posts tagged ‘location-based’

CCN now supports Android

4 November 2010 | Jim Thornton

Yesterday's network architecture simply does NOT suit today's proliferation of multimedia, data, and mobility in a broadly connected world.

It’s time to reap the context-aware harvest

21 September 2010 | Bo Begole

It's ironic that following the invention of the Personal Computer workstation and laptop computers at PARC, researchers would then turn toward making the computer disappear. To most people at the time, having a single “personal” computer was a dream, but Mark Weiser and many others envisioned that we’d soon all have more than just one personal computer in our lives... Today, context awareness isn't about devices and location - it's about people getting things done.

Defining ubiquitous computing vs. augmented reality

2 March 2010 | Bo Begole

What's the difference between Ubiquitous Computing ("ubicomp") and Augmented Reality ("AR")? I hear this question often, and you could replace "augmented reality" in that question with any of the following buzzy paradigms for people-interacting-with-computers: Virtual Reality, Pervasive Computing, Mobile Computing, Wearable Computing, Multi-Device Interaction, Cloud Computing, Intelligent Systems, Ambient Intelligence, Context-Aware Computing, Adaptive Systems, Machine Perception, Social Computing, Smart Environments, Everyware, and so on. For the most part, I don’t find formal definitions useful; you can call it whatever suits your fancy. All that matters is that I understand what you mean when you use a term and that you understand what I mean when I use it. The attributes of a definition that carry lasting meaning are not technological properties (performance, cost, size, distribution, latency), but the core capabilities that the paradigm enables for usage.

Tempted by location apps?

5 November 2009 | Richard Chow

Privacy should be the biggest concern for users of location-based social networking apps like Foursquare, Google Latitude, Loopt, and others. Will these companies store and analyze your location traces to figure out what ads to show you as part of their business model? You can deduce a lot about people from their locational traces: where they sleep and work and play, what stores and restaurants they like, who they spend time with, more.

Reducing the password burden: Implicit Authentication

17 August 2009 | Elaine Shi

How many times a day do you enter passwords in different places AND multiple times in the same place? While passwords are the most widely used method for authenticating users to computer systems and protecting our information, they're also difficult to remember, inconvenient, poorly used, and not always secure. There are multiple ways to authenticate us (something we know, have, are) -- but why not use our habits or routines to implicitly authenticate us?