Disambiguating the Terminology around Ubiquitous Computing

Mike Kuniavsky tried to structure the terms related to the fragmentation of information processing into everyday objects. He says that pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence and physical computing describe the same idea but describe them as follow:

In Kalle Lyytinen and Youngjin Yoo. Issues and challenges in ubiquitous computing: Introduction. Communications of the ACM, 45(12):62–65, 2002., the authors introduce introduce ubiquitous computing as the integration of large-scale mobile computing with the pervasive computing functionality. These terms are thefor conceptually different and employ different ideas of organizing and managing computing services.

I especially like the pragramtic views of the 2 authors, mentioning the technological challenges (they use the term “service” without touching the social challenges) that ubicomp must and will face:

Mobile computing and its limitations (context-awareness)

Mobile computing is fundamentally about increasing our capability to physically move computing services with us. However, an important limitation is that the computing model does not considerably change while we move. This is because the computing device cannot seamlessly and flexibly obtain information about the context in which the computing takes place and adjust it accordingly.

Pervasive Computing and its challenges (environment-awareness and scale-up)

The idea of pervasive computing is an area populated with sensors, pads, badges, and virtual or physical models of the physical and social/cognitive environment. Pervasive computing services can be built either by embedding models of specific environments into dedicated. Currently, the main challenge of pervasive computing is the limited scope to teach a computer about its environment. This makes the availability and usefulness of such services limited and highly localized because of the large effort required to design and maintain such services.

Ubiquitous computing and its challenges (all of the above)

The main challenges in ubiquitous computing originate from integrating large-scale mobility with the pervasive computing functionality. In its ultimate form, ubiquitous computing means any computing device, while moving with us, can build incrementally dynamic models of its various environments and configure its services accordingly. [...] It is simultaneously very personal and extremely global.

Research in ubiquitous computing requires transcending the traditional barriers between social and technical as well as levels of analysis – individual, team, and organizational [1].

1. Kalle Lyytinen , Youngjin Yoo, Research Commentary: The Next Wave of Nomadic Computing, Information Systems Research, v.13 n.4, p.377-388, December 2002