Jason Hong's Confabulations

I wrote up a white paper about the cybersecurity issues that we will face as the Internet of Things becomes more common. I discuss issues like physical security, scale, lack of experience by manufacturers, and lack of tools and best practices. One idea I also advance is this pyramid of IoT Devices. At the top tier we will all have a few devices that have a lot of computational horsepower, such as laptops, smartphones, and glasses. In the middle tier we will have dozens of devices that have moderate computational capabilities, but also only require a little bit of our attention. These include TVs, refrigerators, and smart toys. At the bottom tier are hundreds of cheap devices or ones that we are barely aware of. These include RFIDs, smart toilets, digital picture frames, electronic locks, smart meters, cheap environmental sensors, and more. The bottom two tiers are the ones we need to worry about the most. The top tier already has major tech manufacturers wor...

Mary Baker and I have created a subreddit specifically for pervasive, mobile, andubiquitous computing , and we’d like you to join and share content. Examples include (but are not limited to): ·          News in the popular press about mobile and ubiquitous computing ·          Works in progress that you, your colleagues, or your friends are doing ·          Fun videos of pervasive computing systems in action ·          Information about interesting research papers, best paper awards ·          Dates, calls for papers, and calls for participation for relevant conferences ·          Smartphone apps that you are working on and you want people to try ·          Discussing trends in ubicomp research, ...

Our livehoods.org site is now open. Our vision is to re-imagine how cities work in the age of social media. Specifically, we've analyzed and clustered 18m Foursquare checkins to understand how people use a city. We currently have maps for New York City and Pittsburgh. San Francisco will be out soon. (Note that our site is still a bit slow, so please be patient) LiveHoods has also just been featured in The Atlantic Cities too.

I had a great meeting with an ecologist in Pittsburgh earlier this week, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that there is a company building devices for tracking birds. The devices are essentially souped up mobile phones that combine cellular phone technology, GPS, and small solar panels, and are small enough that you can strap them onto the bird. Very cool! http://celltracktech.com/

Our group had a good year for Ubicomp with four papers accepted, all on various aspects of privacy, location, and social networking. Jialiu Lin, Guang Xiang, Jason Hong, Norman Sadeh. Modeling People’s Place Naming Preferences in Location Sharing. This paper looks at how people name places when sharing with others. Eran Toch et al. Empirical Models of Privacy in Location Sharing. This paper examines what location information people share with others, using models of how public a place is, and how mobile that individual is. Karen Tang, Jialiu Lin, Jason Hong, Norman Sadeh. Rethinking Location Sharing: Exploring the Implications of Social-Driven vs. Purpose-Driven Location Sharing. Here, we examine the difference between two different kinds of location sharing. One is purpose-driven ("where are you now?"), the other is social-driven ("hey, I'm in Paris now"). Justin Cranshaw, Eran Toch, Jason Hong, Niki Kittur, Norman Sadeh. Bridging the Gap Between Physical Locat...

I've been wondering for a while that, given the cost of "smart" objects, why don't more of them don't have anti-theft mechanisms built in? It seems that there are two basic approaches here: make the stolen object useless, or make it (or the thief) really easy to find. An example of making the smart object useless comes from a post by Ed Felten talking about how DRM can be used for good, to help prevent your stuff from being stolen. http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1180 How might this work? One possibility is that when the device [iPod] is plugged in to a charger it hasn’t seen before, it makes a noise and prompts the user to enter a password on the iPod’s screen. If the correct password is entered, the device will allow itself to be recharged by that charger in the future. The device will become associated with a group of chargers over time. There are obvious holes with this approach, most notably stealing the charger, but it seems to me a generally good idea. ...

Just finished a meeting with some visitors from Nokia. It looks like they are launching a very ambitious program called Sensor Planet, leverage mobile phones as a large scale sensor platform. I have to say it looks pretty exciting! SensorPlanet is a Nokia-initiated cooperation, a global research framework, on mobile device-centric large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks. The results of SensorPlanet are 1) a test platform that enables the collection of sensor data on a never seen scale, and 2) a central repository for sharing the collected sensor data for research purposes.

Here's something that is heavy on the creativity scale: TeamAwear is a next-generation basketball jersey which allows players to 'wear their performance' in order to enhance the awareness of information during game-play for all stakeholders, including: athletes, coaches, referees, and spectators. http://www.mitchellpage.com.au/teamawear/

The Economist has a special issue on ubiquitous computing, looking at such topics as different wireless technologies, sensors, and wireless energy. The articles look like a good overview of the current state of the art, I think it's likely I'll use these the next time I teach a course on ubicomp. http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9032088 So far, my favorite new insight from the articles: MANY companies claim to have built a better mousetrap. Rentokil has actually done so. The British building-services firm added a small sensor and a wireless module to its traps so that they notify the building staff when a rodent is caught. This is a big improvement on traps that need to be regularly inspected. A large building might contain hundreds of them, and a few are bound to be forgotten.

This is an interesting idea, related to the Hitchhiking work we've done in the past for detecting how busy a place is , and to my Worldspotting blog entry a while back. Homeland Security officials are looking into outfitting cellphones with detectors that would alert emergency responders to radiological isotopes, toxic chemicals and biological agents such as anthrax. ... The Homeland Security Department says the program, called Cell-All, might work this way: Detectors would be placed in cellphones, most of which are already linked to the Global Positioning System. If a detector recorded a hit, the GPS would transmit the location and time to local emergency responders and Homeland Security's operations center. Of course, there's the question of too many false positives , as well as the very serious privacy concerns involved, especially since there is little direct benefit to end-users.

