Informatics 241: Introduction to Ubiquitous Computing
Spring 2014
Professor
Bill Tomlinson
wmt@uci.edu
Office hours by appointment

Meeting Times
Lectures: M 11-1:50
Classroom: SSTR 101, UC Irvine

Class mailing list
ubicomp-S14@classes.uci.edu

Overview
The "disappearing computer" paradigm. Differences to the desktop computing model: applications, interaction in augmented environments, security, alternate media, small operating systems, sensors, and embedded systems design. Evaluation by project work and class participation. Same as COMPSCI 248A.

Policies
Add/drop: Electronic Add/Drop only. Standard University time lines apply.

Attendance:Students are responsible for material that is disseminated during class. If you miss class, please arrange beforehand with a friend to get notes/handouts for you. If you know you are going to miss something important, contact the instructor beforehand. It's much easier to accommodate planned absences.

Students are responsible for all material taught in this course. If you join the class later in the quarter, you are expected to complete all missed work immediately.

Sick Policy: If you find that you are unable to make it to a scheduled event (class, exam, presentation, etc.) due to sickness, please get some documentation from a health care provider to assist us in maintaining fairness to the other students in the class. In the absence of such documentation, please contact the staff as soon as you realize that you are going to miss a scheduled event. Generally sicknesses will be treated on a case by case basis. We will accommodate you as best as we can depending on the circumstances.

Respect: This class will involve discussion of topics on which you and your classmates may have differences in opinion. Please be respectful of others at all times.

Academic Honesty: Please familiarize yourself with the latest UCI academic honesty policy. The consequences of academic dishonesty are not worth the risks.

Students with Disabilities or Special Needs: Any student who feels he or she may need an accommodation based on the impact of a disability, religious observance (or anything else) should contact me privately to discuss his or her specific needs. If appropriate, contact the Disability Services Center at (949) 824-7494 as soon as possible to better ensure that such accommodations are implemented in a timely fashion.

Technology in Class: Please turn off all mobile phones/pagers/etc. before the beginning of each class. Please do not use notebook computers or any other technology during class for any purpose not directly relating to this class.

Web Page, Readings, and Assignments: The web page for the class is subject to update. Check it frequently and be sure to refresh / reload the web pages when you browse them. Please follow the assignments exactly. If you need clarification, ask before the assignment is due.

Correspondence: We will send course announcements by email to the official course mailing list, so you should check your email regularly. Note that this mailing list goes to the email address that the registrar has for you (your UCInetID). If you prefer to read your Email on another account, you should set your UCInetID account to forward your Email to your preferred account (you can do this on the web at http://phwww.cwis.uci.edu/cgi-bin/phupdate).

To make sure that the class staff see your email, please include the class code, "[INF 241]" , at the beginning of the subject line. If you do not get a response to the email in 24 hours (except weekends), and your issue remains unresolved, please resend your email or talk to me after class. I recommend also CCing the EEE class mailing list on non-personal issues so that the entire class benefits from the discussion.

Late Assignments: Assignments that are one day late will have their grades reduced by one letter grade (A- to B-, etc.). Projects more than one day late will not be accepted.

Course Mechanics and Grading
Grading:
  • Reading Summaries at Beginning of 2-3 Class Meetings: 10%
  • Leading Discussion: 20%
  • Attendance/Participation in Other Discussions: 20%
  • Final Project: 40%
    • Summary/References: 5%
    • Project Update: 5%
    • Video: 10%
    • Paper: 20%
  • Peer Reviewing: 10%
Readings: Each week there will be several articles, videos, or other pieces of content assigned. You should read/view the items before coming to class on the day that they are listed. You may need to be on campus, or logged in via VPN, to access some of these materials without paying for them. http://www.nacs.uci.edu/security/vpn/

The required book for this class is: Ubiquitous Computing Fundamentals (UCF)

book cover

Reading Summaries: Occasionally at the beginning of class you will be asked to write a one-paragraph summary of one or more recent readings/videos. These reading summaries will not be announced. There are no makeups for missed summaries without a doctor's note or other clear evidence of an excusable absence.

Leading Discussion: You will be asked to work with one or two classmates to lead discussion or one or more readings at least once during this course. Here are some tips on how to lead a discussion. Your grade will be based on the following criteria: 1) Articulates author's argument correctly and completely; 2) Identifies nuances of author's argument; 4) Poses thoughtful, open-ended questions or creative exercises to the class; 5) Guides discussion to important points; 6) Maintains control of the classroom.

Class Participation: A large part of this course is based on discussion of the topics. Your grade will be based in part on your attendance, attention, and participation in class discussions.

Final Project: Working in teams of 1-4 students, you will engage in a ubicomp project. This project may focus on any topic of mutual interest to the members of the group. It could involve implementing a novel ubicomp system, evaluating an existing ubicomp system, or some other project relevant to the course. If you are uncertain of what kind of project to pursue, I encourage you to think about resource tracking and other sustainability-related topics as a possible domain for your project. There will be two interim deliverables, and two final deliverables. The interim deliverables are:
  1. a 1-page summary of your project idea accompanied by a list of 20 relevant references (of which approximately half should be from the Ubicomp conference), due before class on Week 4. (One document submitted per team.)
  2. a 5-6 minute presentation about your progress to date, due in class on either Week 6 or 7. (Team makes presentation together. Presentation date (week 6 or 7) will be specified when teams are assigned.)
Your final deliverables are:
  1. a 1-3 minute video describing your project (One video per team.)
  2. an academic paper, appropriate for submission to the Ubicomp conference. One paper per team. If you are a team of 1-2 students, you are expected to deliver a Ubicomp note (up to 4 pages + up to 1 page of references). If you are a team of 3-4 students, you are expected to deliver a Ubicomp full paper (up to 10 pages + up to 2 pages of references). You are expected to cite an appropriate selection of the academic literature in your paper. More detail may be found on the Ubicomp 2014 web site.
Peer Reviewing: The class will be performing a "peer review" process as part of the final project evaluation. Each student will be asked to review the papers written by three other teams. In addition, students will be asked to review their own paper using the same criteria. In writing your reviews, please be rigorous and kind; the goal is to help person make better work, and want to work more.

Note: These are guidelines intended to help students plan their work in this course. However, the instructor reserves the right to make changes to this syllabus over the course of the quarter.

Assignments and Readings must be completed BEFORE the class next to which they are listed.

Week Date Topic Assignments Readings
1 3/31 Introduction slides None (work on final project).

2 4/7 Foundations and History
 In this class meeting, we will be doing several activities to help students team up for the final project. If you have an idea for a project that you might like to pursue, please email me a one paragraph summary of the project by Sunday at 8pm, and come to class prepared to give a 1-2 minute description of it and talk with your classmates about it.
Please give some thought to how many people the project might take, how flexible you are about the topic (e.g., are you amenable to being teamed up with someone with a similar idea, even if it means you both need to compromise a bit, or would you rather work on your own), what resources you might need, etc. In addition, shortly after class, you will be asked to fill out a questionnaire about your team preferences.
  1. UCF, Chapter 1
  2. M. Weiser. The computer for the twenty-first century. Scientific American, 265(3):94-104, September 1991.
  3. G. Bell and P. Dourish. Yesterday's tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing's dominant vision. Personal Ubiquitous Comput., 11:133-143, January 2007.
  4. G. D. Abowd. What next, ubicomp? : celebrating an intellectual disappearing act. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp '12, pages 31-40, New York, NY, USA, 2012. ACM.
3 4/14 Context Aware Systems
 None (work on final project).
  1. UCF, Chapter 2
  2. UCF, Chapter 8
  3. P. Dourish. What we talk about when we talk about context. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 8(1):19-30, 2004.
  4. J. Hong, E. Suh, and S.-J. Kim. Context-aware systems: A literature review and classification. Expert Syst. Appl., 36(4):8509-8522, 2009.
4 4/21 Location Fusion 1 page summary of high-level design of final project, plus list of 20 references (at least 10 from Ubicomp conference).
  1. UCF, Chapter 7
  2. J. Hightower. From position to place. In Proceedings of The 2003 Workshop on Location-Aware Computing, pages 10-12, October 2003. part of the 2003 Ubiquitous Computing Conference.
  3. J. Krumm and A. J. B. Brush. Learning time-based presence probabilities. In K. Lyons, J. Hightower, and E. M. Huang, editors, Pervasive, volume 6696 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 79-96. Springer, 2011.
5 4/28 Predicting People
 None (work on final project).
  1. UCF, Chapter 9
  2. E. Troshynski, C. Lee, and P. Dourish. Accountabilities of presence: reframing location-based systems. In CHI '08: Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 487-496, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.
  3. J. Krumm and E. Horvitz. Predestination: Inferring destinations from partial trajectories. In P. Dourish and A. Friday, editors, Ubicomp, volume 4206 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 243-260. Springer, 2006.
6 5/5 New Sensing First half of Project Updates.
  1. M. Philipose, J. R. Smith, B. Jiang, A. V. Mamishev, S. Roy, and K. Sundara-Rajan. Battery-free wireless identification and sensing. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 4(1):37-45, 2005.
  2. S. N. Patel, S. Gupta, and M. S. Reynolds. The design and evaluation of an end-user-deployable, whole house, contactless power consumption sensor. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, CHI '10, pages 2471-2480, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM.
7 5/12 Sustainability/ Collapse Second half of Project Updates.
  1. J. Froehlich, L. Findlater, and J. Landay. The design of eco-feedback technology. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, CHI '10, pages 1999-2008, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM.
  2. Collapse Informatics: Augmenting the Sustainability & ICT4D Discourse in HCI
8 5/19 Privacy/ Surveillance None (work on final project).
  1. UCF, Chapter 3
  2. Panopticon readings
9 MEMORIAL DAY  NO CLASS
 		None (work on final project). None.
10 6/2 Final Project Presentations

 Final projects due. (Both videos and papers.) None.
Finals week 12/9 Peer reviews due by Tuesday, June 10 at 1:30pm.