Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing 2020/21 Sandy Gould

This is a reading of Cecchinato et al.'s short paper "Smartwatches: the good, the bad and the ugly?" The full text of this paper is available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/2702613.2732837

This week we are introducing the concept of wearable computing. We will cover some of the challenges of developing wearables from technical and non-technical perspective. We'll also talk a little about 'Wear OS by Google' (which is Google's rebranded 'Android Wear'). Smartwatches in particular were predicted to have had an explosion in use; they've not disappeared by any means, but they've not become the next 'must have' that everyone keeps with them all the time. Why is this? 

This is a reading of Chan et al.'s excellent paper on microgesture elicitation. You can access a PDF of the reading from Canvas or from the ACM.

Back in Week 2 we talked about the challenges of interaction in mobile and ubiquitous computing contexts. And this week we're coming back to it in a different way – gestures. Gestures are often thought of as being a natural part of communication. Could they be a good fit for contexts were a keyboard and mouse is not really appropriate? This week we'll be covering some of the conceptual aspects surrounding gesture-based computing as well as some of the technical challenges involved.

This is a reading of John Krumm's "A survey of computational location privacy" paper from Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. It's quite old now, but I think it still gives a really good introduction to privacy concerns surround location-based services and reviews a variety of computational techniques for reducing the chances of data leakage. Full paper: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00779-008-0212-5.pdf

One of the biggest and most important topics in mobile and ubiquitous computing is privacy and security. Having lots of devices transmitting huge amounts of telemetry all over the world comes with a number of privacy and security challenges. We'll start off by considering a 'local' or on-person threat to privacy in the form of RFID cards. Then we'll cover a little on cloud-based computing and the privacy and security challenges there. We'll finish by thinking about user perspectives on security and how these can be represented in preferences.