Scalable Ubiquitous Computing Systems

We are all acquainted with the Personal Computer. We are less aware of the burgeoning numbers of invisible, embedded computers around us in the fabric of our homes, shops, vehicles and even farms. They help us command, control, communicate, entertain, and commerce, and these invisible computers are far, far more numerous than their desktop cousins.

The visible face of computing, the ubiquitous PC, is nowadays generally networked. To date, embedded computing systems have been largely used to replace analog control systems (for reasons of price, performance and reliability). Increasingly, however, we will find systems are integrated into a whole.

This will lead to a challenge for Computer Science in the form of system complexity. Complexity is at the core of the skill-set of computer science and engineering, but it is also becoming a key piece of the formalisms used to understand other systems in the natural world, in ecology and biology and in physics. With the Internet as large and organic as it already is, we see a complex set of interactions with graph theory, control theory, economics and game theory, and a number of other disciplines being bought to bear and even extended to understand its behaviour. We also see a set of engineering "rules of thumb" maturing into "design principles", which can be applied to other systems.

Some principles already established in the world of Internet-scale engineering give us hope that we can build systems early (and there are many Ubiquitous Computing projects underway in the UK, EU and world today), with some hope that they will work. However, as systems grow, new problems for performance (stability, availability, etc) will emerge. Critical new areas for concern are the control of multiple resources (scheduling for battery life, randomising timing of events to avoid correlated overload, statistical failure tolerance in very large scale sensor systems). Within the timescales of this challenge, components will even start to draw resources (power) directly from their environment (ambient heat, RF etc), and this has hidden consequences (radio opacity in unusual places for example). The more we look at how such systems will be built, the more we see them vanish into the substance (and ether) around us!

The core of this challenge then, is to abstract out these engineering design principles, and this will be achieved largely through a process of "build and learn". This is a natural complement and sister to the challenge to uncover the Science for Global Ubiquitous Computing, which will have descriptive power. We will have prescriptive solutions (patterns) for the mixed reality environment that will form the next phase of development of cyberspace.

Short Biography:

Jon Crowcroft is one of the leading figures in the networking community. He is the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Computer Lab, at the University of Cambridge. He assumed this post in 2001 almost exactly 100 years after Marconi's groundbreaking first transatlantic wireless call. Prior to joining the University of Cambridge, he was a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University College London. For nearly 20 years, Jon Crowcroft's research has focused on Internet support for multimedia communications, with particular emphasis on scalable multicast routing, on practical approaches to traffic management, and on the design of deployable end-to-end protocols.

Jon Crowcroft is a fellow of the ACM, a fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the IEE and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a Senior Member the IEEE. He has served on the Internet Architecture Board of the IETF, on the editorial board of major networking journals, including Computer Networks and IEEE Networks, has served on the technical committees of many leading conferences and workshops, including Sigcom, Infocom, and ICNP, and has served as PC Co-Chair of Sigcom 2003.

Jon Crowcroft graduated in Physics from Trinity College, University of Cambridge in 1979, gained an MSc in Computing in 1981, and PhD in 1993 both from UCL.  

Homepage: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/jac22/