St. Louis Ballroom A & B [Floor Plan]
Session Chair: David Garlan
[Slides]

Biography: Roy Want is a Principal Engineer at Intel Research/CTG in Santa Clara, California, and leader of the Ubiquity Strategic Research Project (SRP). He is responsible for exploring long-term strategic research opportunities in the area of Ubiquitous & Pervasive Computing. His interests include proactive computing, wireless protocols, hardware design, embedded systems, distributed systems, automatic identification and micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS).

Want received his BA in computer science from Churchill College, Cambridge University, UK in 1983 and continued research at Cambridge into reliable distributed multimedia-systems. He earned a PhD in 1988. He joined Xerox PARC's Ubiquitous Computing program in 1991. At PARC Want managed the Embedded Systems group. He joined Intel in 2000.Want is the author, or co-author, of more than 40 publications in the areas of mobile and distributed systems; and also holds over 50 patents in these areas. Contact information: Intel Corporation, 2200 Mission College Blvd, Santa Clara, CA 95052, USA, e-mail roy.want@intel.com

Abstract: The terms Ubiquitous and Pervasive computing were first coined at the beginning of the 90's, by Xerox PARC and IBM respectively, and capture the realization that the computing focus was going to change from the PC to a more distributed, mobile and embedded form of computing. Furthermore, it was predicted by some researchers that the true value of embedded computing would come from the orchestration of the various computational components into a much richer and adaptable system than had previously been possible.

Now some 15 years further on we have made progress towards these
aims. The hardware platforms encapsulate significant computation capability in a small volume, at low power and cost. However, the system software capabilities have not advanced at a pace that can take full advantage of this infrastructure. This talk will describe where software and hardware have combined to enable ubiquitous computing, where these systems have limitations and where the biggest challenges still remain.

St. Louis Ballroom A & B [Floor Plan]
Session Chair: David Garlan
[Slides]

Biography: Jeffrey O. Kephart manages the Agents and Emergent Phenomena group at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and shares responsibility for developing IBM's Autonomic Computing research strategy. He and his group focus on the application of analogies from biology and economics to massively distributed computing systems, particularly in the domains of autonomic computing, e-commerce, antivirus, and anti-spam technology.

Kephart's research efforts on digital immune systems and economic software agents have been publicized in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, Harvard Business Review, IEEE Spectrum, and Scientific American. In 2004, he co-founded the International Conference on Autonomic Computing. Kephart received a BS from Princeton University and a PhD from Stanford University, both in electrical engineering.

Abstract: The increasing complexity of computing systems is beginning to overwhelm the capabilities of software developers and system administrators to design, evaluate, integrate, and manage these systems. Major software and system vendors such as IBM, HP and Microsoft have concluded that the only viable long-term solution is to create computer systems that manage themselves.

Three years ago, IBM launched the autonomic computing initiative to meet the grand challenge of creating self-managing systems. Although much has already been achieved, it is clear that a worldwide collaboration among academia, IBM, and other industry partners will be required to fully realize the vision of autonomic computing. I will discuss several fundamental challenges in the areas of artificial intelligence and agents, performance modeling, optimization, architecture, policy, and human-computer interaction, and describe some of the initial steps that IBM and its partners in academia have taken to address those challenges.