Ubiquitous Computing: Transparency in Context-Aware Mobile Computing Doctoral Consortium position paper UbiComp 2002

With the increasingly distributed use of computers and the wide range of available computing devices, our society is experiencing a previously unknown level of mobile computing. The adoption of mobile communication technologies such as mobile phones and PDAs is an example of the mobility that constitute our society today and the pervasiveness that mobility contribute with, is evidence of a changing computing paradigm. Ubiquitous computing describes a widely networked infrastructure of a multitude of computing devices. It moves the interaction beyond the desktop and into the real world with a special attention to activities of everyday life. According to Mark Weiser the vision is to get the computer “out of the way, allowing people to just go about their lives” [5]. The criteria of transparency is then fundamental to the paradigm of ubiquitous computing. The transparency imply more than just a user-friendly interface; the technology should facilitate the task in a non-intrusive way and in this way ”hide” the underlying technology for the user. The questions to pose however, is how this transparency is acquired and if mobile devices at their present state are to any degree transparent? In order to study the transparency within mobile devices I introduce the concept of contextawareness, a central aspect of ubiquitous computing. The context-aware computing describes a scenario where the computing device knows its own present context and acts accordingly. This scenario, however, is highly complex since it requires a closed community where the computing takes place, contrasting mobile computing that requires a high level of mobility. The solution at the present state of consumer information appliances and mobile devices is that of context-dependent devices, devices that let the user define the context and then act accordingly. One example is the mobile phone that offers profiles for high, low and soundless settings. The two concepts of context-awareness and context-dependency are close and often overlapping however, in my research they will be defined separately in order to be comparable.