"His general stance on email is off — understandably so. Who could ever have predicted our email culture? He is, for example, very up for doing email on weekends because “I’d rather answer email on Sunday and be in my pyjamas on Monday”. Unless the “Monday pyjamas” refers to working from home (which isn’t mentioned anywhere), this reads like a naive assumption that an hour tackling unending email on the weekend corresponds to going in late on Monday. Which, you know, it should. But it doesn’t.
Also, this gem: ”One of the enormous attractions of email is that it is not interruptive like a telephone.” This should be true, and is for some people, but I know that I and others struggle to restrain email checking to once or twice a day. Also, check this: ”You can process [email] at your leisure, and for this reason you may reply to messages that would not stand a chance in hell of getting through the secretarial defences of corporate, telephonic life.” I think not!"

""

"WHAT if there were two worlds, the real one and its digital reflection? The real one is strewn with sensors, picking up everything from movement to smell. The digital one, an edifice built of software, takes in all that information and automatically acts on it. If a door opens in the real world, so does its virtual equivalent. If the temperature in the room with the open door falls below a certain level, the digital world automatically turns on the heat.

This was the vision that David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, put forward in his book “Mirror Worlds” in the early 1990s. ... Even two decades later that sounds like science fiction.""With so much to gain, what is there to lose? Privacy and the risk of abuse by a malevolent government spring to mind first. Indeed, compared with some smart systems, the ubiquitous telescreen monitoring device in George Orwell’s novel “1984” seems a plaything. The book’s hero, Winston Smith, would soon have a much harder time finding a corner in his room to hide from Big Brother.


Second, critics fear that smart systems could gang up on their creators, in the way they did in “The Matrix”, a 1999 film in which human beings are plugged into machines that simulate reality to control humans and harvest their bodies’ heat and electrical activity. Fortunately, such a scenario is likely to remain science fiction. But smart systems might be vulnerable to malfunctioning or attacks by hackers.

Third, some people fret that those with access to smart systems will be vastly better informed than those without, giving them an unfair advantage. Mr Gelernter highlighted this risk in “Mirror Worlds”.

There are plenty of other concerns, and unless they are dealt with they could provoke a neo-Luddite reaction."

"All surfaces have access to connectivity. All surfaces are displays responsive to people, context, and timing. If any surface could show anything, would the loudest or the most polite win? Surfaces which show the smartest most relevant material in any given context will be the most warmly received.""peripheral and ignorable, but still at scale"

" ubiquitous computing is really about ubiquitous connectivity"

""

Really not augmented-reality since it's about a different way of interacting with the world.

Family-level surveillance?

"By comparison with the World Wide Web, ubiquitous computing is vastly more insinuative. By intention and design, it asserts itself in every moment and through every aperture contemporary life affords it3. It is everyware.""
It should be clear that ubicomp represents a substantial raising of stakes over the Web case, the PDA case, the mobile-phone case, or other scenarios we’re accustomed to; that its field of operation is by definition total; and that its potential for harm if poorly implemented is such that the user experience is too important to leave to chance, or the discretion of developers.""Imagine the feeling of being stuck in voice-mail limbo, or fighting unwanted auto-formatting in a word processing program, or trying to quickly silence an unexpectedly ringing phone by touch, amid the hissing of fellow moviegoers—except all the time, and everywhere, and in the most intimate circumstances of our lives."

The software, called Magitti, uses a combination of cues--including the time of day, a person's location, her past behaviors, and even her text messages--to infer her interests. It then shows a helpful list of suggestions, including concerts, movies, bookstores, and restaurants.

via http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/technology/personaltech/05smart.html "
The Senseboard® Gesture Recognition Technology™ (GRT) is a unique proprietary method of capturing, analyzing, and interpreting finger and hand movements.

The Senseboard® Wearable Data Entry Platform consists of one or two hand-worn units that each contains an embedded CPU, firmware, Bluetooth™, a rechargeable Li-Polymer battery, and the Senseboard® GRT. The Senseboard® Wearable Data Entry Platform is also possible to integrate into gloves."

"Just imagine a device with an 8-inch fold-out screen, a big virtual keyboard for easy text input, numerous sensors to detect your surroundings, and software smart enough to anticipate your needs and sharp enough to respond to conversational commands.""Open up the device, point it at the street and ask it to show you what the place looked like 200 years ago, and it offers a photo or video. Ask it where to eat lunch and it highlights a restaurant that suits your tastes. If you are heatedly debating food choices with a companion when someone of marginal importance tries to call you, the phone will know better than to interrupt."“The one hardware development I’m feeling most certain about,” he said, “is foldable displays.”"Smartphone apps could, for instance, recognize when a doctor is in the building, and alert him if another person nearby had dialed 911. Or, your phone might capture images from a video camera around the corner from a subway station."

