Jimali Software Engineering

What are some of the seeds of inspiration for pervasive computing research? For Editor in Chief Roy Want, it's his fascination with gadgets, tendency to shop for electronic odds and ends, and interest in turning fictional devices into reality—all of which relate to hacking, the topic of this special issue.

This issue's New Products department covers several hacks for devices, new and old, and a couple of things that should appeal to the hacker tradition: the jDome game and a Wi-Fi detector shirt.

Almost all smart phones sold today include Bluetooth—a short-range, low-power radio technology. Learn more about the technology as well as new applications and improvements on the horizon.

This research examines various factors affecting consumer adoption of a smart wearable electronics product, specifically an iPod jacket. The results indicate that consumers find convenience and compatibility the most important adoption factors while observability and perceived social prestige are the least important.

The true hacker can achieve miracles by appropriating, modifying, or "kludging" existing resources to suit other purposes, often in an ingenious fashion. From practice to philosophy, the collection of articles in this issue works to paint a broad picture of traditional, benevolent, and playful hacking from a pervasive computing perspective.

Incorporating off-the-shelf devices and technology can reduce the risk, cost, and deployment time of a product's field trials. Two case studies demonstrate hacking's contribution to industrial R&D in commercial settings. The first case study evaluates optical and radio frequency techniques to track shopping carts in a supermarket. The other evaluates the deployment of a handheld device to enable passengers to self-check-in and board commercial flights.

Invention has always made popular television, and the advent of reality TV, along with advances in rapid prototyping technology, has made it possible to design and create inventions in front of the camera. There is also growing interest in producing TV that attracts home viewers who are, or aspire to be, hackers. The authors describe their experiences making a cable TV show in which each episode is dedicated to creating a novel prototype. To achieve this goal within the time and budgetary constraints of the TV process, they must hack or repurpose both hardware and software elements.

A composer's view of the history of hardware hacking, contrasting the aesthetic implications of circuitry and software.

Since its introduction, the Nintendo Wii Remote has become one of the world's most sophisticated and common input devices. Combining its impressive capability with a low cost and high degree of accessibility make it an ideal platform for exploring a variety of interaction research concepts. The author describes the technology inside the Wii remote, existing interaction techniques, what's involved in creating custom applications, and several projects ranging from multiobject tracking to spatial augmented reality that challenge the way its developers meant it to be used.

Opportunistic practices can accelerate and simplify ubiquitous computing systems design. Such practices may include copying and pasting code from online forums into one's own scripts or reappropriating components from consumer electronics for design prototypes. The authors introduce a framework that links opportunistic design for ubiquitous computing to hardware and software practices. They interview 14 professional and hobbyist "mashers"—Web 2.0 programmers, hardware hackers, and designers of interactive ubiquitous computing systems—to learn how designers choose between integration levels. Finally, they discover the mashups' epistemic, pragmatic, and intrinsic values for creators and how shopping becomes a central activity.

As computers become more pervasive, they become more personal. The ultimate pervasive computer would be as unique as the individual it serves. Unfortunately, consumer products are typically closed to protect the manufacturer's intellectual property—a policy choice that hampers users' ability to customize products to fit their unique environments. The chumby is a pervasive computing device and novel business model that were designed to explicitly enable hackers (or "lead consumers") to customize their experience and participate in the hardware intellectual property ecosystem through a unique end user license. The chumby ecosystem is architected such that sharing the product's engineering plans with end users doesn't adversely affect the product's commercial viability. Indeed, by exposing this "lens of engineering" to end users, Chumby Industries' customers actually add value to and help define the company's product.

On 7 September 1927, Philo Taylor Farnsworth demonstrated the first all-electronic dissection and reconstruction of a television image, laying the foundation for the television revolution. In this interview with Kent Farnsworth, one of Philo's surviving sons, we get a rare glimpse of this prolific inventor's working habits.

The economy's ongoing shift to user-centered innovation has some attractive qualities. Many users are finding it progressively easier to get precisely what they want by designing it for themselves. Innovation by users also provides a necessary complement to and source for novel products sold by producers. Users' innovations also seem to increase the welfare of society.

This issue's Works in Progress department features a novel technology that embeds a six-degrees-of-freedom force-torque sensor into a physical artifact to transform existing 3D passive artifacts into contact-sensitive interface devices. The department also presents an approach for rewriting binary to better correlate application usage with contextual information.

