Pervasive Computing: Vision and Challengers

M. Satyanarayanan, “Pervasive Computing: Vision and Challenges,” IEEE Personal Communications, August 2001.

This papers sets the challenges in computer systems posed by pervasive computing. To stay focused, it avoids digressions into areas important to pervasive computing such as human-computer interaction, expert systems and software agents.

Two distinct earlier steps in the evolution of pervasive computing are distributed systems and mobile computing. Some of the technical problems in pervasive computing correspond to problems already identified and studied in those fields. In some cases, the demands of pervasive computing are sufficiently different that new solutions have to be sought.

The research agenda of pervasive computing subsumes that of mobile computing, but goes much further. Moreover, the whole of all the technical challenges is much greater than the sum of the part.

Satyanarayanan keeps a pragramtic approach to invisility:

In practice, a reasonable approximation of this ideal (invisibility) is minimal user distraction

and talks about balancing proactivity and transparency towards the user

Proactivity is a double-edged sword. Unless carefully designed, a proactive system can annoy a user and thus defeat the goal of invisibility. How does one design a system that strikes the proper balance at all times? Self-tuning can be an important tool in this effort. A mobile user’s need and tolerance for proactivity are likely to be closely related to his level of expertise on a task and his familiarity with his environment. A system that can infer these factors by observing user behavior and context is better positioned to strike the right balance.

Taxonomy of Computer Systems Research Problems in Pervasive Computing. Already blogged in Wireless Campus LBS.

Relations to my thesis: Invisibility is about minimal user distraction. I am not sure about “minimal”… I would replace it with relevant. I like the taxonomy that shows the new layers of complexity. The whole of all these layers is much greater than the sum of the parts. Understanding the balance between annoying proactivity and inscrutable transparency is at the heart of my work.