Ten Dimensions of Ubiquitous Computing

Much has been written about smart mobile computing devices and how they will make “ubiquitous computing” a reality, but simply having smart devices in the world is not enough. An infrastructure is needed to bind these devices together in a meaningful way. This infrastructure is known as “intelligent environments”. But, what are the elements of this “intelligence” behind ubiquitous computing? In this position paper, we propose ten dimensions along which this intelligence might be described. They can be summarized as: meaningfulness, world modeling, user modeling, distribution, accessibility, extensibility, heterogeneity, automation, usability, and ubiquity. The intelligent environment systems of today are demonstrations of subsets of this vision; the task before us is to generalize from these examples and develop the standards that will allow ubiquitous computing to be fully developed.