Roy Want

Last updated
Roy Want
Roy Want Profile.jpg
Born
London, United Kingdom
NationalityBritish
CitizenshipAmerican (USA)
EducationCambridge University, United Kingdom
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science

Roy Want is a computer scientist born in London, United Kingdom in 1961. He received his PhD from Cambridge University (UK) in 1988 for his work on multimedia Distributed Systems; and is known for his work on indoor positioning, mobile and ubiquitous computing, automatic identification (e.g. RFID and wireless beacons) and the Internet of Things (IoT). He lives in Silicon Valley, California, and has authored or co-authored over 150 papers and articles on mobile systems, and holds 100+ patents. In 2011 he joined Google as a senior research scientist, and is in the Android group. Previous roles include senior principal engineer at Intel, and principal scientist at Xerox PARC... [1]

Contents

Projects

Active Badge system components Active Badge.png
Active Badge system components
Location map of Active Badge participants Location Map of Active Badge Participants.png
Location map of Active Badge participants
PARC-Tab (the first context-aware mobile computer) being used with a stylus PARC Tab.png
PARC-Tab (the first context-aware mobile computer) being used with a stylus

Among his earliest contributions (circa 1988) was the Active Badge [2] system that identified individual mobile users, and their location, to the computing infrastructure inside a building. This pioneering work was done at the Olivetti Research Ltd (ORL) in Cambridge, United Kingdom and its seminal publication has been recognized with the ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award (2016). Over 1000 Active Badges were deployed outside Olivetti, at laboratories including DEC SRC, and Xerox PARC. These deployments sparked the creation of the first generation of context-aware software systems in the larger research community.

Want was a central figure in the earliest realization (at Xerox PARC) of Mark Weiser’s vision of Ubiquitous Computing. [3] The PARC program involved three devices: PARC-Tab, [4] [5] PARC-Pad, and LiveBoard. [6] Today, these form-factors map directly to smartphones, tablets and smart-TVs. In the early 1990s, Want was the principal architect and implementer of PARC-Tab, the world’s first context-aware mobile computer in a smartphone form-factor. It could adapt the behavior of applications, depending on the user’s context, a decade before the emergence of the iPhone (2007).  A key technology that made the PARC-Tab context-aware was the use of an infrared network, both connecting the device to the local area network, and localizing it to a room using a diffuse infrared-network transceiver.

In the late 1990’s at PARC, Want also pioneered extending the classic notion of a mobile UI to incorporate inertial sensors, [7] taking advantage of the new MEMS technologies, and designed the Hikari handheld digital organizer. It would automatically change from portrait to landscape format as you rotated it; now a commonplace capability for smartphones. Lists could also be scrolled and items selected using a tilt and clutch mechanism, and photos selected from a 2D grid using a ball-in-a-maze puzzle style of user interface. [8] [9]

By the end of 1990s, Want led PARC’s electronic tag project, “Bridging Physical and Digital worlds”, [10] based on passive RFID. It was the first comprehensive published vision that electronic tags (inexpensive, and battery-free), could link the then new mobile platforms with a location, and related digital web content/control; another example of context-aware computing [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]

Want continued to make pioneering contributions to mobile computing over the following two decades. At Intel Research, he led the Personal Server project (2001), [16] [17] [18] [19] a platform later integrated into an early smartphone, which enabled users to present their personal digital content and media onto nearby displays. This led to his vision of Dynamic Composable Computing (2005), [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] in which a mobile user is able to rapidly assemble a logical computer on-the-fly through wireless-connected components. Today, the Personal Server concept is embodied in Apple’s Airplay and Google Cast media services, and as a result the original paper was given the 10-year impact-award at ACM Ubicomp ’12 [25]

At Google, Want was one of the leads for the Eddystone Bluetooth-Low-Energy (BLE) beacon project, with similar context-aware goals to RFID, but enhanced by ubiquitous readers in the form of smartphones, which can detect BLE advertisement IDs at much greater range, and now supported commercially by many vendors. [26] [27] [28]

Technical Service

In addition to his technical contributions, Want has been a dedicated member of the ACM SIGMOBILE community and made many leadership and service contributions. He was the Chair of SIGMOBILE [29] from 2009-12, and has served as program chair for top tier conferences such as ACM MobiSys, ACM HotMobile, IEEE PerDis, IEEE ISWC; and in the role as Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine (2006-09) [26-32] and provided Editorial Board contributions to IEEE Computer magazine.

