Ubiquitous Computing
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My research is in the field of Ubiquitous Computing. At some point I'll put
some more information about that here, but for now,
The Computer
for the 21st Century by Mark Weiser is a good place to start.
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The Beginning of the End
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It's the last talk, and they're about to turn off the WiFi, so this'll be my
last entry 'til I get home. It's been a good conference; I've heard about and
seen some interesting work, met a lot of fun people, and drank quite a bit of
surprisingly good Seattle beer. One thing I've noticed is that I seem to fall
naturally into the role of devil's advocate; I'm defending arty projects and
ethnography to systems people one minute, then electronics and tracking
systems to HCI people the next. It's nice that there's such a range of
specialities at one conference; I hope it stays that way, as opposed to
fragmenting into narrower venues.
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My contribution...
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I've just taken down the poster that I've been displaying (well, that a
pinboard has been displaying on my behalf), and it occured to me that I should
probably make it available online.
So here it is.
I'm planning to do a proper page for the
Rainbow Group site in
the next week or so, which would serve to fill out the details somewhat.
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Patent Pending?
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I've just seen a presentation of a great piece of work from Mitsubishi
Research. Basically, it allows you to use a normal LED to sense light levels,
with only a microcontroller and a single extra trace on your PCB. This means
it can be added to a device that already has an LED and microcontroller at
give or take zero cost. What's more, as you now have both an emitter and a
receiver, you can use it for short range bidirectional communication. It's
very clever, very useful, and, unfortunately, very patented.
Now I'm not sure how I feel about this. Unlike, say, the one-click shopping
patent, there are no technical grounds to object to it. It's original,
non-obvious, and hasn't been done before. It's a piece of apparatus, and it
solves a real problem (many patent systems require a physical instantiation
and/or usefulness). However, it seems a crying shame that the technology can't
be freely used and incorperated into other devices. The patent system was
designed to protect the original inventors, allowing them to exploit the
invention for a time while guaranteeing that it's (eventually) available to
the public. This seems a laudable aim, but loses it's lustre when the
exploitation rights are assigned to a corporation. I don't think that's really
what's bothering me, though. I think it's that in this case, patenting the
technology both reduces the potential for research, but also reduces the
chance of wide dissemenation of the technology - even a slight per-device
license fee would significantly reduce the cost benefit of the technique.
Still, it was a very cool paper.
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Talking about Talking
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I'm sat in a talk about blogging, so it seems appropriate that I should tell
the world via the wonder of RSS. I should probably
start listenting again now, though.
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I'm blogging this right now
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I'm writing this from UbiComp in Seattle;
just in case you don't believe me, here's photographic evidence:
I've only skimmed over the programme so far, but there looks to be a lot of
interesting stuff here.
This afternon I've got to do a one-minute talk to persuade people to come and
see my poster. At some point, I should probably decide what to say.
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