Mobile & Pervasive Computing

The paradigm of mobile and pervasive computing has a number of distinguishing characteristics:

• Computing is spread throughout the environment and yet gracefully integrated with it.
• Users, devices, and services are often mobile.
• Information appliances are becoming increasingly available.
• Communication is made easy—between individuals, between individuals and things, and between things.

Mobile and pervasive computing is changing the way we live and work, as profoundly as the introduction of the automobile did almost a century ago. IBM Research has been at the forefront of this exciting new area from its very beginning. Key advances in mobile networking, wireless connectivity, mobile information access, content adaptation, data synchronization, technology for notebook and wearable computers, and innovative mobile e-business solutions have come from our worldwide research laboratories. IBM Research has also been instrumental in the company’s product offerings in this space, including IBM’s Multimodal Tools, DB2 Universal Database, WebSphere Everyplace Access, WebSphere Commerce Suite, and WebSphere Portal Server products. Towards fulfilling the vision of millions of organizations and billions of people connected by trillions of devices, our current research activities encompass the areas of infrastructure middleware, programming models and tools, the client software stack, mobile security and privacy, application provisioning and device management, and user experience.

Some of our recent research includes:

• ContextSphere: ContextSphere is an environment for developing and executing context-sensitive applications. It enables these applications by composing data from various networked data sources, such as Web services, pub/sub systems, database systems, GPS devices, cell phones, badge readers, calendars, and RFID readers. It is designed to compose data scalably; to ensure user privacy; to operate robustly in the face of data-source, network, and server failures; and to simplify the development and maintenance of context-sensitive applications with a powerful programming model.
• Spatial information Processing: Spatial information, such as geographic and location data, plays an important role in people's daily lives. Our research in spatial information processing focuses on location-based services, moving-object databases, spatial data warehousing and OLAP. Our location-based services middleware supports industry standards such as Parlay Location Service and Web Services. Moving-object databases track locations of large volumes of moving objects and provide functionalities such as monitoring, querying and spatial triggers. Moving-object databases support advanced location-aware applications like spatial pub/sub services. Spatial data warehousing integrates the spatial information spread in multiple data stores into a central spatial data warehouse, which our innovative spatial OLAP technology leverages to facilitate decision making.
• Linux Watch: In August 2000, a team of IBM researchers spread across multiple IBM Research sites, with skills in hardware design, operating systems, displays, electronic and mechanical packaging, industrial design, and user interface design worked together to develop a wristwatch prototype that runs Linux and X11. The team worked for about eighteen months to accomplish this feat. IBM has thus demonstrated the viability of Linux across a wide range of platforms from large enterprise servers to medium-sized and small servers, workstations, desktops, laptops and now a small intelligent device.
• Everywhere Displays: The Everywhere Displays project aims to develop systems that allow the transformation of every surface in a space into a projected "touch screen". A major emphasis in this project is to avoid "wiring" surfaces with monitors or other sensing devices. Unlike users of traditional augmented-reality applications, users of Everywhere Displays do not need to wear graphics goggles or special input devices. Everything happens simply by projection and vision processing: light in, light out. Also, the Everywhere Displays projector can be steered to a new surface by a simple software command, thus avoiding fixed setups where projectors or cameras can only perform one specific task.
• BlueSpace: BlueSpace is a next-generation workspace solution that integrates architectural elements of sensors, actuations, displays and wireless networks. Its goal is to increase knowledge workers' productivity by reducing unwanted interruptions and improving team awareness and communications. It also provides users with greater control over their environment by allowing them to personalize their environmental settings. A full-scale prototype has been developed in collaboration with Steelcase and demonstrated at the IBM Industry Solutions Lab.
• Mobile Assistant: Mobile Assistant provides a natural language voice interface to messaging, calendaring, address book, and more. Applications for mobile devices entail the integration of various sources of data optimized for delivery to limited hardware resources and intermittently connected devices through wireless networks. We are building an automated assistant that is natural to use and can be an alternative to a human assistant, that can arrange meetings, make phone calls, take messages, and provide access to personal-organizer information. Key components are powerful interaction through the phone, instant messaging, and asynchronous text messaging, all according to user preferences.
• Video Semantic Summarization: The Video Semantic Summarization System generates a summarized video for users based on their preferences and delivers personalized content. It generates personalized video summaries using MPEG-7 descriptions of video contents in a middleware architecture. Our Video Semantic Summarization System is designed and implemented for stand-alone applications, for mobile platforms, and for web browsers. Each version of the system allows the user to specify topic preferences and query keywords and total summary time. The summarization techniques involve optimizing the relevance scores of user parameters against the MPEG-7 semantic descriptions of our video content.
• Conversational Dialog Systems: Our research in automated dialog management includes initiatives in natural-language-based dialog interfaces for navigation, and in enhancement of e-commerce through direct access to merchandise. We construct universal and application-specific dialog engines that can manage discourse history and converse in natural language over multiple channels. We build technologies, infrastructure tools and a framework for supporting dialog-based and customer-service-related multi-modal applications. Our current projects include extensive use of XML/XSL technology in building conversational interfaces for stock trading, and for product-information systems that resolve customer questions about merchandise and services and guide customers towards products and services with desired characteristics.
• Security and Privacy in Automotive Telematics: Telematics by its nature requires the capture, storage, and exchange of data to obtain remote services. In order for automotive telematics to grow to its full potential, telematics data must be protected, ensuring privacy and security for end-users, service providers and application providers. We have developed a framework for data protection that is built on privacy and security technologies. The privacy technology enables users and service providers to define a data model and a policy model that allow event-based, temporal, and spatial constraints. The security technology provides traditional capabilities such as encryption, authentication, and non-repudiation. In addition, it provides secure environments for protected execution, which is essential to limiting data access to specific purposes.