In 2019 he became a Technical Editor for the IEEE 802.11 az Wi-Fi standard, [30] working on the Next-Generation Positioning standard, and leading the integration of 802.11mc with Android P+ to enable enhanced context-aware operation for more than 2 billion devices with Android P+. The technology was presented publicly at Google IO ’18, [31] and is expected to lead to ubiquitous (1-2m) indoor location accuracy as the world upgrades its Wi-Fi infrastructure to the latest standards.

Awards

Want is an ACM Fellow (2005) [32] and IEEE Fellow (2005). [33] In 2003 he also received the Lillian Gilbreth Lectureship award [34] from the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for his work on the Intel Personal Server; The Gilbreth Lectures were established in 2001 by the Council of the National Academy of Engineering as a means of recognizing outstanding young American engineers. Later in 2019 he received the Outstanding Contributions Aware (OCA) for “For hardware and software contributions to the conception and practice of context-aware mobile computing” (2019), the most prestigious award presented by ACM SIGMOBILE. [35]

Related Research Articles

Ubiquitous computing is a concept in software engineering, hardware engineering and computer science where computing is made to appear anytime and everywhere. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using any device, in any location, and in any format. A user interacts with the computer, which can exist in many different forms, including laptop computers, tablets, smart phones and terminals in everyday objects such as a refrigerator or a pair of glasses. The underlying technologies to support ubiquitous computing include Internet, advanced middleware, operating system, mobile code, sensors, microprocessors, new I/O and user interfaces, computer networks, mobile protocols, location and positioning, and new materials.

Context awareness refers, in information and communication technologies, to a capability to take into account the situation of entities, which may be users or devices, but are not limited to those. Location is only the most obvious element of this situation. Narrowly defined for mobile devices, context awareness does thus generalize location awareness. Whereas location may determine how certain processes around a contributing device operate, context may be applied more flexibly with mobile users, especially with users of smart phones. Context awareness originated as a term from ubiquitous computing or as so-called pervasive computing which sought to deal with linking changes in the environment with computer systems, which are otherwise static. The term has also been applied to business theory in relation to contextual application design and business process management issues.

Locative media or location-based media (LBM) is a virtual medium of communication functionally bound to a location. The physical implementation of locative media, however, is not bound to the same location to which the content refers.

Context-aware computing refers to a general class of mobile systems that can sense their physical environment, and adapt their behavior accordingly.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virtual graffiti</span> Graffiti only visible through augmented reality software

Virtual graffiti consists of virtual or digital media applied to public locations, landmarks or surfaces. Virtual graffiti applications utilize augmented reality and ubiquitous computing to anchor virtual graffiti to physical landmarks or objects in the real world. The virtual content can then be viewed through digital devices. Virtual graffiti is aimed at delivering messaging and social multimedia content to mobile applications and devices based on the identity, location, and community of the user.

A pervasive game is one where the gaming experience is extended out into the real world, or where the fictional world in which the game takes place blends with the physical world. The "It's Alive" mobile games company described pervasive games as "games that surround you," while Montola, Stenros, and Waern's book Pervasive Games defines them as having "one or more salient features that expand the contractual magic circle of play spatially, temporally, or socially." The concept of a "magic circle" draws from the work of Johan Huizinga, who describes the boundaries of play.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gregory Abowd</span> American computer scientist

Gregory Dominic Abowd is a computer scientist best known for his work in ubiquitous computing, software engineering, and technologies for autism. He currently serves as the Dean of the College of Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. Previously he was the J.Z. Liang Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he joined the faculty in 1994.

Activity recognition aims to recognize the actions and goals of one or more agents from a series of observations on the agents' actions and the environmental conditions. Since the 1980s, this research field has captured the attention of several computer science communities due to its strength in providing personalized support for many different applications and its connection to many different fields of study such as medicine, human-computer interaction, or sociology.

Elizabeth D. "Beth" Mynatt is the Dean of the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. She is former executive director of the Institute for People and Technology, director of the GVU Center at Georgia Tech, and Regents' and Distinguished Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, all at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Location awareness refers to devices that can determine their location. Navigational instruments provide location coordinates for vessels and vehicles. Surveying equipment identifies location with respect to a well-known location wireless communications device.

