Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing 2020/21

This week we're going to be covering one of the most salient aspects of context-aware computing: location. We're going to start off by discussing existing location-sensing technologies, such as GPS (and related services) as well as less well-known technologies from the history of ubiquitous computing. We're also going to cover aspects of Android location sensing and privacy and security implications of location-sensing technologies.

This is a reading of Fisher et al.'s oft-cited paper on the timing and workload of mobile notifications. The full paper is available in the ACM Digital Library: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2037373.2037402

We get lots of notifications on our mobile devices from all kinds of services. Sometimes we suffer from 'notification overload'. Why do notifications disrupt us in this way? In this podcast we'll be learning how psychological theory can help us to understand the sources of notification overload. We'll also discuss how notifications can be made more user friendly, whether through smart management systems or careful design.

In this podcast I read Anind Dey's 'Context-aware Computing' chapter from John Krumm's Ubiquitous Computing Fundamentals. Although this reading is quite long (over an hour), Dey provides a lot of detail on the history of context-aware computing as well as discussing practical aspects of developing context-aware systems.

This week we're covering two slightly separate topics. First, we will cover context-awareness in ubiquitous computing. Context-awareness is a tricky thing to define, but we're still going to think about the kinds of properties a context aware system should have. In the second part of this podcast we're going to be focusing on web-based APIs and why we use them. We'll cover REST, Webhooks and API-First design along the way.

This is a reading of Wiseman et al.'s "User Your Words" paper, published at CHI 2016. The paper can be viewed in the ACM Digital Library: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2858036.2858377

The paper is about developing pairing codes for digital radios. Numeric, alphanumeric and word-based codes are considered and tested in an experiment.

This week we're going to be thinking about how we can interact with ubiquitous computing technologies. This includes typing on touchscreens (and very small screens), pairing devices and interacting with devices without traditional user interfaces. 

In this episode I read Mark Weiser's extremely influential Scientific American article, "The Computer for the 21st Century".

This week I introduce the module. We start off with a short history of the evolution of computing over the decades. Next, you'll hear about how mobile phones have become the dominant ubiquitous computing technology. The main part of the podcast finishes by introducing some of the kinds of 'ubicomp' research that we're going to touch on throughout the module.

As this podcast will, hopefully, get you moving, I thought it'd be good to finish the episode by talking to Prof Anna Cox from the UCL Interaction Centre about the effect that the pandemic has had on our activity levels and how technology can help us get moving.