Mandayam Thondanur Raghunath

Reincarnating PCs with portable SoulPads

The ability to walk up to any computer, personalize it, and use it as ones own has long been a goal of mobile computing research. We present SoulPad, a new approach based on carrying an auto-configuring operating system along with a suspended virtual machine on a small portable device. With this approach, the computer boots from the device and resumes the virtual machine, thus giving the user access to his personal environment, including previously running computations. SoulPad has minimal infrastructure requirements and is therefore applicable to a wide range of conditions, particularly in developing countries. We report our experience implementing SoulPad and using it on a variety of hardware configurations. We address challenges common to systems similar to SoulPad, and show that the SoulPad model has significant potential as a mobility solution.

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.

Application design for a smart watch with a high resolution display

Advances in technology have made it possible to package a reasonably powerful processor and memory subsystem coupled with an ultra high-resolution display and wireless communication into a wrist watch. This introduces a set of challenges in the nature of input devices, navigation, applications, power management, and other areas. This paper describes a platform we have developed and the decisions we have made about how to address these challenges.

User Interfaces for Applications on a Wrist Watch

Abstract: Advances in technology have made it possible to package a reasonably powerful processor and memory subsystem coupled with an ultra high-resolution display and wireless communication into a wrist watch. This introduces a set of challenges in the nature of input devices, navigation, applications, and other areas. This paper describes a wearable computing platform in a wrist watch form-factor we have developed. We built two versions: one with a low resolution liquid crystal display; and another with a ultra high resolution organic light emitting diode display. In this paper we discuss the selection of the input devices and the design of applications and user interfaces for these two prototypes, and the compare the two versions.

IBM's Linux watch, the challenge of miniaturization

Nearly four years in development, the IBM Linux watch contains a complete computer system that runs Linux, displays X11 graphics, and has wireless connectivity. The system fits in a case that could pass as a slightly unusual analog timepiece with a somewhat odd shape and an extraordinarily brilliant face. The developers have created two versions of the watch, one with an organic light-emitting diode display and the other with a liquid crystal display. Still considered a research prototype, the watch already runs some personal information management applications, and it can communicate with PCs, PDAs, and other wireless-enabled devices, viewing condensed e-mail and directly receiving pager-like messages. Eventually, users will be able to access various Internet-based services, such as up-to-the-minute information about weather, traffic conditions, the stock market, and sports.

Energy trade-offs in the IBM wristwatch computer

We recently demonstrated a high function wrist watch computer prototype that runs the Linux operating system and also XII graphics libraries. In this paper we describe the unique energy related challenges and tradeoffs we encountered while building this watch. We show that the usage duty factor for the device heavily dictates which of the powers, active power or sleep power, needs to be minimized more aggressively in order to achieve the longest perceived battery life. We also describe the energy issues that percolate through several layers of software all the way from device usage scenarios, applications, user interfaces, system level software to device drivers. All of these need to be systematically addressed to achieve the battery life dictated by the hardware components and the capacity of the battery in the device.

Fostering a symbiotic handheld environment

Although researchers have already begun building the infrastructure to make a symbiotic environment of handheld systems and related devices possible, business needs will drive this technologys real growth.

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.

Expanding the digital camera's reach

Digital cameras and large-capacity portable storage devices could soon be integrated into compact cell phones that establish symbiotic relationships with stationary devices in the environment, providing users with the ability to view and share images in many new settings and enabling the creation of several novel applications.