How can we compare research projects in ubiquitous computing?
Dr Chris Johnson
DCS SEMINAR SERIESDATE: 2005-09-14
TIME: 16:00:00 - 17:00:00
LOCATION: Room N101, CSIT Building [108]
CONTACT: JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.
ABSTRACT:
Location-aware applications in ubiquitous computing promise to enhance mobile devices with behaviour that is appropriate to the user's location - or to provide information that is automatically tailored to the real-world location of the bearer. Applications for location awareness include automatic tourist guides and museum guides, electronic friends finders, automatically finding and using the nearest printer to a mobile computer user, location-aware diary appointment and travel reminders, socially responsive mobile phones.
This branch of ubiquitous computing has been driven more by gadgets than by analysis of its applications' effectiveness and acceptability. The area lacks any common method for evaluating projects' research value. The lower level engineering measures of accuracy in sensing and reporting a position are not adequate for location-aware applications. Calls for methods of ubicomp evaluation have developed some methods to apply usability and sociological methods to evaluating projects, but have been unfruitful in the area of location-aware applications.
We describe by examples a framework for describing evaluation tasks, the requirements for their location positional services and procedures for their comparative evaluation. Examples are drawn from the domains of tracking friends and co-workers on campus, and museum visitor guides.
BIO:
Chris Johnson is a Bachelor graduate of Information Science (as it was then called) at Monash University and a PhD in Computer Science from ANU. He has worked at the Universities of York (UK), Monash, UNSW (Duntroon), and since 1986, ANU - with research interests in distributed and parallel computer systems, programming languages, and software engineering. He has been Head of the Department of Computer Science at ANU from 1998--2003, during a time of very rapid growth in its teaching programs, and again from 2005. He was also a researcher and project leader in the ACSys Advanced Computational Systems CRC and now has the same role in the Intelligent Environments Program of the Smart Internet Technology CRC. Chris has been a member of the Executive of the Australasian Computer Science Association and its Treasurer, organising chair of the Australasian Computer Science Week 2000, and organiser of WICAPUC - the Wearable, Invisible, Context-Aware etc etc Computers workshop at ACSW 2003. Extra-curricular activities include a lot of cooking and a little book-binding.
For more information: email chris.johnson[at]anu.edu.au
