›› MIND Lab Seminar Series: 22 October 2007

The Evolution of the Rover System

Christian B. Almazan
Ph.D. Student in Computer Science, University of Maryland at College Park

›› Logistics

Date: Monday, 22 October 2007

Time: 2:00p to 3:00p

Location: AVW 3258

›› Abstract

The last decade could be seen as a period of renaissance of Mark Weiser's vision in the early nineties about computers becoming pervasive in our daily lives. A clear example of this becoming a reality had been the rapid growth of the Internet, though not a direct analog to his seminal paper. The Internet provides people the ability to access information, from research papers to bank accounts, at a rapid rate and computing almost becomes a necessity of our daily lives.

When Mark Weiser wrote his vision of a new paradigm of computing, devices that support his vision had not yet been readily available. Examples of such technology include the Global Positioning System, biomedical sensors, condition sensors, device information, and wireless signal information. Such technology compromises what we call contextual information. This can be augmented even further with context including awareness, desires, and cost.

We often take all of this context for granted, often leaving out pieces of context when deemed convenient when building a system. Such context could be potentially useful later, but disregarded in the earlier stages of the operation of a system. In this talk, I will present the evolution of the Rover system from the early stages to the future vision of Rover. Rover aims to capture as much contextual information possible, making even the most implicit contextual information explicit. In addition to Rover, I will discuss related work which has and potentially will influence certain decisions made in the next version of Rover.