Place Lab: Bootstrapping Location-Enhanced Computing Anthony LaMarca Yatin Chawathe, Sunny Consolvo Jeffrey Hightower, James Scott, Ian Smith

2 The Goal of Place Lab Enable widely available location- enhanced computing Build a positioning system that is – Wide-scale, indoor & outdoor Can be used everywhere – Privacy observant, low barrier to participation Can be used by everyone I am here

3 How does it work? We exploit wide-scale WiFi deployment – Urban areas have dense WiFi coverage – WiFi base stations broadcast unique IDs – Position WiFi devices using map of base- station-IDs to location

4 Where is the data coming from? Build a global user-contributed RF- location mapping service – Leverage “war drivers” and WiFi clubs – Collect trace logs of regular users

5 Demo

6 J2ME / Java 1.3 Many supported platforms Coming soon to a phone near you Version 1.1 available at Place Lab: The Toolkit

7 Place Lab: The Research Project Location sensing technologies – Using radio beacons for positioning Distributed Systems – Building large-scale user- contributed dataset Privacy and trust – Making location-based systems compelling and safe for users

8 Place Lab Users UCSD’s Active Campus Project Trinity College, Dublin University of Washington CSE GUIR’s Topiary Kelvin Institute

9 Conclusion Opportunities for collaborations – User interfaces & privacy models/mechanisms – Development of location-enhanced applications and services Place Lab is a indoor/outdoor WiFi-based positioning system with a low barrier to participation

10 Thank You! Questions?