I'm a guest editor on a special issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing on security and privacy . SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 1 May 2007 Author guidelines: www.computer.org/pervasive/author.htm Submission address: http://cs-ieee.manuscriptcentral.com WIP Deadline: See below Publication date: September 2007 IEEE Pervasive Computing invites submissions to a special issue on the topic of ÎéÎíSecurity and Privacy in Pervasive Computing.ÎéÎí Example topics include, but are not limited to, the following: Establishing trust in pervasive hardware Preserving security in cyber foraging Software and hardware attestation of remote executions Authenticating with low distraction Using tamper-evident hardware Providing peripheral awareness of trust context Combining privacy with accuracy in location sensing Coping with physical threats to pervasive hardware Encrypting on low-power computing devices Anonymized computing with disposable device...

Jefferson Han, the person whose work on interactive touchscreens has been all over YouTube and featured at the TED conference , has founded a startup to commercialize his technologies. I think it's interesting that large interactive screens have been around for quite a while. For example, Stanford's iRoom , Fraunhofer IPSI's iLand , the old Liveworks (that commercialized the LiveBoard), Smart Technologies (that sells SmartBoards), and MERL's DiamondTouch , just to name a few. I remember being the session chair for Jefferson when he presented at UIST 2005 , and thinking that there were two key differences. The first is that the technology is cheaper than anything else out there. Ridiculously cheaper by an order of magnitude. Most large interactive displays cost thousands of dollars, whereas Jefferson's work only required a cheap sheet of plexiglass, a projector, and a camera. It's cheap enough that I've been trying to encourage students in my classes to bui...

One interesting thing that happened last month was that I got to meet Alan Kay, one of the researchers at PARC that helped invent our modern conception of personal computing back in the 1970s. He said many things that struck me, but one stood out in particular, namely that it only took about 25 researchers at PARC to develop it all, from ethernet to GUIs, from Smalltalk to the laser printer. The key to it all, though, was having a shared vision that 25 really smart and independent people could agree on. This is something I've noticed about the original Ubiquitous Computing project as well (also done at PARC), in that there was a grand shared vision that a lot of really smart people believed in and pushed for. However, I'm not sure if this is something we could easily re-create today. It's hard enough to get 25 people to agree on anything, but there's also the funding issue, in that NSF can't fund projects that large and DARPA no longer will. I also don't think t...

http://www.loopt.com/ , description via Joe McCarthy ...they already have 40K users, and will be doing a major launch in December (at which point the application will be pre-installed on all Boost phones). ...Managing privacy issues will be crucial to their success; Mark said everything is opt-in, requiring an explicit invitation, acceptance, and activation, and it only works if you know someone's phone number."

FYI, Rich Gold was an artist and designer that was part of the original ubiquitous computing team at PARC. He also helped establish the PARC Artist in Residence program. I just found out that a book he had been working on before his untimely passing away is online (and his wife is also looking for a publisher, if any of you know of one). http://www.o-art.org/Plenitude/ Rich has some really good insights about the nature of art, science, design, and engineering; intelligent houses; and how the act of reading has changed over time.

I'm about halfway thru Vernor Vinge's new book Rainbows End . What's really amazing is how he ties together a lot of technology trends in a single coherent story, including: wearable computers with contact lens displays sensor networks augmented reality robotics new biomedical therapies (I'm sure there's a sexier name for that) silent messaging (I'd love to know how people could do text entry that fast!) paper displays autonomous vehicles (self-driving taxis) micropayments holographic displays digital libraries There's a funny section early on where the protagonist, who has missed the last decade due to Alzheimer's, is asking where all the robots and flying vehicles are. Vinge also does a good job of tying things to our present world by forecasting how existing entities such as Bank of America , Google , and Homeland Security fit in. Vinge also seems to subscribe to Brin's notion of a transparent society, where everyone can easily find almost any pi...

See where movie stars are in Manhattan in near-realtime based on reports by people. A weird (and somewhat scary) form of a smart mob. http://www.gawker.com/stalker/

I made this prognostication a few years ago, and it just keeps coming true. Now, you can run not just Doom, but Doom II and Halflife on a video ipod. YouTube Link Reminds me of Zawinski's law : "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

One reader asks about ubicomp and its relationship to supply chain management. [We think ubicomp is] simply the philosophy of using computation to augment the ability of entities in a non-invasive way. If our definition is correct, then would it follow that technologies which can vastly improve transparency across a supply chain without requiring significant process changes be one valid application of ubiquitous computing? If so, then wouldn't any and all supporting technologies (data storage facility, barcodes, etc.) be part of ubiquitous computing technologies within that context? My response: Well, on the one hand, the term ubiquitous computing is sufficiently general that it could include lots of things, sort of like personal computing. On the other hand, if you look at the specific research that calls itself ubiquitous computing, you only see certain kinds of things. For example, mobile computing, sensor networks, large displays, etc. Lots of areas with previous work done (e...

http://ludimate.com/geominder/index.php For Nokia phones... Geominder allows you to create location-based reminders that stay attached to physical locations. When arriving at a marked location, Geominder can play an alarm and display a stored text note or a voice note previously associated to the location.