGS Activating the Internet of Things Roy Want, Google Schahram Dustdar, TU Wien 16 COMPUTER PUBLISHED BY THE IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY 0018-9162/15/$31.00 © 2015 IEEE Now is the time to tune in, turn on, and plug in— the Internet of Things ushers in a whole new paradigm in our relationship with technology. he Internet of Things (IoT) turn uses an LTE cellular service is a term now widely used to connect to the Internet and ulti- in scholarly technical pub- mately to a cloud service. How- lications and mainstream ever, the common factor for all IoT Tmedia. CEOs of major tech compa- devices—from low-end sensors to nies center their keynote addresses high-end appliances—is that they around this term at top industry will have some form of Internet shows—as illustrated by Samsung connectivity and embedded pro- Activating CEO BK Yoon’s address at this year’s cessing to make use of it. Consumer Electronics Show. Analysts have predicted the What is so exciting about the IoT to be the “next big thing” for IoT? What does it really mean and several years. Gartner recently why should we care? The IoT vision, estimated that there would be the Internet simply put, is that almost any elec- about 5 billion devices connected tronic device can be augmented by a to the Internet in 2015, rising to connection to the Internet, enabling 25 billion by 2020.3 Others see the an ordinary standalone device to IoT as just another overhyped tech of Things become a smart networked device.1 story feeding headlines and giving For example, a garden sprinkler consumers inflated expectations.
    [Show full text]
  • Internet of Things a Survey About Thoughts and Knowledge
    Thesis no: URI: urn:nbn:se:bth-16304 Internet of Things A survey about thoughts and knowledge Eric Nilsson and David Andersson Faculty of Computing Blekinge Institute of Technology SE-371 79 Karlskrona Sweden This thesis is submitted to the Faculty of Computing at Blekinge Institute of Technology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the bachelor degree in Software Engineering. The thesis is equivalent to 10 weeks of full time studies. Contact Information: Author(s): David Andersson E-mail: [email protected] Eric Nilsson E-mail: [email protected] University advisor: Huseyin Kusetogullari Department of Computer Science and Engineering Faculty of Computing Internet : www.bth.se Blekinge Institute of Technology Phone : +46 455 38 50 00 SE-371 79 Karlskrona, Sweden Fax : +46 455 38 50 57 ii ABSTRACT In this paper we introduce our readers to Internet of Things, what it is, how it works and providing statistics on society knowledge and thoughts about this subject. Data gathered for our statistics will be collected through a survey. From the literature review of this thesis we provide information about how IoT works and how a general architecture behind an IoT product looks like. since IoT comes in all different shapes we want to find out the high-level architecture behind it. With our survey we will first focus on getting the raw knowledge of the society on IoT and these answers will be compared between IT-persons and non-IT persons, then we will get everyone's answers regarding their thoughts on IoT after we have provided information on IoT to get everyone on the same page.
    [Show full text]
  • RFID: a Key to Automating Everything
    EBSCOhost 2/21/04 10:50 PM 10 page(s) will be printed. Back Record: 1 Title: RFID: A Key to Automating Everything. Author(s): Want, Roy Source: Scientific American; Jan2004, Vol. 290 Issue 1, p56, 10p, 3 diagrams, 3c Document Type: Article Subject(s): AUTOMATION TECHNOLOGICAL innovations ELECTRONICS INTEGRATED circuits AUTOMOBILE industry & trade MOBILE communication systems WEISER, Mark ELECTRONIC digital computers EMBEDDED computer systems RADIO frequency identification systems Abstract: Already common in security systems and tollbooths, radio-frequency identification tags and readers stand poised to take over many processes now accomplished by human toil. Thirteen years ago, in an article for Scientific American, the late Mark Weiser, then my colleague at Xerox PARC, outlined his bold vision of" ubiquitous computing": small computers would be embedded in everyday objects all around us and, using wireless connections, would respond to our presence, desires and needs without being actively manipulated. Weiser called such systems "calm technology," because they would make it easier for us to focus on our work and other activities, instead of demanding that we interact with and control them, as the typical PC does today. Today systems based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology are helping to move Weiser's vision closer to reality. The responsive RFID home--and conference room, office building and car--are still far away, but RFID technology is already in limited use. But the RFID revolution is not without a downside: the technology's growth raises important social issues, and as RFID systems proliferate, we will be forced to address new problems related to privacy, law and ethics.
