Smart Instant Messenger in Pervasive Computing Environments

(Prepared by SIM team)

The Future Landscape

Empowered by embedded and wireless technologies, the future world would be full of smart things, which all possess certain processing power, intelligence, and communication capability.

We envision the future of communication, which goes from person-to-person .

What do we mean by smart?

• Invisible
• Familiar
• Appropriate

Why Instant Messenger

• SIM as the unified communication interface
• Everything’s behind an SIM client
• Distributed Servers Architecture

Future Pervasive Communication =  Anytime + Anywhere, and is among “Anything”
 

In a buddy-like way
Appropriate
Knowing when, where, how
Familiar
“gd nite & cu tmr”
“分特” （晕倒, faint）

Three Main Features:

1. Context-aware presence management

• Context as presence
  • Location, activity, with whom you’re…
  • Extended, richer vocabulary
• Adaptive presence distribution
  • Different buddies see different status
  • E.g., available to the people here; yet “busy” to the outliers;
  • Based on current situation and the relationships
• Automatic update
  • Let the system infer the user’s presence

2. Resource buddy services

• Explicitly include resources
• Device, Software, Widget…
• Anything that is of certain usage
• Resources appear on the buddy list
• Just like your buddy
• When you need, when you’re near, what you’re fond of/interested in
• User-centric configuration
• Buddy understands your dialectE.g., A and B see different GUIs for the same printer, or maybe speak different commands

3. Dynamic grouping

• Location-based Grouping (“buddy discovery”)
• Group the buddies according to the same location
• Effectively help you “bump into” a nearby buddy and initiate a serendipitous interaction
• Keep you aware of the surrounding resources, and of what are readily for usage
• Activity-based Grouping (“task centric”)
  • Facilitate the collaborative work by grouping the activity partners, electronic resources and desired devices into a single group