Link
Upkar Varshney Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA
ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT)
archive
Volume 3 , Issue 3 (August 2003) table of contents
Pages: 236 - 255
Year of Publication: 2003
ISSN:1533-5399
Abstract:
With recent advances in devices, middleware, applications and networking infrastructure, the wireless Internet is becoming a reality. We believe that some of the major drivers of the wireless Internet will be emerging mobile applications such as mobile commerce. Although many of these are futuristic, some applications including user-and location-specific mobile advertising, location-based services, and mobile financial services are beginning to be commercialized. Mobile commerce applications present several interesting and complex challenges including location management of products, services, devices, and people. Further, these applications have fairly diverse requirements from the underlying wireless infrastructure in terms of location accuracy, response time, multicast support, transaction frequency and duration, and dependability. Therefore, research is necessary to address these important and complex challenges. In this article, we present an integrated location management architecture to support the diverse location requirements of m-commerce applications. The proposed architecture is capable of supporting a range of location accuracies, wider network coverage, wireless multicast, and infrastructure dependability for m-commerce applications. The proposed architecture can also support several emerging mobile applications. Additionally, several interesting research problems and directions in location management for wireless Internet applications are presented and discussed.
My Discussion:
Sometimes a paper I select turns out to be really relevant for the UI part of mobile UI interfaces, sometimnes it isn't. This paper does start out by stating that under the nomer "wireless Internet" amongst other concepts "user interfaces" explicitely should be included. The author then proceeds to state that mobile commerce will drive the wireless Internet, survey areas of local commerce that would require location identification, propose an architecture for comprehensive location identification, and not mention how any of this will integrate with the user interface on the device at all. The survey of location-aware mobile commerce applications and the needs they impose on the location identification component are interesting. The acrhitecture proposed less so, because it seems more a statement of which diagram boxes should fit together how in what figure and what their real-world effects should be than an actual solution stating how things should work and how we get there from the current context. But again, the needs this architecture has to fulfill seem to have been crafted without a sentence about what the users and agents in this scheme need to see and be told by their technologies to be made confident enough that their transactions will do what they intend and no more, and that their money and services will be secure and effective, to partake in this mobile commerce. Does the consumer need to see any identifiers in the small-cell local scenario on their device and the location of the service provider? How will opting in actually work without having the user opt in to everything in a square kilometer, or nothing in a tiny area? The paper doesn't say, and doesn't seem to care.
A reflective framework for discovery and interaction in heterogeneous mobile environments
Upkar Varshney Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA
ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT)
archive
Volume 3 , Issue 3 (August 2003) table of contents
Pages: 236 - 255
Year of Publication: 2003
ISSN:1533-5399
Abstract:
With recent advances in devices, middleware, applications and networking infrastructure, the wireless Internet is becoming a reality. We believe that some of the major drivers of the wireless Internet will be emerging mobile applications such as mobile commerce. Although many of these are futuristic, some applications including user-and location-specific mobile advertising, location-based services, and mobile financial services are beginning to be commercialized. Mobile commerce applications present several interesting and complex challenges including location management of products, services, devices, and people. Further, these applications have fairly diverse requirements from the underlying wireless infrastructure in terms of location accuracy, response time, multicast support, transaction frequency and duration, and dependability. Therefore, research is necessary to address these important and complex challenges. In this article, we present an integrated location management architecture to support the diverse location requirements of m-commerce applications. The proposed architecture is capable of supporting a range of location accuracies, wider network coverage, wireless multicast, and infrastructure dependability for m-commerce applications. The proposed architecture can also support several emerging mobile applications. Additionally, several interesting research problems and directions in location management for wireless Internet applications are presented and discussed.
My Discussion:
Sometimes a paper I select turns out to be really relevant for the UI part of mobile UI interfaces, sometimnes it isn't. This paper does start out by stating that under the nomer "wireless Internet" amongst other concepts "user interfaces" explicitely should be included. The author then proceeds to state that mobile commerce will drive the wireless Internet, survey areas of local commerce that would require location identification, propose an architecture for comprehensive location identification, and not mention how any of this will integrate with the user interface on the device at all. The survey of location-aware mobile commerce applications and the needs they impose on the location identification component are interesting. The acrhitecture proposed less so, because it seems more a statement of which diagram boxes should fit together how in what figure and what their real-world effects should be than an actual solution stating how things should work and how we get there from the current context. But again, the needs this architecture has to fulfill seem to have been crafted without a sentence about what the users and agents in this scheme need to see and be told by their technologies to be made confident enough that their transactions will do what they intend and no more, and that their money and services will be secure and effective, to partake in this mobile commerce. Does the consumer need to see any identifiers in the small-cell local scenario on their device and the location of the service provider? How will opting in actually work without having the user opt in to everything in a square kilometer, or nothing in a tiny area? The paper doesn't say, and doesn't seem to care.
Link
Paul Grace Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Gordon S. Blair Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Sam Samuel Lucent Technologies, Swindon, UK
ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review archive
Volume 9 , Issue 1 (January 2005) table of contents
COLUMN: Papers from MC2R open call table of contents
Pages: 2 - 14
Year of Publication: 2005
Abstract:
To operate in dynamic and potentially unknown environments a mobile client must first discover the local services that match its requirements, and then interact with these services to obtain the application functionality. However, high levels of heterogeneity characterize mobile environments; that is, contrasting discovery protocols including SLP, UPnP and Jini, and different styles of service interaction paradigms e.g. Remote Procedure Call, Publish-Subscribe and agent based solutions. Therefore given this type of heterogeneity, utilizing single discovery and interaction systems is not optimal as the client will only be able to use the services available to that particular platform. Hence, in this paper we present an adaptive middleware solution to this problem. ReMMoC is a Web-Services based reflective middleware that allows mobile clients to be developed independently of both discovery and interaction mechanisms. We describe the architecture, which dynamically reconfigures to match the current service environment. Finally, we investigate the incurred performance overhead such dynamic behaviour brings to the discovery and interaction process.
