Rethinking Pervasive Computing An SAIC Company Ravi Jain January 24, 2002 Copyright © 2002 Telcordia Technologies Inc. All Rights Reserved. This is just the beginning... Source: Rainer Malaka, EML ICDE 2001

Ravi Jain / 24-Jan-01 / 2 Copyright © 2002 Telcordia Technologies Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Blind Spot of Pervasive Computing  Current computing/communications already presents an environmental challenge –Over 315M obsolete computers in the U.S. by 2004, destined for landfills, incinerators, or hazardous waste exports  Contain toxic metals (lead, mercury) or compounds with unknown toxicity  Waste equipment is growing at 3 times the rate of municipal garbage –Accounts for a significant proportion of U.S. energy consumption  Pervasive computing will often use smaller devices, but:  Will be far more numerous  Low cost encourages rapid replacement  Less mature technology becomes obsolete faster  Disposable devices will emerge  Tend to use batteries  Design for ubiquity will cause wide dispersal, making disposal harder  Global use will bring impacts to regions where little at present

Ravi Jain / 24-Jan-01 / 3 Copyright © 2002 Telcordia Technologies Inc. All Rights Reserved. What Computer Science research can do: Examples  Reduce Software Sprawl –OS & application software causes needless hardware obsolescence  Just-in-time plug-in and configuration of software components  Dynamic software discovery, billing, upgrade and disposal  Reduce Data Sprawl –Personal MM DBs use non-trivial storage, energy and mindspace  Better indexing, retrieval and management techniques -- using not only time and space but energy and administration effort as metrics  Self-maintaining and self-destroying data: under user policy control  Avoid (inefficient) storage of document versions, attachments etc.  Formal models of energy (Big-oh Joules), Hardware/software codesign, Tools to evaluate total lifecycle costs  Context-prediction (not just location-prediction) techniques Rethink: Cycles and Megabytes are cheap, but the environment (and the user) are not