Mark Weiser, the father of ubiquitous computing

The story of ubiquitous compunting begins in 1988 at Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) with the emergence of the Uquitous Computing Program. The program was at first an attempt to provide radical answers to what was wrong with personal computers: too complex, too hard to use, too elitist and far away from common people. The idea was to concentrate on human-to-human interfaces putting computers into the environmental background. The research group stated this idea in the following way:

“We wanted to put computing back in its place, to reposition it into the environmental background, to concentrate on human-to-human interfaces and less on human-to-computer ones.” (Weiser, M., Gold, R., Brown, J.,S. 1999. The Origins of Ubiquitous Computing Research at PARC in the late 1980s. IBM Systems Journal.  38,4)

Later in 1991, Mark Weiser published “The Computer for the 21st Century” in Scientific America. The article is the declaration of Weiser’s vision:

“We are trying to conceive a new way of thinking about computers in the world, one that takes into account the natural human environment and allows computers themeselves to vanish into background” (Weiser, M. 1991. The Computer of 21st Century. Scientific American)

Weiser illustrates this idea differentiating ubiquitous computing from virtual reality. When he talks of ubiquitous computing, he uses the term “embodied virtuality” because it does not try to create virtual realms and objects inside the computer, but it defines ways of “enhancing the world that already exists”, on the other side, “virtual reality is only a map, not a territory”.

The bulk of the article describes the research achievements at PARC. This discussion brings the attention to technological issues for the future of research and development of ubiquitous computing. The first issue is the size of ubiquitous devices: tabs, pads, board -sized writing and display surfaces each suited for a specific purpose. These devices are not new for humans, they are just intelligent. They can communicate with the surrounded environment, predict events, take actions. They are intelligent and invisble presence on our desk. In order to develop such a device, technology required is based on three building blocks: “cheap, low-power computers that include equally convenient displays, a network that ties them all together, and software sytems implementing ubiquitous applications”.

In the last part of the article, Weiser predicts life in an  “embodied virtual” world. Sal, the character of the short Weiser’s sci-fi story, is quitely alerted by the alarm, which asks her if she wants a coffee. Then, Sal has breakfast reading the newspaper and picking up news with a pen, which send them to her e-mail account. Once ready for work, she picks up the car and drives to work. The computer helps her to find a parking stop. And Sal’s life goes on and all her actions are always guided and helped by intelligent devices. Wieser describes this embodied virtual world with a careful use of adjectives. The alarm clock is quite, the car computer is quick and so on. Sal’s life is certainly facilitated by intelligent devices, but is the Weiser’s ubiquity invasive? Is it possible to  switch off the ubiquitous environment in Weiser’s world? Privacy, confidentiality,  dependency by technology are issues slightly touched in Weiser’s article. However, these are questions, which cannot dispute the fundamental role of Weiser, who can be definitely called the father of the next computing paradigm: the ubiquitous paradigm.

 

Looking for a definition of ubiquitous computing

The Oxford Concise says that ubiquity means “being everywhere or in an indefinite number of places at the same time”. If we add to this definition the word computing, we can think of digital devices, able to process and delivery information, located in different locations and all active at the same time. These devices communicate to each other, but also interellate with humans, who can move in different locations and being able to interact with such devices indipendently from time and space. These scenario was firstly described by Mark Weiser in his seminal paper, The Computer for the 21st Century (Weiser, M. 1991. The Computer for the 21st Century. Scientific American, 265(3), 94-104). He captured the scenario described above in the following way: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”. Weiser’s paper is broadly recognized as the starting point of the research in ubiquitous computing (Satyanarayanan, M. 2001. Pervasive Computing: Vision and Challenges. IEEE Personal Communications, August 2001, 10-17) . The importance of Weiser’s article for research in ubiquitous computing is also confirmed by some bibliometrics data such as the following: “almost one quarter of all the papers published in the Ubicomp conference between 2001 and 2005 cite Weiser’s foundamental articles” (Bell, G., Dourish, P. 2006. Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing).

The next step is to analyse Weiser’s vision, which seems to be a “technological paradigm” in unbiquitous computing. It will be also important to understand if this paradigm is obsolete and what is ubiquitous computing today, 25 years from Weiser’s article.