Laura Hill and Bernard Horan of Sun (R&D group)

Examples

• Remote Door Bell - say you are working outside, doorbell rings. Nice if the doorbell muted the radio and rang itself on the radio (or on the mobile phone, etc). Not possible if all devices are using fully proprietary interfaces. Bernard showed his Bluetooth enabled phone controlling volume on the Bluetooth enabled notebook as an example.
• Elder hospice care facility to monitor safety/health of resident(s)
• Health stats
• Intrusions
• Fire, etc
• Small scale home security syste
• Wireless, battery operated
• Elements discover each other on net
• Each item in system does its own task (video monitiring, etc)
• Nice if it could be set up to notice "normal" anomalies (a cat, for instance, should not set off the network)
• Imaging
• Being able to easily discover an available printer on an ad-hoc (WiFi) network
• Variable pricing, etc

A 40 minute team exercise - come up with a new service/idea that plays into discoverability. We came up with the notion of personal location identification cutting across devices and locations:

• Phone (land and mobile)
• PDA
• Email
• Home and other locations recognizing you and configuring themselves to your known desires
• Privacy settings issues

First group - Jack Black finds himself in a strange city with a PDA, and may be in danger of sobering up if he does not find a bar. So his PDA should be able to have that critical information available and route him to the nearest bar:

• Local Customs (tip, etc)
• How late is bar open?
• How close? How do we get there?
• When Jack's blood alcohol level drops below a certain level it notifies him that it's time to drink. Also takes account of current monetary level, and which location is closest
• Environment needs to be able to deal with any local environment automatically. Not all locations will have services that work for this.
• Should be able to translate across language barriers
• Should have privacy, security, abiding by local laws

Second group - Intelligent Visitor Filtering doorbell

User Requirements

• Filters visitors based on context and learned preferences
• Time of Day
• State of House
• Who is present in house
• Contents of the fridge
• Learned preferences of the homeowners for visitors based on context

Task Requirements

• Need for discovery of context of house and home owner
• Need for discovery of purpose of visit
• Comparison of visit purpose with context with preferences, assessment of significance of vist for homeowner/those present

Next step - how to create a solution - the two more general groups (ours and the intelligent filtering) will need to focus in more. They gave us a large handout with a whole bunch of descriptive technology refs and Discovery Protocols. I'm not going to describe all of them.

Descriptive tech

• CCPP - with RDF (ick)
• FIPA
• JSR 124
• MIME Types
• SensorML (XML Schema)
• TinySchema

Discovery Protocols

• Bluetooth Service Discovery Protocol
• CORBA
• INS
• Java RMI
• Jini
• JXTA
• OWL-S
• Rendevous
• Salutation
• Service Location Protocol
• UPnP
• Web Services

For our scenario, we came up with Bluetooth as the best mechanism for initial broadcast of identity information - providers would then do additional queries through some other mechanism (Web Services, JXTA, whatever).

Intelligent Doorbell Scenario - doorbell is not a doorbell, but delegates the task to whatever service should find an appropriate person - it may end up being the ring by default. The person hitting the doorbell will be queried as to what they offer/want, and appropriate proxies will be notified. So with that, they went with Jini, mostly for the Pub/Sub capability. If BlueTooth did that, they would have considered it. If JXTA did that well, might consider it.

The Jack Black drinking system - Ended up with the business part (getting the alcohol) and the discovery part. Missing part - bringing up the network. Ended up a need for multiple services from the list - possibly BlueTooth, possibly Web Services, possibly OWL-S.

Notes - no one brought up security, although we did bring up privacy. There seemed to be an "assumption that it would be secure" - meaning that no one took responsibility for it :) Not that we've seen that before :)