DATE: Thursday, April 18, 2013
TIME: Noon - 1:00 pm
PLACE: CIC 4th Floor - ISTC Panther Hollow Conference Room
SPEAKER: Nigel Davies, Lancaster University, UK, and Visiting Faculty, CMU
TITLE: Open Public Display Networks : A Communications Medium for the 21st Century
ABSTRACT:
Public Display Networks could emerge as a new communications medium for the 21st century, but this transformation can only occur if the technology moves from its current, closed model to a new, open one. Most public displays deployed today literally disappear: people have become so accustomed to their low utility that they have become highly skilled at ignoring them. In contrast to Mark Weiser's influential vision of the Computer for the 21st Century, however, public displays of the 21st century should not disappear. Rather they should become the backbone of a new global communications medium that provides valuable information to viewers who are motivated to actively embrace the technology.
In this talk I will argue that the transformation of public displays to this new communications medium requires significant innovation that can only occur through opening display networks to applications and content from a wide range of sources, such as city officials, local residents, and visitors. Based on this idea I will discuss our work in creating the building blocks to realise this vision and reflect on 16 years worth of experiences of creating experimental public display systems.
BIO:
Nigel Davies is a Professor in the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University and is currently a visiting faculty member at CMU. His research focuses on experimental mobile and ubiquitous systems and his projects include the MOST, GUIDE and e-Campus projects that have been widely reported on in the academic literature and the popular press. Professor Davies has held visiting positions at SICS, Sony's Distributed Systems Lab in San Jose, the Bonn Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich and Google Research in Mountain View, CA. Nigel is active in the research community and has co-chaired both Ubicomp and MobiSys conferences. He is currently editor-in-chief of IEEE Pervasive Magazine, chair of the steering committee for HotMobile and one of the founders of the ACM PerDis Symposium on Pervasive Displays.
HOST: M. Satyanarayanan
VISITOR COORDINATOR: Angela Miller, amiller@cs.cmu.edu
SDI / ISTC SEMINAR QUESTIONS?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/