September has been a rather eventful month.
In the earlier post, talked about spontaneous star photography, but couple weeks before, I was away in London for a week attending conference and workshops. This time, it was for Ubicomp 2019.
Ubicomp is a conference about ubiquitous computing. Simply put, it’s about ‘computers everywhere, in our everyday life’. Sensor networks, IoT devices, wearable devices and etc. My supervisor, Prof. Saleem Bhatti, and I have submitted a paper to a workshop called Pervasive Urban Application Workshop (PURBA). Fortunately, our paper was accepted, so I took some of our kit to show them working.
Our paper, “Seamless internet connectivity for ubiquitous communication” (https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3341162.3349315) featured ‘continuous mobility’ experiment. The experiment emulates the movement of mobile device while we send and receive data continuously. We took the position that ‘ubiquitous computing’ needs ‘ubiquitous communication’; the ability to use any connectivity the device has and move between them smoothly. I was given a chance to present the paper and a live demo during the workshop, which was a success. Thanks to very friendly crowd, I had a very pleasant conversations with them. On top of that, I have managed to take the opportunity to do a spontaneous demo during the main part of the conference in the ‘social/networking area’ of the venue.
The demo featured something different from what we described in the paper. While the paper used benchmarking software iperf and emulation of movement was done by a script, in the demo I have physically attached and detached cables while a video stream was sent from the one side to the another. I believe this was much more compelling demo for two reasons: 1. video stream is a real application where mobility can enhance the experience 2. physically removing cable is visually more convincing how the data flow has migrated. And as suspected this drew some attention amongst more smaller demo kits and or booths with just a poster.
The original intention was to present everything on the first day and to keep rest of the week little less intense than lugging 20+ kg case and running demo all day. However I felt I should make the best use of the opportunity, so during the day I was rather busy all week. Luckily, I have managed to squeeze some meetups with good friends and some photography in.
It is always refreshing to be elsewhere to do some photography. It gives me chance to try new things and see different perspectives. While I hate how busy London is, it’s what makes it so diverse and exciting. I look forward to be down there again!
I’d like to thank my supervisor and the school for the funding to go to the Ubicomp 2019.
I ended up liking the following so that went to the flickr:
