Transitional Pervasive Computing – Identifying the opportunities and challenges for seamless mobility

Traditional pervasive computing focused on embedded intelligence in the
environment in order to minimize the interaction burden on users in that
space. While the mechanisms enabled user experiences that were anchored in
that environment, they did not inherently support transitional experiences as
the user moved between different environments. Â Transitional pervasive
computing will focus on embedding intelligence in the mobile device in order
to minimize the reconfiguration burden on users as they move across spaces.
This directly drives Motorola's vision of seamless mobility – going from
"enhancing user experiences by leveraging environment-provided resources" to
"providing a continuity of user experience by leveraging device-provided
context"
In this talk, we will explore the shift in paradigm from traditional to
transitional pervasive computing by identifying the "seams" that impact
mobility and the technologies needed to make these seams transparent to the
mobile user. We also investigate emerging usage paradigms to uncover new
challenges and opportunities for research. In particular, our goal is to
provide an industry perspective of these issues by describing the evolution of
pervasive computing research within Motorola Labs.

Dr. Venu Vasudevan manages the Pervasive Platforms and Architectures Lab
(PPAL) which is part of the Applications, Content and Services Center of
Research at Motorola Labs. Â PPAL focuses on the development of platform
technologies for mobile and pervasive computing. The department currently has
active projects in wireless internet and Java technologies, multi-modal
architectures, wireless peer-to-peer platforms, wireless sensor networks and
distributed wireless caching architectures. Before taking his current
position, Venu was (in reverse chronological order) a Fellow of Technical
Staff at Motorola Labs, a researcher at a virtual company funded largely under
DARPA's program on Collaborative Agent-Based Systems, and the Database and
Network Management architect at Motorola's Iridium project (still considered
one of the largest network management endeavors).