today we're going to be talking about ubiquitous computing um people a lot of people also call it
ubicomp so i'm going to be using the phrase ubicomp as well as ubiquitous computing so
whenever you hear me say you become that's just a compression of ebooks ubiquitous computing because
as you can tell it's quite hard to say ubiquitous a lot so that's why people say you become
okay so you become so is this the idea of computers being everywhere
or is it is it more than that there's a kind of vision associated with ub comp which is all about
i guess sort of disappearing of computers or at least the idea of computers not being kind of
visible to us not necessarily that we can't see them but they're effectively invisible in our
kind of practices so when we kind of go and do stuff in the world we're interact interacting
with and using computing technologies all the time but the ways in which we're doing it we're
not really focusing on on the on the technology itself and it's quite in contrast to kind of how
people talk about people say using mobile phones and just being completely focused on the phone
and so on so the idea of the vision of ubicomp is obvious of this kind of
world of um seamless interactions with technology that just simply uh help us get stuff done
one of the founders of ubiquitous computing um or ubicomp as well now call it was mark weiser
and he talked particularly about calm computing so this idea that there's not this kind of frenetic
activity interacting with all these devices and managing all this kind of digital stuff
rather i'm just simply able to do things in life in a kind of calm way and it just so happens that
i use technology to get those things done way back in the midst of time in the early days of
computer file we did something called a video called what is a computer i think it was with
professor tom rodden and we were talking about the ideas of computers being in credit cards and
computers being in all sorts of places that you don't even realize things like the internet of
things i suppose we're talking about here but it's not just as you say that it's also the fact that
our interaction with them is not something that we even necessarily consider is that is that about
right well the kind of the idea of ubicomp turns on is that um it's embedded into everyday life
so in much the same way that we don't really think necessarily about some of the infrastructures in
our house that kind of enable our house to go to work properly so i mean an example would be like
something like the heating perhaps a lot of time you don't think about the heating but as soon as
it breaks down it suddenly becomes manifest and kind of very much visible even though
most of the time you're not really you know just kind of it just sort of works most of the time
one of the ways to understand you become where it comes from is to understand that mark wiser
was um reacting against what was very popular at the time so he developed ubicomp in the late 80s
and early 90s virtual reality was a big deal at the time it was a kind of first wave of vr vr is
doing this thing where we're taking people into the machine in a kind of very absorbing way and
if you've been around anyone using a vr headset you'll know that it's very difficult to
communicate with them and to have any kind of shared experience and so ubicomp was about
taking the computing and putting it into the world embedding it into everything to avoid that problem
of being absorbed into the machine so it's very much kind of of the view that technology should
let us get the things done that we need to and not get in the way and so vr is very much the opposite
that where the technology becomes the focus of attention so it must be seen in the context that
historical context the reaction against um against vr really was mark weiser at somewhere like mit
or or one of these places berkeley or something so mark weiser was uh kind of one of the it's
best known basically as someone who was at xerox park now park is palo alto research center so
xerox park was a division of xerox to the photocopier company who are still around park was
very famous for establishing some of the core uh components i guess for elements of computing which
are all very familiar with now park developed what looks like one of the first pcs effectively called
the xerox alto you'll see it kind of looks like a desktop computer it's got a keyboard got a mouse
it's a kind of well-known story that steve jobs went to park and had a look around
and saw the alto and interface and took a bunch of things from it and implemented it into
apple's range of machines and kind of famous for doing so but you know you saw something
that seemed like it kind of worked really well and as any sensible person should do
uh take that and use it in some kind of way so the history of um xerox park is really important
because of because of that aspect i mean there's other aspects of the alto which are important like
networking and so on crucially during the kind of late 80s and early 90s sort of bringing us up to
mark wise's time xerox park was developing a load of different sorts of technologies around
things like improvements in sort of networking mobility so sort of reducing sizes of things
making devices more mobile um improving kind of their networking capabilities um dealing with
issues around power those sorts of things they were developing all these different technologies
and one of the issues was that mark weiser saw was that there was no coherent vision of
all these different technologies and how they might fit together and he had this
um this way of thinking which brought them together and that's what birthed this idea
of ubi comp mark weiss's vision was to take uh or the ubcom vision was to take all these different
disparate bits of technology that were being developed like you know wi-fi networking and
better power management and more powerful computing and display technologies and all these
sorts of things and bring them together into this vision of ubiquitous computing which was about
you know computing being everywhere um with you on your old times uh in the woodwork so to speak
as he put it um embedded into buildings embedded into you know all sorts of places vehicles those
sorts of things in a way it's kind of partly like the world well elements of it are kind of a bit
like the world we're living in now in the sense of you know cars have extremely sophisticated
management systems some cars are connected to the internet all times we have internet
