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Some notes about the summer school and how I survived it.
The Summer School on Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing, August 7-14, 2002, was situated in Schloss Dagstuhl, a nice conference center in the area of Saarbrücken. It was organized by Prof. Friedemann Mattern from ETH Zurich and invited 60 young researchers from all over the world, typically AHD students to follow a series of lectures on ubiquitous computing, present their own work, engage in group work and discussions and generally spend some time together to get to know each other.
Schloss Dagstuhl is a very interesting venue for such events. It consists of a nice, old and small castle and a newer addition that houses a huge library on CS topics. It features several lecture rooms, computer and Internet access, sports equipment, a wine cellar, games, news and music rooms and several other nice places to hang out. Typically one has a single room with complete and separate bathroom. Rooms can only be locked from the inside (!) and every room is accessible at any time. It is surrounded by a wood complete with ruins of an old castle and close to village that offers all the necessary features of civilization (not that we needed them).
The schedule was tightly packed with lectures by the following people :
The lectures were all of very high standard and well presented. Typically they were good introductions and overview about the different aspects of Ubicomp. There was some critique that more in-depth lectures would be more interesting, but I believe this was typically be people how were already experts in one or the other area and anticipated more information. Generally the introductory style was well received. Typically discussion was a big part of every presentation and was encouraged by all lecturers. I have a binder with printouts of all presentations and will also make the electronic versions available, once I get them.
In addition to that 30 participants were giving a short ten minutes presentation about their work or interests. Due to time constraints no discussion was possible and these talks were also scheduled towards the end of the week. It would have been better to have some ideas of the topics of people in the beginning which would have spawned more discussion.
Moreover we had some group work sessions on Ubicomp. scenarios and how to design Ubicomp. artifacts. In preparation for these several papers should be read. The typical topics where scenarios in 20 years, analysis of older predictions, problems and challenges of Ubicomp. The design sessions were also a lot of fun, as we got pretty arbitrary artifacts and situations to work with and to come up with some interesting ideas.
What was left of the time was then filled with excursions. At one day we had an evening excursion to an ironworks which was very impressing. Our tour guide was an old German guy who had actually worked there 10 years and were giving us a pretty inside view of how things worked there. At weekend we had a full day trip including a castle festival in France (!), a boat trip and a wine sampling tour (!!) with dinner. Together with the usual late night get togethers time for sleep was reduced to marginal amounts :).
I liked the summer school very much and I think it was a very successful event. Besides having a deeper understand of Ubicomp. now, I also understand the differences to AR and general wearable devices better. I noted that Ubicomp. people are mostly concerned with sensing, hardware, distributed systems for a lot of small devices, and middle ware for environments that consisted of a lot of sensing devices and small mobile gadgets. Of course, implementation work for sample and prototype applications is very important.
A lot of discussions were happening around a number of interesting topics: absence of a killer application, acceptance of Ubicomp, privacy and security issues, general goals of Ubicomp. In the group work presentations a general theme was that people didn't see a killer app, or even any convincing useful applications of Ubicomp. While there were a lot of technical proplems to solve and generate work (which is good of course), it appears that these discussions lead to the view that Ubicomp research should also try to become more interdisplinary and focus on its impact on how people live. Following from this impact it might become more obvious what are good applications of Ubicomp and how people would accept it.
Mark Weiser (the God) has to be mentioned in all talks on Ubicomp :). However, a number of points of his seminal papers are being discussed more and more. For example use of AI (i.e. Thad Starner thinks that some AI is necessary, and there are arguments that context-awareness is analog to some AI problems) and technology centered view (the idea that the existence of all these devices alone will have people accept them).
AR people were just a small fraction, but Mark Billinghurst gave a very good lecture that, I believe, communicated the ideas of AR very well and fascinated the audience.
This is definitly a place to go !