Advance   Program

Making Computing and Communications Truly Pervasive

Speaker:        Dr. Peter Steenkiste

            Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Abstract:

The goal of pervasive computing is to make services that help users with diverse tasks available everywhere, all the time. This is an ambitious goal, given the diverse environments that users spend time in during a typical day. Probably in part because of this, many pervasive computing projects focus on a specific environment (e.g. office) or activity (e.g. tourist guide). In this talk I will discuss some research efforts that try to make pervasive computing and wireless networking "more" pervasive. The talk will have three parts. I will first present some results from the Aura project, which explored pervasive computing and networking in an office environment. Next, I will talk about our experience in moving some of the technologies to different environments. Finally, I will discuss how a wireless testbed based on signal propagation emulation can be used to evaluate wireless networking and pervasive computing technologies in a wide range of environments. Some of the work presented is joint research with David Garlan, Bradley Schmerl, and Srini Seshan.

SPeaker's Bio:

Peter Steenkiste is a Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He received the degree of Electrical Engineer from the University of Gent in Belgium, and the MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. His research interests are in the areas of networking and distributed computing. Over the last 20 years, his research has addressed problems in high performance networking, cluster computing, network quality of service, and scalable network services. His current research is in the areas of pervasive computing and wireless networking. He is involved the Aura project on "distraction-free" computing. Aura is developing systems that self-optimized to best meet the user's intent. His work in wireless focuses on having wireless networks that self-optimize based on the communication environment and traffic load. He is also building a wireless testbed based on signal propagation emulation that supports wireless experiments that are fully repeatable and easy to control. More information on his research can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~prs

Computing trends and their implication

for pervasive computing

Speaker:      Jian WANG

                     Microsoft Research Asia

Abstract:

Computing industry is very competitive and has changed significantly over the years. The presentation will discuss computing trends in the area of data center, storage and user interface technologies.  Today’s data center is the computer with hundreds of thousands of processors and millions of hard disks. More importantly, the data center is becoming an integrated part of everyone’s desktop computers, laptops and mobile phones through internet and PC has been completely redefined.  The ability of large-scale data-centric computing has been changing the way people use and interact with future computing system in cloud.

Speaker's Bio:

Dr. Jian Wang is a principal researcher and assistant managing director at Microsoft Research Asia.  His research interests are pen computing, multimodal user interface, seamless computing, large scale data processing and infrastructure and human cognition. Dr. Wang manages five research groups (multimodal user interface, interaction design, machine learning, media communication and data intelligence and tools) and Microsoft adCenter Lab Beijing.

Dr Jian Wang’s recent effort is to research core technologies and build data infrastructure for large scale data-centric computing. These technologies have been used to develop MS Office 2007 and more recently also released as a tool for Vista and other Microsoft products.

The group lead by Jian invented an inline input and correction user interface for Asian languages called modeless input user interface. The technology was shipped with Windows XP/Vista and Office XP/2007.

Digital ink technology from Jian’s group has been shipped with first release of Tablet PC, OneNote 2003, Windows XP Tablet PC edition 2005 and Vista.  The handwriting math equation recognizer has been shipped in July 2005. His work on digital pen can also be found at

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=13570&ch=infotech

Before joining Microsoft in 1999, Dr. Jian Wang held the position of Professor, Department of Psychology at Zhejiang University, China. He received his Ph.D. in engineering psychology from Department of Psychology, Hangzhou University in 1990.

Program information