Chandra Narayanaswami

User-Generated Content

Pervasive user-generated content takes the traditional idea of user-generated content and expands it off the desktop into our everyday world. The six articles in this special issue give innovative examples of gathering and using such content.

Web services on mobile devices-implementation and experience

Web services have started to appear on servers as interfaces between business-to-business applications. To date, mobile devices have only consumed Web services running on stationary servers. We expand this notion so that mobile devices can both offer and consume Web services. We discuss some interesting classes of applications that can be enabled when mobile devices can host Web services. This can be a powerful model for facilitating automatic interaction between resource-constrained mobile devices, time starved users, and pervasive infrastructure. We also explore the issues that arise due to mobility of devices hosting Web services, such as service discovery, device disambiguation, software footprint, and security requirements. To explore this paradigm and to gain an understanding of these issues, we have implemented a retail shopping scenario where a mobile device offers wallet services to an electronic check-out kiosk. This demonstration is now housed at the IBM Industry Solutions Lab and has been operational for several months.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Pervasive Computing in Healthcare

Pervasive computing has great potential to improve healthcare, from enriching data collection and distribution to virtually bringing experts to an emergency site. This special issue samples this developing area through five theme articles that go beyond current applications to find a wider range of applicability. This article is part of a special issue on Healthcare.

Prototyping retractable string-based interaction techniques for dual-display mobile devices

Accessing information on mobile and wearable devices often requires the users visual attention, and the precise operation of virtual or physical widgets. However, these interactions may sometimes be too time-consuming and socially inappropriate. To address this, we introduce a novel input/output device that is based on the manipulation of a retractable string in a polar coordinate frame. Depending on how the user pulls the string from its enclosure--to a particular length, at a particular angle--various system features may be directly accessed. Furthermore, we present our concept for a 1D pixel array, embedded in the string that may be used as a secondary 1D display. Since it is possible to unwind the display itself and trigger functionality with a single pull, information may be accessed and presented quickly, and perceived at a glance. We present scenarios for how the string input/output device may be used in conjunc-tion with the mobile devices primary 2D display and describe our augmented reality proof-of-concept prototype.

Inverted browser: a novel approach towards display symbiosis

In this paper we introduce the inverted browser, a novel approach to enable mobile users to view content from their personal devices on public displays. The inverted browser is a network service to start and control a browser that is then used to view the content. In contrast to a traditional Web browser, which runs on the client device and pulls content from a server, content is pushed to the inverted browser from a personal data source upon user input. This approach allows a wide variety of personal content to be viewed by facilitating symbiotic relationships between mobile devices and intelligent displays in the environment. Our initial inverted browser prototype is based on a Web services wrapper around a traditional Web browser. Our experiments show that the inverted browser approach is superior to other solutions in terms of user convenience, ease of use, energy consumption, and privacy, but interaction latencies need improvement

Designing a new form factor for wearable computing

Despite significant improvements in underlying technologies, the wearable computing field is still in its youth. The article offers several methods that can help accelerate the process from vision to product.

Event maps: a collaborative calendaring system for navigating large-scale events

Event Maps is a novel, rich and interactive web-based system targeted at improving the experience of attending and organizing large, multi-track conferences. Through its zoomable Tabular Timeline, users can navigate the conference schedule, seamlessly moving between global and local views. Through a compact decoration widget named Active Corners, Event Maps enables contextual asynchronous collaboration before, during, and after the conference. Organizers can easily create or import conference schedules via a backend interface, and also use the provided analytic toolkits to get insights from visiting patterns and statistics.

User-driven visual mashups in interactive public spaces

Searching and presenting rich data using mobile devices is hard given their inherent I/O limitations. One approach for alleviating these limitations is device symbiosis, whereby the interaction with ones personal mobile device is augmented by additionally engaging with more capable infrastructure devices, such as kiosks and displays. The Celadon framework, previously developed by our team, builds upon device symbiosis for delivering zone-based services through mobile and infrastructure devices in public spaces such as shopping malls, train stations and theme parks. An approach for rich data visualization that is gaining wide popularity is mashups. In this paper we describe User-Defined Mashups -- a general methodology that combines device symbiosis and automated creation of mashups. We have applied this methodology to build a system that enables Celadon users to flexibly interact with rich zone information through their mobile devices, leveraging large public displays. Our system bridges public and personal devices, data and services.

Device Context Discovery System for Context-Aware Services in Ubiquitous Device Collaboration Environment

This paper describes a system for obtaining and describing device context information such as device capabilities and user preferences for context-aware services in the ubiquitous device collaboration framework called Celadon. The proposed system is designed to gather and manage device properties and user profiles from devices, and to provide generalized access methods for manipulating static and dynamic properties of the devices. We present the architecture of the proposed system within the overall Celadon framework and describe the functions of each component in more detail and present our current prototypes

Form factors for mobile computing and device symbiosis

Several novel portable and wearable form factors have been prototyped at IBM over the last eight years. Each of the different form factors has some unique advantages and addresses different user needs. This invited paper present our experience building these prototypes and describe how improvements in technology have advanced our prototypes over time. Recently we have been investigating the middleware necessary to use a collection of devices symbiotically to address some of the limitations of each form factor. Drawbacks of some form factors include battery, small screen size, limited bandwidth and limited user interface capability. However form factors with such limitations also typically come with several advantages, i.e., they are always with you and provide a private display and a trusted platform. The paper sketches a few applications that could use devices symbiotically and outline some of the challenges that need to be overcome to enable this symbiosis.