Weiser's dream of an environment enhanced with a set of invisible computing devices is slowly becoming a reality. While most technological requirements can be fulfilled with the current technology, there are still many open questions regarding how to design, build and deploy this kind of systems. …
Weiser's dream of an environment enhanced with a set of invisible computing devices is slowly becoming a reality. While most technological requirements can be fulfilled with the current technology, there are still many open questions regarding how to design, build and deploy this kind of systems. It is a quite remarkable fact that the world of software engineering has been in a sense surprised by the world of electronics in such a way that we now have sensors and multimodal interactors and no rigourous methodology to create context-aware programs. Moreover, existing monitoring systems for networked computerized systems are not obviously able to adapt to these new systems. We can think of a future where humans interact with a seamlessly integrated cloud of processes and a partly invisible set of devices.
What are suitable system architectures for dynamic multi-device appliances? Which programming languages cope best with the needs? How should we devise our applications in order to adapt to hardware evolution? How can our systems interact with previously unknown sensor networks? How flexible can applications adapt to new situations and what level of anticipation is unavoidable? How should systems be presented to end users with such a variety of computing devices? How shall we monitor the different devices and the global architecture ?