of things technologies in our homes so smart bulbs smart heating systems whatever it might be
we also have devices we carry around um with us you know all in all places so there's many
ways in which the uh vision that he created of ubicomp actually is kind of with us today today
certain elements of it so it's although at the time it was massive yes worth emphasizing how
how ambitious it was as a vision at the time given that you know talking about the late 80s um
there's no sense in which everyone had a desktop pc at that point necessarily at all so it's a very
very different world i think that's if anyone's you know people who are watching us have to
really understand if they weren't around then they have to understand how much of a different world
it was and um and how much of a kind of visionary person he needs to be to bring the stuff together
there's another aspect that's important about bringing all those technologies together and that
was a kind of to do with the relationship between park itself and xerox now as with any and there's
a story about the demise of the corporate um research lab which we can probably talk about in
another video but um as with any kind of corporate research lab or any kind of facility like this he
needs to justify his existence to um to xerox and one way to justify the development of these very
interesting technologies was to say well actually part of a bigger vision and the vision was ubicomp
and so that so not just it wasn't just that it had a purely had a function in terms of the kind
of computer science elements but also this kind of um element of of how do you justify this work it
actually occurring even at all so i think you know he's a really important figure because he brings
together all these things and then obviously that leads to this idea of internet of things which is
nowhere near as sophisticated in its vision as mark wise's original but there's no way
it would really exist without the idea of ubicomp if you want to read a core text about you become
you can read his really famous 1991 scientific american article called the computer for the 21st
century it's not a hugely technical bit of writing so i'd encourage everyone to go and have a look at
it it kind of lays out this vision the ubicomp vision very clearly about this world um in which
we live in this kind of ubicomp world all these different sense technologies different bits of
computing embedded into everything also you know goes through all the different challenges that
are associated with this because we could talk at length about the some of the issues that it brings
up so if we're doing ubiquitous computing we suddenly have issues around things like
as mentioned already power becomes a real problem how do you power all these devices sensors
how do you collect sensor data and then make sense of it at all because there's all this
stuff flying around in terms of the data you're collecting how do you network stuff how do you
ensure continuous provision of networking services these are all major problems still now obviously
how do you get the adequate data science stuff to do the inference to make sure you understand the
data you're getting back and then act on it how do you determine things like context these are
really critical problems and what the kind of interaction techniques that you need to build
to enable people to actually interact with these um always on always with you type devices or
devices that are embedded into non-standard things like you know you're not expecting
the wall to have a computer embedded into it what's the form of interaction that you might
uh need to enable someone to interact with a wall in an appropriate way that's not a trivial thing
to work out i mean it took a long time just to get to you know this sort of thing right um many many
different prototypes were made to get to the mouse the surprising amount of work in something we now
take for granted did mark weiser see his vision fulfilled what happened mark wise unfortunately
died in 1999 so he died quite young um and uh you know so so he he would have seen the some of the
fruits of what he'd created in terms of vision um i guess in terms of things like miniaturization
and increased networking you know improvements in that technology and all those sorts of things but
but i really think um you know he'll be missing out on the internet of things that we see now and
there's a very direct line between that as i said between that and you become so i think there was a
lot more to come basically that that he never saw unfortunately i i would argue here that the way
that the internet of things has developed uh in a kind of ramshackle away from various different
manufactures is far from his vision by from what i understand how do you go about testing a system
like this when you're coming up with it from nowhere and these aren't kind of devices you
can ship off to somebody to have a play with how do you go about making sure it does stuff that
you wanted to do when they were building these different devices they talked about building
technologies at different scales they had a very small scale post-it note scale through
to a kind of ipad size scale through to a kind of whiteboard size scale and they kind of experiment
with different technologies have been involved in building those things and making them work
um in order to test them um they actually use themselves in their own work they sort of ate
their own dog food so to speak in working with them they understood more about what it meant to
live in this way with those technologies so that way in which they test it out themselves was very
very important for um the kind of ubicomp vision and establishing the ubicomp vision for for others
um and you know making it um seem like it's taken seriously which is we're so serious about this
technology we're just going to use it ourselves and i think at the time that wasn't necessarily
really one of those kind of practices that people would generally engage in they'll generally be
um perhaps engaging users other people in in trials for a specific short amount of time
and measuring various facets of of those of those trials those experiments drawing very badly here
and so on so you'd have two sets of pulses one delayed from the other it's what we call
quadrature encoding we can actually derive from that 1990 something or other this was
this big crunch coming up that we're going to run out of ip addresses any
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