Serendipity and Data Management in  Pervasive Environments
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         Anupam Joshi
         Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
         University of Maryland Baltimore County
         http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~joshi/

Technological advances in semiconductors as well as wireless
networking are leading us towards the vision of Pervasive
Computing. We envision that in the (near) future, devices all around a
person, either embedded as a part of smart spaces, or being carried by
other people in the vicinity, will provide an array of services and
information that she might want to use. All of these devices will
spontaneously discover each other and connect via short range ad-hoc
networks such as those engendered by Bluetooth. This is very different
from infrastructure based mobile environments, where mobile devices
are viewed simply as consumers of services/information and the
services themselves come from servers on the wired side. In this talk
we will present our efforts to create a system that provides
personalized and secure access to services/information in pervasive
environments. The focus will be on the data management aspects of our 
work, especial query answering. We will describe the vision, the design of our 
system, and preliminary implementations that work on a combination of
laptop/palmtop devices connected by 802.11 and Bluetooth networks.