Summer School on Context Awareness

Yesterday, the Summer School on Context Awareness took place here in Culture Lab. Sponsored by the EU, Matthias Kranz had come over and delivered a set of lectures covering a broad range of topics in this area, including the history of ubiquitous computing, basic concepts, design principles and location sensing. We had a good turnout of students with a quite diverse background (from Computer Science to Digital Media and Education), and they produced some really interesting ideas during the final workshop session. We also had some good discussions about the implications of the increasing proliferation of ubiquitous computing and in which cases using this technology would subvert the original purpose of an activity or an object.

Talk on Location Awareness and Intelligent Environments by Matthias Kranz

Matthias is visiting Newcastle this week (he's delivering the Summer School on Context Awareness on Wednesday) and he gave a talk on his current research yesterday. One of the topics he discussed was the use of cordless phones for indoor/outdoor localisation. It was fascinating to learn about the pervasiveness of DECT-based phones (there are many more than wireless base stations - on average 3 out 4 households in Germany have one) and their properties (long range, low power, reserved frequency band) that make them very well suited for localisation. He presented initial results indicating that the algorithms can be used that were developed for Wifi-localisation. Additionally, Matthias show initial evidence that the theoretical benefits can translate into practical advantages in terms of coverage and precision of the measured location. It will be worthwhile to keep that in mind when designing any smart objects for use in people's homes.