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Welcome Welcome to the Ubiquitous Computing group at the University of Washington. We do research in ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction and developing world. In those domains we often build on previous work in sensor systems, embedded systems, and location-aware computing.

Projects RFID Ecosystem is a large-scale project (100s of readers, 1000s of tags) with participants from various research groups at UW CSE. Where past research with RFID in pervasive computing has been limited to short-term technology and user studies in restricted scenarios, the RFID Ecosystem will provide a living laboratory for long-term, in-depth research in applications, privacy, security, and systems. CAM Ecosystem is a mobile document processing system in which a camera phone is used as an image capture and data entry device. The system is able to process paper forms containing CamShell programs -- embedded instructions that are decoded from an electronic image. By combining 1) paper, 2) audio, 3) numeric data entry, 4) narrative scripted execution and 5) asynchronous connectivity, CAM is well-suited for an important set of users and applications in the developing world. We are currently porting CAM to Nokia S60v3 phones and adding sensing. Phone System Interface (PSI) board is a flexible prototyping board that interfaces to commercial Linux phones using the standard SD slot. PSI's expansion capabilities includes a module which allows the device to scan tags and enabling bidirectional near–field communication (NFC) with other mobile devices. We are currently exploring the interactions that NFC can enable.

Publications Mobiscopes for Human Spaces Tarek Abdelzaher, Yaw Anokwa, Peter Boda, Jeff Burke, Deborah Estrin, Leonidas Guibas, Aman Kansal, Sam Madden, Jim Reich. In IEEE Pervasive, April 2007. Context to Make You More Aware Adrienne Andrew, Yaw Anokwa, Karl Koscher, Jonathan Lester, Gaetano Borriello. In IWSAWC, 2007. The PSI Board: Realizing a Phone-Centric Body Sensor Network Trevor Pering, Pei Zhang, Rohit Chaudhri, Yaw Anokwa, Roy Want. In BSN, 2007. A User Interaction Model for NFC Enabled Applications Yaw Anokwa, Gaetano Borriello, Trevor Pering, Roy Want. In PERTEC, 2007. Gesture Connect: Facilitating Tangible Interaction With a Flick of the Wrist Trevor Pering, Yaw Anokwa, Roy Want. In TEI, 2007.

People Gaetano Borriello has a BS in EE from the Polytechnic Institute of New York (1979), an MS in EE from Stanford University (1981), and a PhD in CS from the Unversity of California at Berkeley (1988). He was a member of the research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1980-87. He joined the CSE Department in 1988. Gaetano Borriello is known primarily for his work in automatic synthesis of digital circuits, reconfigurable hardware, and embedded systems development tools. The focus of Borriello's research interests are in location-based systems, sensor-based inferencing, and tagging objects with passive and active tags. Harlan Hile Alan Liu Jonathan Lester Adrienne Andrew Yaw Anokwa is a second year Ph.D. student in computer science. His building, deploying, and evaluating low-cost technologies that positively impact the developing world and understanding the ubiquitous computing and human-computer interaction problems in that space. Yaw's previous work explored novel ways of using Near Field Communication in mobile devices. He has a B.Sc. in computer science from Butler University (2004) and a B.Sc. in electrical engineering from Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (2004) and is advised by Gaetano Borriello. Brian DeRenzi Carl Hartung Karl Koscher