IBM researchers have been, and continue to be, among the worldwide leaders in mobile and pervasive computing. Being part of IBM gives us rare opportunities to have our research affect both the state of the art and the state of the practice. We advance the state of the art by publishing in leading journals and conferences, engaging in active participation in standards bodies, producing numerous patents, and collaborating with researchers from top-ranked academic institutions. We affect the state of the practice through significant engagements, both with business units that make up IBM, and also with key IBM customers.

Arup Acharya, Archan Misra, Sorav Bansal, “A Label-switching Packet Forwarding Architecture for Multi-hop Wireless LANs”, 5th ACM International Workshop on Wireless Mobile Multimedia (WoWMom’02), in conjunction with MobiCom 2002, Atlanta, Georgia, September 2002. [Best Paper Award]

Ming-Syan Chen, Kun-Lung Wu, Philip S. Yu, “Optimizing Index Allocation for Sequential Data Broadcasting in Wireless Mobile Computing”, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 15(1), pp 161-173, January/February 2003.

Norman H. Cohen, Hui Lei, Paul Castro, John S. Davis II, Apratim Purakayastha, “Composing Pervasive Data Using iQL”. 4th IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA’02), Callicoon, New York, June 2002.

Sabine Deligne, Satya Dharanipragada, Ramesh Gopinath, Benoit Maison, Peder Olsen, Harry Printz, “A Robust High Accuracy Speech Recognition System For Mobile Applications”, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, 10(8), pp 551-561, November 2002.

Jennifer Lai, Anthony Levas, Paul Chou, Claudio Pinhanez, Marisa Viveros, “BlueSpace: Personalizing Workspace through Awareness and Adaptability”, International Journal of Human Computer Studies, Volume 57, pp 415-428, Elsevier Science, December 2002.

Hui Lei, Daby M. Sow, John S. Davis II, Guruduth Banavar, Maria R. Ebling, “The Design and Applications of a Context Service”, ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review (MC2R), 6(4), pp 45-55, October 2002.

Jussi Myllymaki, James Kaufman, “High-Performance Spatial Indexing for Location-Based Services”, 12th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW’03), Budapest, Hungary, May 2003.

Chandra Narayanaswami, Noboru Kamijoh, Mandayam Raghunath, Tadanobu Inoue, Thomas Cipolla, Jim Sanford, Eugene Schlig, Sreekrishnan Venkiteswaran, Dinakar Guniguntala, Vishal Kulkarni, Kazuhiko Yamazaki, “IBM's Linux Watch: The Challenge of Miniaturization, IEEE Computer, 35(1), pp 33-41, Jan 2002.

Gopal Pingali, Claudio Pinhanez, Anthony Levas, Rick Kjeldsen, Mark Podlaseck, Han Chen, Noi Sukaviriya, “Steerable Interfaces for Pervasive Computing Spaces”, 1st IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom'03), Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, March 2003. [Mark Weiser Best Paper Award]

Recent Accomplishments:
Arup Acharya, co-chair, Global Internet and Next Generation Networks Symposium, Globecom 2004.

Guruduth S. Banavar, general co-chair, 2nd ACM/USENIX International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys’04).

Chatschik Bisdikian, recipient, 2002 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award.

Chatschik Bisdikian, co-chair, Personal Communication Systems and Wireless LANs Symposium, ICC 2003.

Chatschik Bisdikian: Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Network, 2004.

Chatschik Bisdikian: IEEE Fellow, 2004

Chatschik Bisdikian: Elected member of the Academy of Distinguished Engineers, Univ. of Connecticut, 2004.

Maria Ebling, Guerney Hunt, and Hui Lei, guest co-editors, Joint Special Issues on Context-Aware Computing, IEEE Pervasive Computing and IEEE Wireless Communications, 2002.

Guerney Hunt, associate editor, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

Jennifer Lai, guest editor, Special Issue on Speech and Human Computer Interaction, International Journal of Speech Technology, April 2003.

Chung-Sheng Li, IEEE Fellow.

Hui Lei, conference co-chair, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM’04).

Mahmoud Naghshineh, IEEE Fellow.

Chandra Narayanaswami, general chair, 7th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC’03).

Ramón Cáceres, editorial board, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

Gopal Pingali, associate editor, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing

Claudio Pinhanez, Most Promising Scientist, Advanced Degree Award, the Hispanic Engineers National Achievement Awards Corporation (HENAAC), 2003.

Ramón Cáceres, Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

Norman Cohen, Workshop Chair, 2005 IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management.