Pebbles in Oxygen and Autohan

A Control Plane Architecture for Ubicomp

     

Skirmishes Talk: May 05 Brief Slides.

Overview Talk: Nov 04 PowerPoint Slides.

Overview Talk: Oct 03 PowerPoint Slides.

Some posters (updated April 2005): Posters.

Pictures of our CII stand: Photo1     Photo2.


This research is being undertaken jointly by the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge, UK and the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT, USA. It is receiving funding from the Camb/MIT/CMI Initiative and elsewhere.

Pebbles themselves are self-contained hardware or software objects that fulfill a certain task. Examples are a numeric entry keypad, an electronic piggybank or a speech recognition engine. Our vision is that all such devices shall, in the future, share a common middleware and reflection API. Ours is taken from Project Oxygen. We have constructed a large number of example pebbles. These form our prototype of a future dominated by ubicomp. Pebbles do not invoke operations on or interact with other pebbles (interaction is left to applications).

On top of the Pebble layer we need an application layer to invoke the APIs exposed by the Pebbles. On top of the application layer we need an application creation layer. Our various current project strands address these higher levels in various ways. All either use declarative expression of applications or declarative expression of constraints on application behaviour.

MIT CSAIL are taking a complementary approach to the development of the scripting and application layers, although again based on declarative programming in the large. We have a shared Pebbles layer.

  • Background and Overview

  • Original Workplan

  • People and their Current Personal Workplans

  • Practical Results and Achievements So Far

  • Documentation, Links and Publications
  • Pebbles offer an API and describe themselves to their environment, but do not perform proactive operations on their peers. They are pretty passive really.

    (C) 2005 University of Cambridge. END.