Ubiquitous Computing

Computer technology continuously advances and it enters people’s li ves more and more as they get better and we can perform certain tasks faster with them, or can perform certain tasks automaticall y. The existence of computers is due to people because people created them and people are using them. Computer technology and computers probably wouldn’ t have a meaning in whatever they do without people’s needs for them either directly or indirectly. We may benefit from computers directly when their benefits are directly due to them such as using a word processor to accomplish our tasks (e.g. writing a report or paper), while we can benefit indirectly when we eventually get benefits due to having computers processing tasks for us but the connection is not that obvious. For instance, some products IKEA sells are cheaper due to computers because with the help of computers certain tasks in production require less effort. Humans and computers together could be viewed as a system, where they affect one another. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp, for short, as Weiser uses it in [18]) is about computers everywhere surrounding humans, communicating with each other and interacting with people in certain ways. One of the main goals of ubiquitous computing is that it needs to be distraction-free. The research group for the Aura project [14] developed at Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) claims the importance of this as follows “The most precious resource in a computer system is no longer its processor, memory, disk or network. Rather, it is a resource not subject to Moore's law: User Attention. ” in [15]. Russell and Weiser also agree that user attention is the scarcest resource [11]. Computing is a technology and according to Mark Weiser, who is known as the father of ubiquitous computing due to initiating research work at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1988 [18], the most profound technologies are those that disappear [21] as he states in his seminal paper. According to him, “writing” is already a technology that disappears. We no longer think about the symbols, or concentrate on the shapes of letters. It is natural for us to write as we think. The details of writing, or the overhead, which are the selection of symbols, their shape, position all are irrelevant to the task, namely to the thoughts that we are going to express through writing. Writing is so pervasive; it is everywhere, shop names, on the books, on some sticky note that is attached to a wall , on papers, books, and magazines, even in small things such as candy wrappers. Its prevalence is due to its profoundness, it offers so much than it requires and this is largely because the irrelevant details to the task “disappear” (writing can probably be stated to be an automatic process [2] that consumes no attentional resources of a person after enough practice). Mark Weiser contrasts the technology of writing with that of computers at then (1991) and states that computers are in a world on their own and makes an analogy to the era when writing was a bulky process as in order to write, there were scribes that would make ink and bake clay. Weiser notes that the “disappearance” concept also exists in other famous people’s minds in different terms: nobelist Herbert A. Simon calls it “compili ng” ; philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it the “tacit dimension” ; psychologist J.J.Gibson calls it “visual invariants” ; and philosophers Gadamer and Heidegger call it the “horizon” and “ the ready to hand” [21]. Weiser believes that computers should also vanish in the background