The World Is My Interactive Interface: September 2010

Monday, September 27, 2010

Getting beyond "Ad-Hoc" Ubiquity: Content Centered Networking at PARC, recent recipient of a National Foundation Grant.

I recently blogged about some interesting work going on at PARC, "Get what you want, faster, through content-centered networks: Video - Jim Thornton, PARC"

After I published the post, I received a comment from someone from PARC with links to some presentations about innovations in networking. The most recent presentation is below. (I've posted my original post and a related presentation after this segment.)

Van Jacobson Explains It All
If you are interested in ubiquitous & pervasive computing - and creating seamless user experiences across locations and devices, the presentation is well worth the 90-minute watch.

A New Way to Look at Networking

View more videos from PARC, a Xerox company.

ORIGINAL POST (from the Interactive Multimedia Technology Blog
I came across information about PARC's work in an article written by Dean Takahashi, of Venture Beat (9/26/10) Xerox PARC has a plan to make the internet more speedy

Get what you want faster:
In the video below, Jim Thornton, a researcher at PARC, is interviewed by Dean Takahashi, from VentureBeat. Jim discusses his work in the area of content-centric networking, also known as CCN or Named-Data-Networking (NDN). CCN is a way to work around the problem of internet "bottlenecking", something that happens when lots of people want to view rich multimedia content at the very same time.

As it stands, content-delivery companies handle this problem by storing content in video caches, identified by IP addresses. If you search for content via the CCN protocol, your search will lead to a memory node that is identified by the name of the content (or other information that identifies the content), rather than an IP address, and select the content that is closest to your location.

One of the objectives of CCN is to reduce internet bandwidth expenses.

PARC is working with nine universities on this project, which provides open-source software that can be found on the Project CCNx website.
About CCNx:
"Project CCNx exists to develop, promote, and evaluate a new approach to communication architecture we call content-centric networking. We seek to carry out this mission by creating and publishing open protocol specifications and an open source software reference implementation of those protocols. We provide support for a community of people interested in experimentation, research, and building applications with this technology, all contributing to its evolution."

If you are curious, the open-source Content Centric Networking code can be found on the github website. If you visit the website, make sure you take a look at the "ReadMe" section. Also heed this warning, found on the Project CCNx website: "CCNx technology is still at a very early stage of development, with pure infrastructure and no applications, best suited to researchers and adventurous network engineers or software developers. If you're looking for cool applications ready to download and use, you are a little too early."

RELATED
PARC Awarded National Science Foundation Funding to Expand Fundamental Research in Content-Centered Networking: Part of NSF's new "Future Internet Architecture" program, the Named-Data-Networking (NDN) grant includes PARC and nine universities:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
University of Arizona
Washington University
Yale University
Colorado State University
University of California, San Diego
University of Memphis
University of California, Irvine
University of California, Los Angeles

Networking Named Content (pdf)
Jacobson, V.; Smetters, D. K.; Thornton, J. D.; Plass, M. F.; Briggs, N.; Braynard, R. Networking named content. Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT 2009); 2009 December 1-4; Rome, Italy. NY: ACM; 2009; 1-12.J

"Network use has evolved to be dominated by content distribution and retrieval, while networking technology still can only speak of connections between hosts. Accessing content and services requires mapping from the what that users care about to the network’s where. We present Content-Centric Networking (CCN) which takes content as a primitive – decoupling location from identity, security and access, and retrieving content by name. Using new approaches to routing named content, derived heavily from IP, we can simultaneously achieve scalability, security and performance. We have implemented the basic features of our architecture and demonstrate resilience and performance with secure file downloads and VoIP calls."

SocialTV: designing for distributed, social television viewing (pdf)
Ducheneaut, N. ; Moore, R. J. ; Oehlberg, L.; Thornton, J. D. ; Nickell, E. SocialTV: designing for distributed, social television viewing. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. 2008 February; 24 (2): 136-154.

"Media research has shown that people enjoy watching television as a part of socializing in groups. However, many constraints in daily life limit the opportunities for doing so. The Social TV project builds on the increasing integration of television and computer technology to support sociable, computer-mediated group viewing experiences. In this paper, we describe the initial results from a series of studies illustrating how people interact in front of a television set. Based on these results, we propose guidelines as well as specific features to inform the design of future "social television" prototypes."

