Experiments with User-Centric Ad-hoc Applications Durga Prasad - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Experiments with User-Centric Ad-hoc Applications Durga Prasad Pandey MIT Media Lab July 31st 2007 Presented at: IBM Watson Research Center Cambridge

~FluidVoice~ an infrastructure-less voice conferencing system

Wouldn’t it be cool if I could listen to everyone in the lab?

Maybe not!

Who’s playing loud music at work? Only Grace has the temerity to do that!

Actually, its D u r g a !!

Oops! ;)

Circle of influence, or ‘speak if you dare’ Andy Durga Grace Robots Affects David Kwan You’ve been FluidVoiced !!

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Mann last night at the nightclub..psst psst… Hey dude! What did I just say? Isn’t FluidVoice on? It is!!!

My reach? Its everywhere! •

What is FluidVoice? • A conferencing system • No infrastructure • Push to listen • Ad-hoc • Wireless • A viral system

Why Voice? • Heavy enough to stress the wireless network and reveal weaknesses – Video can buffer, sensors don’t send much data • Time sensitive • Its an application! 13

Compelling Application? • 5000,000 Children’s Laptops(OLPC) • Mesh Networking enabled • Huge potential of on the fly voice collaboration • Testbed and Usebed 14

Architecture 15

What’s viral? • Start small • Scalable • Incremental. Each node adds value. • Examples: Skype, Google, eBay, Napster..

Why does it matter? • Better characterize the wireless space • Cynic: But wireless is unreliable, bad bla bla… – Well let me build a system, learn from it, fix it. • Exploit inherent broadcast nature – Wireless is not a link • Collaborate on the fly!

Traditional Telephony A C 18

FluidVoice-Many2Many C 19

Technically speaking • Broadcast UDP packets • Mixer locally, not like Yahoo chat! • Gateway allows calls from cellphone/PSTN • Neat Interface borrowed from Sociable Media work • More than 9 nodes = system starts getting ill • Built on VIA boards = Free trip to LA!

Whats hot! • Nodes running in offices • Demo on N800 • Gateways to PSTN/cellphones and Avaya p2p phones • Web based UI • Separation of UI, mixing and listening

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To Sum Up • Privacy - someone’s hearing me! • Local mixing - everyone has a mixer. • Identity - who’s allowed? • Inversion of the telephone system - – Traditional: Point to Point – FV: Many to Many with Point to Point as special case • Philosophy - Open the communications space to innovation. 23

Future Work • FluidVoice on N80 Nokia Cellphones • Deployment of FluidVoice in the Media Lab building • Deployment of a credit based multihop system in FluidVoice • Separate multiple conversations 24

UniPlug: A Framework For Ad-hoc Invention sharing

Invention • Computer programs/software • Diagrams • New applications • Websites • Video tutorials • Online Papers

What’s the problem? • Invention sharing is currently not ad-hoc • Need to be able to build systems that allow a community to share inventions • There are lots of inventions on the MIT campus that are forgotten • If I plug my iPod into the laptop, can I get all the programs people have written for it?

What UniPlug does • Ad-hoc sharing • Plug-n-Play detection of devices • Proximity detection of Bluetooth devices • Automatic lookup and download for useful software from UniServer • User populated UniServer

Requirements • Work well in Ad-hoc environment • Populatable in a distributed way • Code should be trusted or verifiable. Malicious users must be punished. • System should be scalable

Architecture • UniClient • UniServer • OpenDHT

Mechanisms • Leader election for LANs • Inter-UniServer borrowing • Store only whats relevant locally • Context-oriented programming

Leader election • Every LAN has a leader that responds to requests for service discovery • Leader can be chosen round robin or credit system based • Leaders signal to others when they are about to relinquish • No heartbeat means leader is no more

Local content • Store inventions only for devices that are registered for the community • Look for content for those registered devices periodically from other UniServers with frequency specified by users • Credit based serving of number of requests

Models • Peer-to-Peer • InterLibrary • Client-Server

Context Classification • User Context(BP) • Device Context(battery level) • Surroundings Context(# of wifi networks)

Scaling • System scales by having lots of users host content • Scaling only needed for the campus • Everyone hosts content they need and service others only on interlibrary. • A machine will only perform a limited number of services.

Demo: UniPhone

Demo: UniBlue

UniBlue for Fluidvoice

Security Issues • Trust networks for small communities • Human moderated invention posting • Damage control for malicious code released

Patient-centric UniPlug implementation scenario

Medical Devices PnP • MGH based consortium • Value in interconnecting Medical Devices • Currently they aren’t interoperable across vendors • Doctors’/BioMed engineers’ inventions need to be sharable • Context-oriented programming will be critical

To Sum Up • Context-based invention sharing • Better device utilization • Inventions not lost over time • Enables better collaboration

Future Work • Demo with medical devices and OR of the future • Full P2P version of UniClient • Deployment and testing with the MIT community under Living The Future program

Questions? • Thanks! • Special thanks to Daniel Gruen and Ciaran Dellafera.