Ubiquitous Computing: Shall we Understand It?
RUTH A. MILNER · The Computer Journal · 2006
Pervasive or ubiquitous computing has become an aspiration of the computing community in the last 15 years. Its vision, pioneered by Mark Weiser [1], is that populations of computing entities—hardware and software—will become an effective part of our environment, performing tasks that support our broad purposes without our continual direction, thus allowing us to be largely unaware of them. The vision arises because the technology begins to lie within our grasp. This simply stated aspiration arouses questions ranging across computer science and beyond. Here are a few of them. Social questions: what ubiquitous computing systems (UCSs) do people want or need, and how will they change people’s behaviour? Technological questions: how will the hardware entities—the sensors and effectors whose cooperation represents such a system—acquire power, and by what medium do they communicate? Engineering questions: for the populations and subpopulations—including software agents—that make up a system, what design principles should be adopted at each order of magnitude, to ensure dependable performance? Foundational questions: what concepts are needed to specify and describe pervasive systems, their subsystems and their interaction?