Alcides Fonseca

This is the last WSMU presentation I will blog about and, in my humble opinion, it was the best one. I enjoyed both the content as the style presentation, very web2.0-presentation-style full of sweet pictures.

Each day, more and more gadgets are coming up and your living room is becoming more and more a media center. Plasma screens, stereo controller, gaming consoles, home servers, portable media players, dvd players, apple tv, maybe surface(?) and many more are there and NOT working together.

Pedro Pinto is developing a platform to create a “remote control” that controls most of the electronic devices. The challenge is making it universal for all the devices. In order to archive that, semantic services are used making way for future innovations that can take over our living room.

For more information regarding this project, you can download the presentation PDF.

GPS systems are being used more and more by home users and therefore new problems are being raisen. One of GPS problems is that it doesn’t work under a roof. Therefore another means of calculating your position indoors are in need.

Pedro Sousa and Joaquim Jorge are developing an algorithm to calculate the probability of being somewhere in the building. Their system only relies on several APs located around the building. It needs 3 AP or more, so this system won’t be used in small houses, but in large buildings like university or large companies facilities.

For now the system is giving great results ( Average error ≤ 6 meters in 88% of cases ) but they are still working in order to improve it.

Continuing with the presentations from WMSU, this one is about how networking can and should be mobile.

Vitor Jesus started to show how the current networking is far from perfect. One good example of that most wireless technologies don’t work while you are moving or when you move from one Access Point to another. Another limitation is that wireless networks are limited to about 1km, so the connectivity is very limited.

In a near future (2012?) he believes that different technologies can complement each other and that services will allow you to move from cell to cell and your session will be real-time tranfered without losing any data. WiMax will be largely used while WiFi will be avaiable mostly in Malls and other closed buildings. In a farer future, people won’t pay for coverage, only for some extra services, terminals and networks will be more inteligent and together with sensors will raise your Quality of Experience. This last one will be user-centric and is the subject of Vitor and Rui Aguiar’s work.

Yesterday I attended a Workshop about Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems that took place at DEI. It was a very interesting experience, so in the next days I will post about some presentations that delighted me, starting today.

The first one was given by Marta Figueiredo and André Teixeira (who I will be working with in the next months). Despite being the youngest presenting their project, they had the courage to make a live demo.

Before presenting the project itself, they talked about Mobile Tagging, how it’s already being used in Japan and its possibilities. Imagine yourself reading a magazine and want to go to a website written there with a long address. Wouldn’t it be simpler to take a photo with your PDA or mobile phone, and view it?

Marta and André applied this concept to a museum where there were datamatrix codes associated with every painting. This allowed visitors using a PDA to take a photo of the code, and see more information about the artwork. It worked together with the floor plant of the museum, so people could know where they were, and the whereabouts of they favorite painting. It worked just fine with a mobile client and a server containing all the data accessible by WiFi. They also added voting and commenting possibilities that were shown in the demo.

I’m looking forward to see more solutions and innovations using Mobile Tagging, either barcodes, datamatrix or RFID.