[Nets-seminars] Talk 6th Nov GS/302 6pm

[Richard G. Clegg]

Next week's talk is by Emil Lupu from Imperial College.

Engineering Ubiquitous Systems - What does it take to make it easier?

Emil Lupu

Department of Computing, Imperial College London

Ubiquitous systems have been foretold more than two decades ago, and to 
some extent they already intrude our lives. But engineering ubiquitous 
systems for new applications is fraught with challenges as the resulting 
systems must be autonomous, adaptive, dependable and inconspicuous. So what 
can we do to make it easier? What principles, tools, techniques and 
abstractions would be of most help?

This talk overviews our recent and ongoing work on building policy-based 
autonomous ubiquitous systems. It describes the concept of a Self-Managed 
Cell (SMC) as a basic architectural pattern for components that group 
devices e.g. in a body area network, a team of collaborating robots, an 
office, or a large enterprise network. To scale to larger environments we 
explore means of realising interactions between SMCs and composing them 
into larger autonomous cells. We then discuss techniques required for 
refining high-level goals into policies, analysing a SMC's behaviour under 
a given set of policies, to identify inconsistencies and check that 
desirable properties are satisfied. Finally, to be inconspicuous, 
ubiquitous systems must learn the rules governing their behaviour from user 
actions. The talk will discuss techniques that can be used to this end.


-- 
Richard G. Clegg,
Dept of Elec. Eng.,
University College London
http://www.richardclegg.org/