Research

Although computing technology is currently omnipresent in the modern world, it has not become invisible at all. Today, people to a large extent have to interact with their computer in order to get certain tasks done. Ubiquitous computing is a vision, postulated by Mark Weiser: computing technology will become invisible as it is integrated into the fabric of everyday life. This vision has been termed Ambient Intelligence by the European Council's IST Advisory Group. Weiser explains the invisibility of a computer by making the analogy to text. A world without text is unthinkable in our modern society. Text allows ideas, which were previously perhaps mere thoughts in the brain of a single person, to be made persistent accurately such that knowledge and culture can survive time. Today, text has become ubiquitous: from books to the internet and from traffic signs to button labels on a remote control. For most people the act of reading text has become oblivious, because in modern societies it is learnt from childhood on. As a result people are no longer consciously aware of text such that, in a sense, text has become invisible to people. According to Weiser computing technology is about to make the same leap. The first signs of this transition are already present in many current-day products. Television sets and video recorders have become fully digital even though the user can still interact with them in much the same way as when they were analog. Contemporary cars have an enormous amount of electronics embedded in them and many of these are invisible to the driver. These electronics can change the parameters of the engine to adapt itself to current driving conditions or even send a self-performed check to the car dealer. The dealer can analyze these results and invite the driver for maintenance of his car should that be necessary. Although these examples are somewhat modest they show that the user is no longer confronted with the technology embedded in the products. Nevertheless, when considering the last example it shows that interaction of devices can further make certain processes transparent. Indeed, before, the driver had to be consciously aware of the maintenance schedule of his car whereas because of the interaction of his car with his dealer this is now automatically taken care of. This is a first example how oblivious interactions between material objects can lead to further making technology invisible.

The vision postulated by Mark Weiser has nowadays become technically feasible because of continuous and recent developments in technology.

It is our position that present-day programming languages such as Java and C# form a bottleneck when developing such applications. Their model for concurrency (usually based on threads) and distribution (usually based synchronous remote method invocations) gives rise to numerous problems with respect to the frequent failures encountered when communicating over wireless technology. The fact that communication failures have become the rule rather than the exception requires a different paradigm. For more information about this new paradigm look at my publications and my Ph.D. dissertation.

Research Prototypes

• AmbientTalk: A Programming Language Kernel for Ambient-Oriented Programming
• ChitChat: A High-Level Programming Language for Object Mobility