Location authentication is a young security requirement that has recently arisen in ubiquitous computing applications. During the last decade, researchers have proposed several schemes to guarantee this property in different contexts, but more research is needed. To provide a clearer picture of this requirement, the authors present a comprehensive definition of location authentication, describe its main threats in different scenarios, and review the mechanisms proposed thus far to fulfil this requirement.

To close the gap between theory and application, industry needs ways to employ theoretical and scientific innovation in its applications. The Consumer Experience Architecture (CEA) is a new framework for applying scientific insights to the development of products and services.

Recognized evaluation strategies are essential to systematically advance a research field's state of the art. Pervasive and ubiquitous computing need such strategies to mature as a discipline and to enable researchers to objectively assess and compare new techniques' contributions. Researchers have shown that evaluating ubiquitous systems can be difficult, so approaches tend to be subjective, piecemeal, or both. To ensure that the validity and usability of proposed systems won't be compromised, researchers must reach consensus on a set of standard evaluation methods for ubiquitous systems. Otherwise, methods for scientifically testing and presenting state-of-the-art advances will remain unclear. In this article, the organizers from four different workshop series, each focused on this topic, summarize and discuss the main outcomes of these events.

The devastating power of hurricanes was evident during the 2005 hurricane season, the most active season on record. This has prompted increased efforts by researchers to understand the physical processes that underlie the genesis, intensification, and tracks of hurricanes. This research aims at facilitating an improved understanding into the structure of hurricanes with the aid of visualization techniques. Our approach was developed by a mixed team of visualization and domain experts. To better understand these systems, and to explore their representation in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, we use a variety of illustration-inspired techniques to visualize their structure and time evolution. Illustration-inspired techniques aid in the identification of the amount of vertical wind shear in a hurricane which can help meteorologists predict dissipation. Illustration-style visualization, in combination with standard visualization techniques, helped explore the vortex rollup phenomena and the mesovortices contained within. We evaluated the effectiveness of our visualization with the help of six hurricane experts. The expert evaluation showed that the illustration-inspired techniques were preferred over existing tools. Visualization of the evolution of structural features is a prelude to a deeper visual analysis of the underlying dynamics.

Continuing improvements in CPU and GPU performances as well as increasing multi-core processor and cluster-based parallelism demand for flexible and scalable parallel rendering solutions that can exploit multipipe hardware accelerated graphics. In fact, to achieve interactive visualization, scalable rendering systems are essential to cope with the rapid growth of data sets. However, parallel rendering systems are non-trivial to develop and often only application specific implementations have been proposed. The task of developing a scalable parallel rendering framework is even more difficult if it should be generic to support various types of data and visualization applications, and at the same time work efficiently on a cluster with distributed graphics cards. In this paper we introduce a novel system called Equalizer, a toolkit for scalable parallel rendering based on OpenGL which provides an application programming interface (API) to develop scalable graphics applications for a wide range of systems ranging from large distributed visualization clusters and multi-processor multipipe graphics systems to single-processor single-pipe desktop machines. We describe the system architecture, the basic API, discuss its advantadges over previous approaches, present example configurations and usage scenarios as well as scalability results.

Shape indexing, classification, and retrieval are fundamental problems in computer graphics. This work introduces a novel method for surface indexing and classification based on Teichmuller theory. The Teichmuller space for surfaces with the same topology is a finite dimensional manifold, where each point represents a conformal equivalence class, a curve represents a deformation process from one class to the other. We apply Teichmuller space coordinates as shape descriptors, which are succinct, discriminating and intrinsic; invariant under the rigid motions and scalings, insensitive to resolutions. Furthermore, the method has solid theoretic foundation, and the computation of Teichmuller coordinates is practical, stable and efficient. This work focuses on the surfaces with negative Euler numbers, which have a unique conformal Riemannian metric with -1 Gaussian curvature. The coordinates which we will compute are the lengths of a special set of geodesics under this special metric. The metric can be obtained by the curvature flow algorithm, the geodesics can be calculated using algebraic topological method. We tested our method extensively for indexing and comparison of about one hundred of surfaces with various topologies, geometries and resolutions. The experimental results show the efficacy and efficiency of the length coordinate of the Teichmuller space.