ABSTRACT:  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.

SPEAKER:  Anupam Joshi is an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland. His research areas include Intelligent Networked Systems in general, and Mobile Computing in particular. His major focus is in creating networking and data management techniques that will enable the next generation mobile systems. He also research issues related to personalizing the networked environment (especially the web) using mining. Professor Joshi received a PhD in computer science from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana in 1993. 

Refreshments will be served starting at 2:00 PM.