Engineering multimedia-aware personalized ubiquitous services

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing focusing on users and tasks instead of devices and singular applications is an attractive vision for the future. The idea of nomadic, mobile users in particular poses new challenges for hardware and software. Mobile devices provide vastly different presentation capabilities and need to integrate into heterogeneous environments. Network bandwidth is far from being constant and services may be available only when online. This paper presents MUNDO, an infrastructure for ubiquitous computing that addresses these challenges. The infrastructure is intended to be non-monolithic with its parts supporting mobile computing using multi-modal user interfaces, mobile data delivery, and ad-hoc communication and networking.