When humans talk with humans, they are able to use implicit situational information, or context, to increase the conversational bandwidth. Unfortunately, this ability to convey ideas does not transfer well to humans interacting with computers. In traditional interactive computing, users have an impoverished mechanism for providing input to computers. By improving the computer’s access to context, we increase the richness of communication in human-computer interaction and make it possible to produce more useful computational services. The use of context is increasingly important in the fields of handheld and ubiquitous computing, where the user?s context is changing rapidly. In this panel, we want to discuss some of the research challenges in understanding context and in developing context-aware applications.

https://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ctk/pubs/HUC99-panel.pdf

Towards a Better Understanding of Context and Context-Awareness

Ubiquitous computing is the method of enhancing computer use by making many computers available throughout the physical environment, but making them effectively invisible to the user. Since we started this work at Xerox PARC in 1988, a number of researchers around the world have begun to work in the ubiquitous computing framework. This paper explains what is new and different about the computer science in ubiquitous computing. It starts with a brief overview of ubiquitous computing, and then elaborates through a series of examples drawn from various subdisciplines of computer science: hardware components (e.g. chips), network protocols, interaction substrates (e.g. software for screens and pens), applications, privacy, and computational methods. Ubiquitous computing offers a framework for new and exciting research across the spectrum of computer science.

/pdf/some-computer-science-issues-in-ubiquitous-computing-59kpy3d30s.pdf

Some computer science issues in ubiquitous computing

Methods and systems for processing touch inputs are disclosed. The invention in one respect includes reading data from a multipoint sensing device such as a multipoint touch screen where the data pertains to touch input with respect to the multipoint sensing device, and identifying at least one multipoint gesture based on the data from the multipoint sensing device.

Gestures for touch sensitive input devices

In recent years, a wide variety of mobile computing devices has emerged, including portables, palmtops, and personal digital assistants. Providing adequate network connectivity for these devices will require a new generation of wireless LAN technology. In this paper we study media access protocols for a single channel wireless LAN being developed at Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center. We start with the MACA media access protocol first proposed by Karn [9] and later refined by Biba [3] which uses an RTS-CTS-DATA packet exchange and binary exponential back-off. Using packet-level simulations, we examine various performance and design issues in such protocols. Our analysis leads to a new protocol, MACAW, which uses an RTS-CTS-DS-DATA-ACK message exchange and includes a significantly different backoff algorithm.

/pdf/macaw-a-media-access-protocol-for-wireless-lan-s-xpti1g90i6.pdf

MACAW: a media access protocol for wireless LAN's

Configuration of the computing and communications systems found at home and in the workplace is a complex task that currently requires the attention of the user. Researchers have begun to examine computers that would autonomously change their functionality based on observations of who or what was around them. By determining their context, using input from sensor systems distributed throughout the environment, computing devices could personalize themselves to their current user, adapt their behaviour according to their location, or react to their surroundings. The authors present a novel sensor system, suitable for large-scale deployment in indoor environments, which allows the locations of people and equipment to be accurately determined. We also describe some of the context-aware applications that might make use of this fine-grained location information.

/pdf/a-new-location-technique-for-the-active-office-5bygv7mxxa.pdf

A new location technique for the active office

A method for detecting chemical reactions uses a nanocalorimeter having a substrate including thermal isolation capability residing on the substrate, thermal equilibration regions residing within the thermal isolation capability, and thermal measurement capability residing within each of the thermal equilibration regions. The thermal measurement device is connected to detection electronics. The method includes depositing drops of potentially reactive chemical solutions within the thermal equilibration region. These potentially reactive solution drops are merged through the use of drop merging electrodes residing within the thermal isolation region. The thermal change occurring within the merged solution drops is then measured with the detection electronics.

Method for a nanocalorimeter for detecting chemical reactions

Provision is made for selectively addressing individual crests (64) of traveling or standing capillary surface waves (62) to eject droplets from the selected crests on command. To that end, the addressing mechanisms (65, 85) of this invention locally increase the surface pressure acting on the selected crests and/or locally reduce the surface tension of the liquid within the selected crests. The preferred addressing mechanisms have sufficient spatial resolution to address a single crest substantially independently of its neighbors. Discrete addressing mechanisms having a plurality of individual addressing elements (85) are especially attractive for liquid ink printing and similar applications, not only because their individual addressing elements may be spatially fixed, but also because the spatial frequency of their addressing elements may be matched to the spatial frequency (wavelength λc) of the capillary wave. Such frequency matching enables selected crests of the capillary wave to be addressed in parallel, such as for line printing. Preferably, the capillary wave for a printer is a spatially stabilized standing wave, so that the crests and troughs of the capillary wave are locked in predetermined spatial locations.

Spatially addressable capillary wave droplet ejectors

Techniques are disclosed for surface texturing multicrystalline silicon using drop jetting technology to form mask or etch patterns on a surface of a multicrystalline silicon substrate.

Texturing multicrystalline silicon

Disclosed herein in is a radiative cooling formulation comprising a first component with >55% reflectance in a wavelengths range of 0.3 to 2.5 microns, a second component with >0.85 peak thermal emissivity in a window range of 4 to 35 microns, and a third component to mechanically bind together a mixture of the first and second components.

Coating to cool a surface by passive radiative cooling

http://www.cell.com/article/S2666389922002021/pdf

Scott A. Elrod

Papers

Method for a nanocalorimeter for detecting chemical reactions

Spatially addressable capillary wave droplet ejectors

Texturing multicrystalline silicon

Coating to cool a surface by passive radiative cooling

Systematic analysis of 50 years of Stanford University technology transfer and commercialization