Speaker: Prof. Dr. Max Mühlhäuser, Telecooperation Lab
Technische Universität Darmstadt

Venue: CSE K17 Building Level 1 Seminar Room, UNSW.

Abstract
Twenty years after Mark Weiser's Ubiquitous Computing vision, we do witness the proliferation of networked visible and invisible computers of all sorts. Nevertheless, two key challenges remain from the early days:

- interaction concepts (in a wide sense) that put the human in the center and
- integration support that truly weaves `smart things' into `much smarter
systems'

The talk revises these two grand challenges of Ubiquitous Computing and looks at approaches to a number of sub-issues. Contributions made by his lab, a group of about 40 researchers and assisting staff, are highlighted as examples. In particular, the talk looks at interaction issues like
- context-aware proactive user interfaces
- model driven interaction development
- hybrid electronic and paper-centered interaction
- systematic approaches to the development of voice UIs
- dynamically federated user interfaces

and integration issues like
- event based small-footprint middleware
- appropriate programming models and development aids
- relevant common services like navigation and context support

These individual issues are placed into a comprehensive architecture that provides a holistic view of the problem space, embracing issues like quality-aware P2P networks, ad hoc social networks, and privacy / trust / security aspects.  The vision of a personal global access key to the Ubiquitous Computing `world', called `minimal trusted entity' or ME, is briefly introduced in conclusion.

Biography: Max Mühlhäuser is a Full Professor of Computer Science at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. He received his Doctorate from the University of Karlsruhe and founded a research center for Digital Equipment (DEC).  Since 1989, he worked as either professor or visiting professor at universities in Germany, Austria, France, Canada, and the US. Max published more than 280 articles, co-authored and
edited books about ubiquitous computing, E-learning, and distributed & multimedia software engineering. He heads the Telecooperation Lab and the Departmental Computing Center within the Informatics Department, the campus wide centre of research excellence in eLearning, and one of three departments in the large new CASED research center for IT security.