The Stanford Interactive Workspaces project is developing the computing foundations for bringing reality to ubiquitous computing. A diverse collection of faculty and students from the areas of graphics, human-computer interaction (HCI), networking, ubiquitous computing, and databases, we are looking at new types of human/machine interaction including multimodal input, heterogeneous device integration from wall-sized displays to handheld information appliances, and the "invisible" software infrastructure required to support them.

In the same way that today's standard operating systems make it feasible to write single-workstation software that uses multiple devices and networked resources, we are constructing a higher level operating system for the world of ubiquitous computing. We combine research on infrastructure (ways of flexibly configuring and connecting devices, processes, and communication links) with research on HCI (ways of interacting with heterogeneous changing collections of devices with multiple modalities). I will describe our progress on the software infrastructure, including applications running in our deployed iRoom that do in fact integrate a variety of devices.

Armando Fox Assistant Professor, Computer Science, Stanford University fox@cs.stanford.edu

In previous lives, Armando received a BSEE from M.I.T. and an MSEE from the University of Illinois, and worked as a CPU architect at Intel Corp. He is also an ACM member and a founder of ProxiNet, Inc. (now a division of PumaTech), which is commercializing thin client mobile computing technology developed at UC Berkeley.