Urban computing is an interdisciplinary field which pertains to the study and application of computing technology in urban areas. This involves the application of wireless networks, sensors, computational power, and data to improve the quality of densely populated areas. Urban computing is the technological framework for smart cities.

The Telecooperation Office (TECO) is a research group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. The research group is in the Institute of Telematics, and is attached to the chair for Pervasive Computing Systems, currently held by Michael Beigl.

Albrecht Schmidt is a computer scientist best known for his work in ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, and the tangible user interface. He is a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where he joined the faculty in 2017.

OpenCelliD is a collaborative community project that collects GPS positions of cell towers and their corresponding location area identity.

Fog computing or fog networking, also known as fogging, is an architecture that uses edge devices to carry out a substantial amount of computation, storage, and communication locally and routed over the Internet backbone.

Crowdsensing, sometimes referred to as mobile crowdsensing, is a technique where a large group of individuals having mobile devices capable of sensing and computing collectively share data and extract information to measure, map, analyze, estimate or infer (predict) any processes of common interest. In short, this means crowdsourcing of sensor data from mobile devices.

Venkata Narayana Padmanabhan is a computer scientist and principal researcher at Microsoft Research India. He is known for his research in networked and mobile systems. He is an elected fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 2016.

Yunhao Liu is a Chinese computer scientist. He is the Dean of Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) at Tsinghua University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moustafa Youssef</span> Egyptian computer scientist

Moustafa Youssef is an Egyptian computer scientist who was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2019 for contributions to wireless location tracking technologies and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2019 for contributions to location tracking algorithms. He is the first and only ACM Fellow in the Middle East and Africa.

Andrew Thomas Campbell is a computer scientist who works in the field of ubiquitous computing. He is best known for his research on mobile sensing, applied machine learning and human behavioral modeling.