"My research interests are in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing,assistive and educational technologies and medical informatics. I am very interested in issues surrounding the technology needs of people in chronic care situations."

via http://twitter.com/DSpinellis/status/4474761641 "Returned from brilliant PhD defense: http://bit.ly/2ESqHh found in pervasive systems enjoyment and usability trump usefulness!" "my doctoral research goal is to define the factors that will meet the PIS novel attributes and provide a robust acceptance model for predicting PIS adoption and use by individuals."

"There's not a simple way to use touchscreens when you can't see what you're doing, which means 10 million blind and low-vision Americans can't use this ubiquitous technology. But what if you could feel it? What if the "slide to unlock" key was an actual slide? Even better, what if you could have a Braille iPhone?"

via http://thesocialmobileweb.org/programme.html

Ubiquitous Monitoring and Human Behaviour in Intelligent Pervasive Spaces

"The Street project is tackling fundamental research challenges in the areas of ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction and sensor networks, and applying the outcomes to urban computing environments. In brief, the vision for Street is to allow people to "program their city"." via: http://nicta.com.au/people/rrobinson/publications/citemine-paper.html

"The NET Desk prototype is a project that is attempting to address the lack of a link between printed material and the digital file. Printed material should be contain in its process a link to its digital essence and not just through its appearance."

"Pachube, a service that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual."

"We had argued that Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research have long moved beyond the evaluation setting of a single user sitting in front of a single desktop computer, yet many of our fundamentally held viewpoints about evaluation continues to be ruled by outdated biases derived from this legacy. We believe that we need to engage with real users in 'Living Laboratories', in which researchers either adopt or create functioning systems that are used in real settings. These new experimental platforms will greatly enable researchers to conduct evaluations that span many users, places, time, location, and social factors in ways that are unimaginable before.""Not only do many users already use multiple displays, they also use tiny displays on cell phones and iPods and peripheral displays. Matthews et al. studied the use of peripheral displays, focusing particularly on glance-ability, for example."

"The gestures can be as simple as using his fingers and thumbs to create a picture frame that tells the camera to snap a photo, which is saved to his mobile phone. When he gets back to an office, he projects the images onto a wall and begins to size them.""The prototype was built from an ordinary webcam and a battery-powered 3M projector, with an attached mirror -- all connected to an internet-enabled mobile phone. The setup, which costs less than $350, allows the user to project information from the phone onto any surface -- walls, the body of another person or even your hand.""Maes' goal is to harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses."

"The goal of the GeoPKDD project is to develop theory, techniques and systems for geographic knowledge discovery, based on new privacy-preserving methods for extracting knowledge from large amounts of raw data referenced in space and time."
see also Spri

"TVs, laptops, and iPhones are now designed around 16 x 9 " "LibraryLand needs an “ISWN"

"This paper explores the possibilities of using audio and haptics for interpersonal communication via mobile devices."

"As the form factors of computational devices diversify, the concept of eyes-free interaction is becoming increasingly relevant: it is no longer hard to imagine use scenarios in which screens are inappropriate."

discusses "questions about the boundaries of what children consider as life." "The old AI debates were about the technical abilities of machines. The new ones will be about the emotional vulnerabilities of people."

"Libraries made a great effort to get on-line and to reach out to users beyond their walls. What we haven't done, however, is to combine the on-shelf and on-line resources in a useful way. It makes sense to me that I should be able to stand amid bound jou

"The World Narrow Web" "Search is a bloody interruption! I'm in the middle of doing something and the thing isn't there where I need it!"-Bill Buxton. Search *is* an immersive task for me...

"what happens to a society if every last stitch of hypocrisy is removed and everyone can know where anyone else is, or was, at any given time."

Adam Greenfield. Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (New Riders, 2006).

"It's kind of difficult to blog, as the wireless is non-existent! People keep running up their rooms to plug in and post stuff. Very 1996."

"Imity is a little app you can run on your phone, turning your phone into a more context aware device. Imity uses Bluetooth to 'scan' your environment for other devices." ***Good take on privacy/security***

stories of frustration with modern technology, especially telephone lines. "I hope ubicomp really does take a hundred years. That way I'll be spared the indignity of having to use it."

"Spimes" to refer to future objects that could be aware of their context and transmit "cradle-to-grave" information about where they have been, where they are and where they are going"