IEEE Pervasive Computing on Smart Phone

The April-June issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing has several informative articles on smart phone application, exemplifying some exciting advancement in smart phone research and development. The following is a quick briefing of the issue.

Swiss Army Knife or Wallet?
As always, the editor in chief, M. Satyanarayanan, brings the readers an insightful perspective into smart phone computing. He points out that

What is the most valuable functionality to cram into a small, lightweight device that has a long battery life? Every designer of mobile computing hardware wrestles with this question. A large reward awaits anyone who can produce a good answer and follow through with a good implementation. The iPod's success in displacing older portable music devices shows the power of combining the right device functionality with a good form factor and user interface.

Apparently, due to the restriction of the form factor, it is impossible to offer everything with a smart phone. Smart phone must be a phone in the first place - everyone (well, almost) agrees with this. Beyond that, fancy features are being added to make the phone sexier to teenagers as well as business professionals. Camera phone, email, gaming, IM (think about T-Mobile sidekick), mobile TV, ..., you name it. The design philosophy is named "swiss army knife" by Mr. Satyanarayanan: cram many things into one, but each one only provides largely reduced/constrained functionality. The article adds that instead of designing swiss army knife like mobile devices, it would be more viable to have "wallet" like smart phones which are a must-have in everyday life and carry in-direct functionality (credit card, cash, etc) that leverages the surrounding environment. This is indeed a good point-rather than fighting with limited computing, communication, and storage capability of a mobile device, try every possible means to make it easily fit into a computing environment (computers, the Internet, wireless links per se). Again, user interface is a key.

Mobile Hardware
Japan's T-Engine platform provides boards and middleware for a wide range of mobile devices, ranging from smart phone to home appliances to wireless sensors/switches. Stamp-size LCD display hanging close to the eye has long been marketed as next generation display technologies but only managed to create niche market. However, near-eye display with VGA or high resolution may have a good chance to replace the tiny cell phone screen (QCIF or CIF), as long as the cost is reduced to a level around one or two hundred US dollars.

New Products
A family location-tracking application provided by uLocate sounds like a clone to the family car tracking application-both use GPS, and parents can view the locations of their kids over the web. Phone-controlled video camera like Sony Ericsson's Mobile Cam ROB-1 are nothing new-I still remember Nokia Remote Camera. But the ROB-1 is a mobilizable camera-it can move! Kodak's Wifi-enabled digital camera may enable a new fad "DC-blogging", in addition to using camera phones to upload pictures to blogs. 2G micro-drive from Toshiba further sheds some light on integrating video related applications into a smart phone.

The Smart Phone, A First platform for Pervasive Computing
The article identifies two kill apps for ubiquitous computing: person-to-person voice communication and SMS (over 100 million text messages are exchanged daily in China). No one will argue. Next one? no one knows for sure. But it is very likely that smart phone will become the "first" platform for pervasive computing, facilitating novel applications such as mobile social networking services (remember dodgeball?), camera phone enabled phone/video blogging, personalized information sharing(p2p?), and of course anything about location based services.

Enabling Pervasive Computing with Smart Phones
Using smart phone as an end point for an information utility or service, a number of services can be devised, including spatial navigational assistance (mapping) along with local search, shopping assistance, entertainment, healthcare monitoring and diagnosis. Examples of projects are mXpress(conference/event assistance), MyGrocer (RFID-assisted shopping), E-Care(mobile data collection, monitoring, alerting, etc, in healthcare), and TellMaris(3-D mapping). The article shares some of the lessons learned from design of those systems. The article continues to argue that using mobile phone as a remote controller "has appeal in the at the mobile phone fits this role well", and will "become a manifestation of the pervasive service" as a point of contact. A mobile phone is of course a network hub to provide wireless connectivity for connecting equipment, just like a model, so we don't need to worry about the form-factor. Mobile phones as ID tokens holding credentials extend its functionality to another level: mobile payment, mobile banking, mobile bidding, etc. The article concludes that "Until practical ubiquitous interfaces and services emerge that allow for a greater wealth of interactions, the smart phone will remain the best available personal computing device". Indeed, smart phone itself may disappear into the environment in the future; but for now, it is the best candidate of universal mobile terminal for a large array of emerging applications.

Social Serendipity: Mobilizing Social Software
Serendipity is a Bluetooth based mobile socialware that facilitates interactions between physically proximate people sharing similar interest. It can be seen as an extension to "online introduction"/social networking applications such as Friendster and Match.com. A J2ME MIDP application on a user's Bluetooth phone periodically scans other Bluetooth devices in proximity (assuming many such devices are in 'discoverable' model). The system may use employ dedicated device called BlueDar to do the same thing, then uses WiFi to transmit detected BTIDs to a serendipity server, which performs profile matching as well as privacy driven SMS notification. Relationship inference relies on some information retrieval methods that basically computes the level of similarity of two sets of pieces of information-just like in Peer to Peer networks, we match user's interest with their query strings. The article has a list of mobile social software, including Lovegety, Gaydar, Cell tower/SMS friend finder(Dodgeball), Experience Ubicomp Project, Social Net (using specialized wireless computer), Hummingbird, and Jabberwocky.

Supporting Social Interaction with Smart Phones
7 experimental smart phone applications developed by researchers at University of Birmingham exemplify smart phone's ability to support a wide range of social interactions, which would be difficult if not impossible to achieve without the smart phone technology. The author argues that in a pervasive environment, phones exist in a social setting where the focus is communication, not computation. Smart phones's computation capability should be leveraged to augment communication. The article uses a simple shorthand notation for interactions between people: 1-1 (person to person), 1-N (person to group), N-N(within group communication), 1-all (person to world) and N-all(group to world). A smart phone application is useful only if it supports more than one type of communications. The systems introduced in this article are: Blue dating (locally stored personal information compared to Serendipity's centralized approach), Community building such as Joke sharing (Chinese SMS users should be very familiar with this app) File Sharing (mobile P2P), Public Space and Share Space (like a mobile BBS but without an admin to constantly monitor and manage posts), Intelligent Multimedia Messaging System (placing ipaqs or smart phone on the office doors and remotely control the display while allowing visitors to use it), and Mobile Blogging (Bluetooth based picture posting via HTTP)