Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing

What happened in the decade since the phrase of Ubiquitous Computing was coined by the late Mark Weiser (1952 - 1999), described in 1988 as 'the calm technology, that recedes into the background of our lives' - until the late Nineties, when this vision began to spread rapidly, and gaining a momentum of reality in the young millennium? Have we all been sleeping until the ubicomp wake-up call? Obviously not, we have been working on maturing the enabling technologies, the sensors and actuators, the wireless and ad hoc networking, the distributed and embedded systems, the power density of energy sources, the capacity of storage devices, the software architectures and middleware, the localization and positioning technology, the microelectronics, nano technology, MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS), human-centered application design, multi-modal user interfaces, and many more. It is the synergy, the interdisciplinarity of all these developments, that begins now to enable the increasing availability, mobility and interaction of services and applications in a large variety of areas in daily life - defining Ubiquitous Computing. Recently, we have seen major progress in developing the new off-the-desktop computing paradigm that indeed moves towards the notion of a pervasive, wearable, unobtrusive, disappearing, personalized computer. The impact on our daily life will probably be even more revolutionary than the effects of the Internet during the previous decade, and within ten years, we will have applications we currently not even think of. Sometimes I am questioned about the price, as people find current, preliminary solutions rather expensive. While military applications are usually well paid for, what about the consumer domain? Will this technology be affordable for all of us? Probably it will - if the appropriate business models can be established, and products enter mass production. Or, would you have believed ten years ago that there is hardly a primary school kid today in Europe that is not equipped with a 'complex, digital radio link for speech and data communication' (= mobile phone)? Today, the embedded systems in each car have magnitudes more computing power than the vehicles that carried the man to the moon. However, we have to be aware of the social implications of our technology. As engineers, we have the tendency to enjoy playing with our toys in research and development and to think too late about issues such as the market acceptance and the impact on privacy. Should we go with Sun's CEO Scott McNealy that 'you already have zero-privacy anyway, get over it' (1998)? We should not give up that early. We need to learn to design privacy into our systems first-hand, not as a later add-on. This inherent need for trustworthiness becomes very obvious in health care and medical monitoring based on sensors and body area networks. The near future will bring more insights into these key issues that have already been the topic of heated discussions. Within a lecture for advanced students at the Technical University of Berlin, established in summer term 2003, the interdisciplinarity of the approaches in Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing has been addressed. The red line is considered to span from technological prerequisites, over software and hardware required, to applications. Certainly, the view is biased and influenced by the own research of the main author, and his colleagues at the Fraunhofer Institute of Open Communication Systems (FOKUS), which cooperates with the TU Berlin and enables the students to participate in topical, applied research. To maintain the authenticity of the material presented, the order of the lectures has been maintained, even if the red line got a little twisted in respect to the availability of the individual researchers for presenting their lectures. The material is presented mainly in English, while some of the guests retained the right to an individual language approach.