New Horizons for Mobile Computing

Abstrac

Face-to-face media sharing using wireless mobile devices

Abstract Advanced personal wireless mobile devices, such as today 's emerging smart-phones, ar

Towards Activity Context using Software Sensors

Service-Oriented Computing delivers the promise of configuring and reconfiguring software systems to address user's needs in a dynamic way. Context-aware computing promises to capture the user's needs and hence the requirements they have on systems. The marriage of both can deliver ad-hoc software solutions relevant to the user in the most current fashion. However, here it is a key to gather information on the users' activity (that is what they are doing). Traditionally any context sensing was conducted with hardware sensors. However, software can also play the same role and in some situations will be more useful to sense the activity of the user. Furthermore they can make use of the fact that Service-oriented systems exchange information through standard protocols. In this paper we discuss our proposed approach to sense the activity of the user making use of software

RFID explained: a primer on radio frequency identification technologies

This lecture provides an introduction to Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), a technology enabling automatic identification of objects at a distance without requiring line-of-sight. Electronic tagging can be divided into technologies that have a power source (active tags), and those that are powered by the tag interrogation signal (passive tags); the focus here is on passive tags. An overview of the principles of the technology divides passive tags into devices that use either near field or far field coupling to communicate with a tag reader. The strengths and weaknesses of the approaches

Embedded Computation Meets the World-Wide-Web

Two important trends are converging to bring about a radical transformation in the operation of our world. First, the computer industry's remarkable ability to squeeze more and more transistors into a smaller and smaller area of silicon is increasing the computational abilities of our devices, while simultaneously decreasing their cost and power consumption. Second, the proliferation of wired and wireless networking spurred by the development of the world-wide web and demands for mobile access are enabling low-cost connectivity among computing devices. It is now possible to connect not only our desktop machines, but every computing device into a true worldwide web that connects the physical world of sensors and actuators to the virtual world of our information utilities and services. What amazing new applications and services will result? How will ubiquitous computation affect our everyday lives? Will the long envisioned invisible computing paradigm finally be possible? This paper expl..