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May 24, 2006

Apple, Nike exercise iPods to track workouts

USATODAY.com - Apple, Nike exercise iPods to track workouts NEW YORK -- Apple and Nike have unveiled an iPod gizmo to put more rhythm in your run: the Nike iPod Sports Kit, the first product coming out of a new partnership between the companies. The wireless kit lets Nike's new Air Zoom Moire shoes send fitness data to your iPod Nano - via a sensor you tuck inside the running shoe and a small receiver that attaches to the Nano. As you run, the sensor records your distance, time, pace and calories burned in real time and displays data on the Nano. At the push of a button, audio feedback is delivered through Nano's earbuds.

Posted by djp3 at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

May 18, 2006

eBlocks: Enabling Design of Basic Embedded Systems by Novice Users

The speakers at this week's seminar will be Susan Lysecky and Frank Vahid. Abstract: "The eBlocks project, at UC Riverside, is empowering regular people, having no programming or electronics experience, to build basic useful electronic systems around the home, office, store, etc. While decreases in cost, size, and power consumption has led to the integration of embedded systems into new emerging domains, including RFID tags and ingestible pills, the design of even the simplest of embedded systems, such a system indicating when a garage door has been left open at night, still requires advanced engineering skills beyond the reach of most users. " The Informatics Seminar is held in ICS2 136 at 3pm, followed by a happy hour at 4pm. See you there! This talk will be videocaptured, broadcast live, and archived via this blog. 15 minutes before the live broadcast we will publish a multicast ".spd" file which will allow a quicktime client to tune into the event.

Posted by djp3 at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)

May 6, 2006

Ambient Display Umbrella

From:Inhabitat : WIFI UMBRELLA "Chicago design group Materious has designed an interactive umbrella called Forecast which uses Wifi to get up-to-date weather information, and then glows to alert you when its going to rain. If your umbrella isn't glowing, no need to worry - but if the handle is pulsing blue, its the umbrella's way of saying 'take me with you, it's going to be a soggy day' "

Posted by djp3 at 4:47 PM | Comments (0)

May 5, 2006

Paul Dourish has a posse

Photo stolen from mroth, who could probably get in trouble for making a picture with Paul's likeness anway, so we're even.

Paul apparently made a splash at CHI.

Posted by djp3 at 3:39 PM | Comments (0)

May 1, 2006

Composition of Real-Time and Hybrid Distributed Computing Systems in High-Safety Ubiquitous Computing Societies

The speaker at this Friday's Informatics Seminar will be Kane Kim. This week's seminar will be a joint seminar between the Department of Informatics and the Department of Computer Science. The Informatics Seminar this week will be held on Friday at 3pm in ICS 432, followed by a social hour at 4pm. See you there.

Abstract:

" Emergence of ubiquitous computing societies (UCSs) means enormous increase in both the number of computing nodes connected together and the number of distributed computing (DC) applications. That in turn means enormous increase in the complexity of DC occurring. Without a new-generation DC software engineering technology, application systems such as next-generation multi-party video-conferencing systems, real-time virtual reality systems, systems of cooperating autonomous ground vehicles, and next-generation secure villages and towns, cannot be constructed with sufficient economy, efficiency, and reliability. A major part of a new-generation DC software engineering technology should be a new-generation software building-block (BB). A substantial percentage of new-generation DC applications are of RT computing types which involve actions subject to relatively high-precision timing requirements. Therefore, desired BBs must be effective in constructing RT DC application systems.

The TMO (Time-triggered Message-triggered Object) programming and specification scheme is intended to facilitate RT distributed programming and software engineering in a form which software engineers in the vast business software field can adapt to with relatively small efforts. It is also aimed for enabling system engineers to produce certifiable RT computing systems for safety-critical applications in cost-effective and sufficiently confident manners. Its support tools can be based on well-established OO programming languages such as C++, C#, and JAVA and on ubiquitous commercial RT operating system kernels or even on MS Windows. In addition, the TMO scheme facilitates an attractively simple approach to parallel and distributed RT simulation. Experiences have shown that undergraduate senior students can learn the TMO tools and methodology and become reasonably proficient in networked embedded system programming. In this seminar, the underlying design paradigm and the essence of the scheme, the tools (including middleware supporting reliable execution of TMOs on various platforms such as notebook, PDA, and single-board ITX PC, associated APIs, GUI-based design aids, and analysis tools) and application demonstrations built so far, and remaining research issues, will be introduced."

Posted by djp3 at 9:15 AM | Comments (0)