My Discussion:
The technical section seems really wordy to describe a technology that abstracts several service discovery and invocation protocols with a new layer based on web services WSDL bindings -- after all, creating an abstract layer is one of the oldest comp-sci tricks in the book. It is too bad that very little time is spent showing where the abstraction will not properly fit the abstracted protocols. There is a nice section to demonstrate that adding a dynamically changing environment on top of these service protocols isn't that much of an imposition, but from a mobile user interface POV this paper is not that interesting.
ACM's <interactions> July 2005
Paul Grace Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Gordon S. Blair Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Sam Samuel Lucent Technologies, Swindon, UK
ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review archive
Volume 9 , Issue 1 (January 2005) table of contents
COLUMN: Papers from MC2R open call table of contents
Pages: 2 - 14
Year of Publication: 2005
Abstract:
To operate in dynamic and potentially unknown environments a mobile client must first discover the local services that match its requirements, and then interact with these services to obtain the application functionality. However, high levels of heterogeneity characterize mobile environments; that is, contrasting discovery protocols including SLP, UPnP and Jini, and different styles of service interaction paradigms e.g. Remote Procedure Call, Publish-Subscribe and agent based solutions. Therefore given this type of heterogeneity, utilizing single discovery and interaction systems is not optimal as the client will only be able to use the services available to that particular platform. Hence, in this paper we present an adaptive middleware solution to this problem. ReMMoC is a Web-Services based reflective middleware that allows mobile clients to be developed independently of both discovery and interaction mechanisms. We describe the architecture, which dynamically reconfigures to match the current service environment. Finally, we investigate the incurred performance overhead such dynamic behaviour brings to the discovery and interaction process.
My Discussion:
The technical section seems really wordy to describe a technology that abstracts several service discovery and invocation protocols with a new layer based on web services WSDL bindings -- after all, creating an abstract layer is one of the oldest comp-sci tricks in the book. It is too bad that very little time is spent showing where the abstraction will not properly fit the abstracted protocols. There is a nice section to demonstrate that adding a dynamically changing environment on top of these service protocols isn't that much of an imposition, but from a mobile user interface POV this paper is not that interesting.
Link
interactions archive
Volume 12 , Issue 4 July + August 2005 table of contents
Year of Publication: 2005
ISSN:1072-5520
Abstract:
[Editor note: instead of the standard choice of a paper from ACM's digitial library, this week's edition of comouipapers urges you as a UI practitioner to read the linked issue of ACMs <interactions> bulletin, specifically the articles 'CHI: the practitioner's dilemma' by Arnowitz & Dykstra-Erickson, 'Why doesn't SIGCHI eat its own dog food?' by Morris, and most certainly 'Human-centered design considered harmful' by Donald A. Norman.]
My Discussion:
These articles may be the harbinger of a revolution in which the UI community confronts that User-Centered Design, UCD, is simply not going to give us the results we need. The Morris article highlights that as UI practitioners, the CHI community couldn't even get itself to use its tools and methodologies for somehing so obvious as to create a good conference for ourselves. The Arnowitz & Dykstra-Erickson article the describes an actual revolt in the CHI community during a planning session between practitioners and academics, with practitioners being clear they weren't getting much out of the academic tracks, and the academics feeling threatened by too much focus on practitioners. The Norman article, written by the grand master and authority on clear design that instantly communicates its function to the user and is a joy to use, actually makes a point that UCD is not leading to the best products out there but that genius design vision very often trumps painstaking UCD protocol.
This last part is something practitioners already quietly know, but cannot say out loud, because we are not all design genius visionaries, and we need something to guide us to good results in our efforts. However, academic inquiry into UCD has not delivered a clear and workable set of guidelines and practices, and in practice UCD clashes badly with business constraints on product design. We may see UCD as a guide being replaced, or at least have to consider it.
interactions archive
Volume 12 , Issue 4 July + August 2005 table of contents
Year of Publication: 2005
ISSN:1072-5520
Abstract:
[Editor note: instead of the standard choice of a paper from ACM's digitial library, this week's edition of comouipapers urges you as a UI practitioner to read the linked issue of ACMs <interactions> bulletin, specifically the articles 'CHI: the practitioner's dilemma' by Arnowitz & Dykstra-Erickson, 'Why doesn't SIGCHI eat its own dog food?' by Morris, and most certainly 'Human-centered design considered harmful' by Donald A. Norman.]
My Discussion:
These articles may be the harbinger of a revolution in which the UI community confronts that User-Centered Design, UCD, is simply not going to give us the results we need. The Morris article highlights that as UI practitioners, the CHI community couldn't even get itself to use its tools and methodologies for somehing so obvious as to create a good conference for ourselves. The Arnowitz & Dykstra-Erickson article the describes an actual revolt in the CHI community during a planning session between practitioners and academics, with practitioners being clear they weren't getting much out of the academic tracks, and the academics feeling threatened by too much focus on practitioners. The Norman article, written by the grand master and authority on clear design that instantly communicates its function to the user and is a joy to use, actually makes a point that UCD is not leading to the best products out there but that genius design vision very often trumps painstaking UCD protocol.
This last part is something practitioners already quietly know, but cannot say out loud, because we are not all design genius visionaries, and we need something to guide us to good results in our efforts. However, academic inquiry into UCD has not delivered a clear and workable set of guidelines and practices, and in practice UCD clashes badly with business constraints on product design. We may see UCD as a guide being replaced, or at least have to consider it.