References

  1. ↑ "Roy Want – Google Research". Google Research. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  2. ↑ "The Active Badge Location System", Roy Want, Andy Hopper, Veronica Falcao & Jon Gibbons, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems (TOIS) Vol. 10. No. 1, Jan 1992, Pages 91-102. (SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award 2016)
  3. ↑ Ubiquitous computing fundamentals. John Krumm. Boca Ragon: Chapman & Hall/CRC Press. 2010. ISBN   978-1-4200-9360-5. OCLC   417446236.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  4. ↑ "An Overview of the Parctab Ubiquitous Computing Experiment", IEEE Personal Communications, December 1995, Vol 2. No.6, pp28-43 Roy Want, Bill Schilit, Norman Adams, Rich Gold, David Goldberg, Karin. Petersen, John Ellis, Mark Weiser.
  5. ↑ "Context-Aware Computing Applications", Bill Schilit, Norman Adams, Roy Want, 1st Annual Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA), Dec 1994, Santa Cruz.
  6. ↑ "It's time to reap the context-aware harvest". PARC. 2010-09-21. Retrieved 2021-02-23.
  7. ↑ "Squeeze Me, Hold Me, Tilt Me! An Exploration of Manipulative User Interfaces". Beverly L. Harrison, Kenneth P. Fishkin, Anuj Gujar, Carlos Mochon, and Roy Want - ACM SIGCHI '98, Los Angeles, CA, April 1998.
  8. ↑ Proceedings of the 15th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology : 2002, Paris, France, October 27-30, 2002. ACM Digital Library, SIGGRAPH. [New York]: Association for Computing Machinery. 2002. ISBN   1-58113-488-6. OCLC   612956789.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  9. ↑ "Embodied User Interfaces for Really Direct Manipulation", Communications of the ACM, Sept. 2000, Vol.43 No.9, pp75-80, Ken Fishkin, Anuj Gujar, Beverly Harrison, Tom Moran and Roy Want.
  10. ↑ “Bridging Real and Virtual Worlds with Electronic Tags", Roy Want, Ken Fishkin, Beverly Harrison, Anuj Gujar. Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI. May 1999, Pittsburgh, pp370-377.
  11. ↑ "Ubiquitous Electronic Tagging", IEEE Distributed Systems Online, September 2000, Vol. 1, No.2, Roy Want and Dan M. Russell.
  12. ↑ "RFID: The Key to Automating Everything", Roy Want, Scientific American, Jan 2004, pp56-65.
  13. ↑ “The Magic of RFID”, Roy Want, ACM Queue Magazine, pp41-48, Vol 2, No.7 Oct 2004.
  14. ↑ Want, Roy (2006). RFID explained : a primer on radio frequency identification technologies (1st ed.). [San Rafael, Calif.]: Morgan & Claypool Publishers. ISBN   978-1-59829-109-4. OCLC   72002340.
  15. ↑ "An Introduction to RFID Technology", Roy Want. IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol. 5, Number 1. pp25-33, Jan-Mar 2006.
  16. ↑ "The Personal Server: changing the way we think about ubiquitous computing", Roy Want, Trevor Pering, Gunner Danneels, Muthu Kumar, Murali Sundar and John Light. Proceedings of Ubicomp 2002: 4th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Springer LNCS 2498, Goteborg, Sweden, Sept 30th - Oct 2nd, 2002, pp194-209. (ACM Ubicomp Test-of-Time Award 2012).
  17. ↑ "CoolSpots: Reducing the Power Consumption of Wireless Mobile Devices Using Multiple Radio Interfaces", Trevor Pering, Yuvraj Agarwal, Rajesh Gupta and Roy Want, Proc. ACM MobiSys 2006, Uppsala, Sweden June 19th, 2006, pp220-232.
  18. ↑ "SwitchR: Managing Low-Power Wireless Connections in a Multi-Radio Environment", Yuvraj Agarwal, Trevor Pering, Rajesh Gupta and Roy Want; IEEE ISWC'08, 1st Oct 2008.
  19. ↑ "Enhancing Web Browsing Security on Public Terminals using Mobile Composition", Richard Sharp, Anil Madhavapeddy, Roy Want, and Trevor Pering; Proc. ACM MobiSys 2008. Breacon Ridge Colorado.
  20. ↑ "Dynamic Composable Computing", Roy Want, Trevor Pering, Shivani Sud, and Barbara Rosario. ACM HotMobile 2008, February 2008 Napa Valley, California.
  21. ↑ "Enabling Pervasive Collaboration with Platform Composition”, Pervasive Computing 2009, Trevor Pering, Kent Lyons, Shivani Sud, Barbara Rosario, & Roy Want, Nara, Japan, May 2009.
  22. ↑ "Multi-Display Composition: Supporting Display Sharing of Collocated Mobile Devices", Kent Lyons, Trevor Pering, Shivani Sud, Barbara Rosario and Roy Want, Interact'09, Uppsala Sweden, August 24th 2009.
  23. ↑ "Context-Aware Composition”, HotMobile-2009, Kent Lyons, Roy Want, David Munday, Jia Jia Sheng, Shivani Sud, Barbara Rosario & Trevor Pering, ACM Hotmobile 2009, Santa Cruz, CA, Feb, 2009.
  24. ↑ "Spontaneous marriages of mobile devices and interactive spaces", Trevor Pering, Raffael Ballagas, and Roy Want, Communications of the ACM, Volume 48, Issue 9, (Sep. 2005), pp 53 - 59, Special Issue: "RFID - tagging the world".
  25. ↑ "Ubicomp Awards". ubicomp.org. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  26. ↑ “Enabling the Internet-of-Things”, R. Want, B. N. Schilit, and Scott Jenson, IEEE Computer, Jan 2015, Vol 48. No. 1, pp28-35.
  27. ↑ “Bluetooth LE Finds its Niche”, Roy Want, Bill Schilit, Dominik Laskowski, IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 12-04 (2013), pp. 12-16.
  28. ↑ “Bluetooth Low Energy in Dense IoT Environments”, Albert F. Harris III; Vansh Khanna; Guliz Tunca; Roy Want; Robin Kravets; IEEE Communications Magazine, Volume: 54, Issue: 12, December 2016, pp 30-36; DOI: 10.1109/MCOM.2016.1600546CM.
  29. ↑ "Committees | SIGMOBILE". www.sigmobile.org. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  30. ↑ "IEEE P802.11 - NEXT GENERATION POSITIONING STUDY GROUP". www.ieee802.org. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  31. ↑ "Presentation at Google IO '18". YouTube .
  32. ↑ "Recipients". awards.acm.org. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  33. ↑ "IEEE Fellows Directory - Alphabetical Listing". services27.ieee.org. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  34. ↑ "Armstrong Endowment for Young Engineers - Gilbreth Lectures". NAE Website. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  35. ↑ "Outstanding Contribution Award | SIGMOBILE". www.sigmobile.org. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
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