Roy Want | |
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Born | London, United Kingdom |
Nationality | British |
Citizenship | American (USA) |
Education | Cambridge University, United Kingdom |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer 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]
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]
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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