2006 PRESENTATION
In the video below, Van Jacobson talks about ubiquitous computing, wireless, networking, research, and the challenges of making everything synced and seamlessly inter-operative in the future. In this video, Van Jacobson provides a good overview of the history of the communications/networking industry, and much, much more. Although the presentation was given in 2006, it is well worth the time.

A NEW WAY TO LOOK AT NETWORKING

Here's info about Van Johnson and abstract of the talk from the Google Tech Talks website:
"Google Tech Talks August 30, 2006 Van Jacobson is a Research Fellow at PARC. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist and co-founder of Packet Design. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist at Cisco. Prior to that he was head of the Network Research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He's been studying networking since 1969. He still hopes that someday something will start to make sense."

ABSTRACT
"Today's research community congratulates itself for the success of the internet and passionately argues whether circuits or datagrams are the One True Way. Meanwhile the list of unsolved problems grows. Security, mobility, ubiquitous computing, wireless, autonomous sensors, content distribution, digital divide, third world infrastructure, etc., are all poorly served by what's available from either the research community or the marketplace. I'll use various strained analogies and contrived examples to argue that network research is moribund because the only thing it knows how to do is fill in the details of a conversation between two applications. Today as in the 60s problems go unsolved due to our tunnel vision and not because of their intrinsic difficulty. And now, like then, simply changing our point of view may make many hard things easy."

Friday, September 24, 2010

Large Scale Networked Pervasive Public Displays- PD-NET (cross-post)

I love the concept of interactive, networked public displays! The PD-NET project has a fairly new website and a Facebook page. If this interests you, take the time to learn about the PD-NET project, a collaborative effort between researchers from several different universities in Europe. I'd like to see this take hold in the US. (Cross-posted on the Interactive Multimedia Technology blog.)

PD-NET Project Objectives (From the PD-NET Website):

To create enabling technologies for large-scale pervasive display networks through the design, development, and evaluation of a robust, scalable, distributed and open platform for interconnecting displays and their sensors.
To establish Europe as the international centre for work on pervasive display networks.
To address key scientific challenges that may inhibit the widespread adoption of pervasive display network technology: Tensions between privacy and personalization, situated displays, business and legislative requirements, User Interaction.

Here is a list of participating universities and researchers, taken from the PD-NET website:

Lancaster University, (UK)

Participants from Lancaster:

University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany)

Participants from Duisburg-Essen:

Albrecht Schmidt

Florian Alt

Dominik Bial

University of Lugano (Italy)

Participants from Lugano:

Marc Langheinrich

Nemanja Memarovic

Ivan Elhart

University of Minho (Portugal)

Participants from Minho:

Rui José

Nuno Otero

Publication

J. Müller, F. Alt, D. Michelis, and A. Schmidt, "Requirements and Design Space for Interactive Public Displays," in Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia (Multimedia 2010), to appear, 2010.

COMMENT

If you are familiar with this blog, you know that I am passionate about interactive displays, especially in public spaces. I've devoted numerous posts to this topic on this blog, and also on The World Is My Interactive Interface, a blog I started a few years ago when I was working on projects for large interactive displays.

I am interested in how interactive displays, of any size, can be accessible and universally designed, especially those that can inter-operate with mobile devices, including devices that support communication for people with special needs.

SOMEWHAT RELATED

Here are links to some of my previous blogposts related to the topic of interactive displays in public spaces. Some have links to scholarly publications. I

What is DOOH and Why Should We Care? (DOOH- Digital Out-Of-Home)

Interactive Displays and Interaction (Presentation via Daniel Michelis)

Thoughts about technology on a cruise ship, and other reflections

Multi-touch and gesture interaction out-and-about

UPDATED: More News, Videos, and Links about Multi-Touch and Screen Technologies

Technology-Supported Shopping and Entertainment User Experience at Ballantyne Village: "A" for concept, "D" for touch screen usability.

Usability/Interaction Hall of Shame (In a Hospital)

Think Globally, Act Locally: Exploring the Problem Space - Top-down, bottom-up, local and the global...