    [Show full text]
  • BRINGING HOME BABY How Smart Devices Can Help New Parents Page 11
    MOBILE COMPUTING & COMMUNICATIONS REVIEW Volume 21, Issue 1 • March 2017 GetMobile BRINGING HOME BABY How smart devices can help new parents Page 11 A PUBLICATION OF ACM SIGMOBILE GetMobile MOBILE COMPUTING & COMMUNICATIONS REVIEW Volume 21, Issue 1 • March 2017 CONTENTS 3 Message from the Editor-in-Chief 19 25 5 STANDARDS HIGHLIGHTS 19 RETROSPECTIVE MIMO Technologies in 5G 25 Flying Blind with Reactive Control New Radio of Aerial Drones 5 Wearable Computing: Retrospectives on the First Decade 30 Scaling Mobile Network Capacity Aggressively with QuickC 35 11 35 Gyro in the Air: Tracking 3D Orientation of Batteryless Internet of Th ings MAKERS 11 Bringing Home Baby 39 MobileInsight: Analyzing Cellular Network Information on Smartphones ARM'S LENGTH 39 14 An Elevator Pitch on Deep Learning 2 GetMobile March 2017 | Volume 21, Issue 1 MESSAGE FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF CONTRIBUTORS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF IN THIS ISSUE, we highlight three papers Eyal de Lara, University of Toronto from ACM MobiCom 2016. The issue also MANAGING EDITOR Donna Paris includes one highlight paper from ACM DESIGNER JoAnn McHardy MobiSys 2016, which was originally meant to SENIOR ADVISORS (Past Editors-in-Chief) appear in the previous issue, but was delayed. Paramvir Bahl, Microsoft Research Suman Banerjee, University of Wisconsin, Madison The paper, “Flying Blind with Reactive Srikanth Krishnamurthy, University of California, Control of Aerial Drones,” by Luca Mottola Riverside and Kamin Whitehouse, describes a new Jason Redi, BBN Technologies approach to aerial drone autopilot design Mani Srivastava, University of California, Los Angeles Nitin Vaidya, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Eyal de Lara that executes the navigation logic only in SECTION EDITORS response to meaningful variations in sensor Sharad Agarwal, Microsoft Research readings.
    [Show full text]
  • Mark Weiser (1952–1999) the Founder of Ubiquitous Computing
    Mark Weiser (1952–1999) The Founder of Ubiquitous Computing Mark Weiser was the chief technology officer at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Cen- ter (Parc). He is often referred to as the father of ubiquitous computing. He coined the term in 1988 to describe a future in which invisible computers, embedded in everyday objects, replace PCs. Other research interests included garbage collection, operating sys- tems, and user interface design. He received his MA and PhD in computer and com- munication science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. After completing his PhD, he joined the computer science department at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he taught for 12 years. He wrote or cowrote over 75 technical publications on such subjects as the psychology of programming, program slicing, operating systems, pro- gramming environments, garbage collection, and technological ethics. He was a mem- ber of the ACM, IEEE Computer Society, and American Association for the Advance- ment of Science. Weiser passed away in 1999. Visit www.parc.xerox.com/csl/ members/weiser or contact [email protected] for more information about him. 18 PERVASIVEcomputing REACHING FOR WEISER’ S VISION Images not reprinted. Some were omitted and others reproduced. The Computer for the 21st Century Specialized elements of hardware and software, connected by wires, radio waves and infrared, will be so ubiquitous that no one will notice their presence. he most profound technologies are colleagues and I at the Xerox Palo Alto Research those that disappear. They weave Center think that the idea of a “personal” computer themselves into the fabric of everyday itself is misplaced and that the vision of laptop life until they are indistinguishable machines, dynabooks and “knowledge navigators” from it.
    [Show full text]
  • Smart Phones Editor: Roy Want N Intel Labs N [email protected]
    Smart Phones Editor: Roy Want n Intel Labs n [email protected] iPhone: Smarter Than the Average Phone Roy Want EDITOR’S INTRO thought out in several design dimen- sions and is fully extensible through To begin, I thank Franklin Reynolds, the previous Smart Phones department editor, the Apple App Store, which keeps the for a most interesting and insightful collection of articles. He recently stepped down novelty and fun factor very high while after serving eight years on the editorial board. Likewise, at the beginning of this leveraging the developer community’s year, I reached the end of my term as editor in chief, passing the torch to Nigel Davies, and at that time we discussed the option of me continuing as the Smart huge talent pool. Furthermore, these Phones department editor in 2010. This article is the first in this series. —Roy Want applications aren’t just games—they provide customers with indispensable productivity tools for everyday work. ell phones—and, in particu- of. An important development for Though I have owned several smart C lar, smart phones—are tangible smart phone technologies is how they phones, my recent iPhone acquisition embodiments of pervasive comput- integrate key aspects of what has tra- has been a very empowering experi- ing that can be used as invaluable ditionally been pervasive computing ence. In particular, the ease of adding tools in our daily lives. Though the research, including location-based ser- new applications and the consistent mobile phone market’s growth has vices, context-aware applications, and and straightforward user interface been spectacular since the 1990s, the make the device a joy to use.
    [Show full text]
  • RFID Technology and Applications RFID Technology and Applications
    GUEST EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION RFID Technology and Applications adio frequency identification is a work of static RFID readers. For example, rental wireless communication technology cars with RFID tags fixed to their windshields that lets computers read the identity could store vehicle identification numbers, so of inexpensive electronic tags from rental companies could perform automatic inven- a distance, without requiring a bat- tories using RFID readers installed in parking lots. Rtery in the tags. In the past, the lack of widely This network of readers could also help the com- accepted industry standards and resulting market panies locate their cars: because the system would fragmentation limited RFID use have a record of the reader’s location, it could Badri Nath to a few applications such as approximate the corresponding car’s location. Rutgers University ticketing. “EZ-Pass” highway The airline industry could also exploit static toll booths are one example of readers. Currently, airlines annually transport Franklin Reynolds RFID-enabled smart tickets. about a billion checked bags—more than a billion Nokia Research Center However, the situation is now passengers boarded planes in 2004, according to Roy Want changing, warranting a respon- the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics (www. Intel Research sible debate about RFID’s merits bts.gov) and US Census Bureau (www.census.gov). and implications. As RFID tech- Only a very small percentage of bags are misrouted nology matures, it will likely (less than 0.5 percent), but airlines still incur a sig- unleash a new wave of applica- nificant cost to recover and deliver misrouted tions that will exploit inexpensive and highly items.
    [Show full text]