DATE: Thursday, October 22, 2009
TIME: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
PLACE: Gates Center 8102
SPEAKER: Nigel Davies, Lancaster University, UK
TITLE:
Building a Global Display Network
ABSTRACT:
Public displays have become pervasive with the widespread deployment of plasma screens, LCD panels and projection systems. Shopping malls, sports stadiums and city squares frequently feature large numbers of displays of varying size and complexity. However these displays are typically part of small isolated networks consisting of a handful of displays under a single management domain. Our group's aim is to create a single global network of displays that is open to new applications and content from many sources - a Global Display Network. In effect, we are looking to create the display equivalent of the Internet - a single global medium for sharing information that has revolutionized the way we live our lives. A Global Public Display Network has the potential to change every public space - from environments in which information is pushed to passers-by in the form of adverts to spaces that can be tailored to reflect the hopes, aspirations and interests of its occupants using content and applications created anywhere in the global network. In this talk I will focus on the infrastructure created and lessons learned from the e-campus project - a deployment of over 100 public displays at Lancaster that has been explicitly built as a research testbed for work on public display systems. The system includes support for interaction with displays using mobile devices. As it stands e-campus is not a global display network but it is in daily use and the applications and infrastructure developed provide, we believe, some insight into future Global Display Networks.
BIO:
Professor Nigel Davies holds a BSc and PhD in Computer Science, both from Lancaster University, UK. Having completed his studies he was a visiting researcher at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) before returning to Lancaster in 1994 to help create the University's Mobile Computing group. He has since managed over 3 million pounds worth of projects at Lancaster, including the MOST, GUIDE and e-Campus projects, which have been widely reported on in the academic literature and the popular press. During 1999/ 2000 he spent a year as a visiting researcher at Sony's Distributed Systems Lab in San Jose working on integrating mobile devices with home AV networks. In recognition of his work in establishing Lancaster as a major research center in the field of mobile computing he was awarded a personal chair in the Computing Department in 2000. He has participated actively in the mobile computing research community and has served in a number of roles including Program Chair for IEEE WMCSA 2000, Program Chair for Ubicomp 2004 and Program Co-Chair for MobiSys 2006. In 2007 Nigel was a visiting research at both the Bonn Institute of Technology and ETH Zurich where he worked on public display systems. Nigel was one of the first associate editors for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and was a founding associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Pervasive Computing. From 2001-2008 he was an Associate/Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Arizona. He is currently Head of the Computing Department at Lancaster University.
Visitor Host
M. Satyanarayanan
Visitor Coordinator
Tracy Farbacher, tracyf@cs.cmu.edu
SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/