Designing Linux for Wearable and Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract

According to DARPA, we are approaching the production of 8 billion microprocessors a year. Only 2% of these processors are used in devices commonly considered a "computer" by the public, and the most common operating systems address only a fraction of this market. As computers shrink, integrating into the user's clothing or disappearing into the environment, the desktop will be replaced as the dominate software platform for users. However, current desktop operating systems and the prevaling paradigms are ill-prepared for this change as evidenced by the billion dollars invested in pen computing in the early 1990's without a successful product (remedied with the relatively recent release of the Palm Pilot and its "rule-breaking" approach). Linux is a clear contender for the future operating system of choice across a wide range of devices and user interfaces due to its scalability, real-time capabilities, reliability, design, pricing, development cost, and immunity to obsolescence. However, the Linux community must be aware of upcoming computing trends and direct the operating system appropriately. This talk will examine how Linux and other open source projects are being used in the wearable computing community and will discuss the difficult issues foreseen by the wearable and ubiquitous computing communities.

Speaker Bio

Thad Starner graduated from MIT in 1991 with Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science and Brain and Cognitive Science. He joined the Speech Systems Group at BBN as an Associate Scientist where he developed one of the world's most accurate on-line cursive handwriting recognizers. Starner was named a United States Air Force Laboratory Graduate Fellow and returned to the MIT Media Laboratory where he earned his Masters and Doctorate in 1995 and 1999, respectively. In 1999, Thad joined Georgia Tech's College of Computing as an Assistant Professor. The author of over 30 peer-reviewed scientific publications and book chapters in computer vision, mobile computing, augmented environments, and pattern recognition, Starner is known internationally as one of the founders of the field of wearable computing. He is a founding member of the MIT Wearable Computing Project, the IEEE Wearable Information Systems Task Force, and the IEEE Wearable Information Systems Technical Committee. Starner co-founded the IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) and served as the local arrangements chair, the publicity co-chair, and on the program committee. Thad's current work researches the use of computational agents for everyday-use wearable computers as a segue to artificial intelligence.