cylab NEWS
CyLab Mobility Research Center Holds Summit with Silicon Valley Leaders to Help Design the Future
The CyLab Mobility Rsearch Center recently held its first Mobility Research Summit at the Carnegie Mellon silicon valley campus. Representatives from Adobe, Bosch, Cisco, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, Nasa, SAP, Sun, and Yahoo participated along with CyLab faculty from the Silicon Valley Campus, located in NASA AMES Research Park, as well as from the main Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh, PA.
The Summit was organized to introduce the center and its faculty, discuss the most effective way to engage with industrial partners in the exciting and diverse mobility ecosystem, and begin the process of building a collaborative community.
Associate Dean Martin Griss, one of the Mobility Center’s co-directors, comments on the success of the event: “The first Mobility Research Summit was a great success. We had some 20 people from a range of companies … principal engineers, senior directors, VPs and business developers. … I pleased with the energy, enthusiasm and range of ideas, as well as issues surfaced, such as our model for dealing with IP and to build local community. Valuable suggestions included looking at Africa as a primary emerging market with a radically different mobile user experience, and to run several topical workshops, tutorials and speakers series, etc. Several suggested we look at creating and advocating open platforms for ‘open context,’ ‘open privacy,’ ‘open ID,’ etc.
The work of the CyLab Mobility Center is focused on “enriching anywhere, anytime computing,” and its goals include:
- To address next generation of mobile applications, devices & systems
- Multi-disciplinary research
- Holistic, synergistic work
- Large scale, experimental pilot(s)
- Create collaborative community
Leading off the faculty research presentations, Dr. Griss spoke on his concept of the “mobile companion.” Based on a convergence of multiple device capabilities and a “seamless/context-aware interaction with other devices,” the “mobile companion” would become your “primary mobile device.
“Your mobile companion is with you all the time, knows where and who you are,” Griss said, “It adapts to how you work, play, learn, collaborate, shop, …It knows your schedule and preferences, your history …”
Griss’ co-director, Dr. Priya Narasimhan and several other CyLab faculty members delivered talks on their research. The rest of the day was spent brainstorming: e.g., ideas for big, collaborative test-beds to drive collaborative research, interesting short term mobility projects and key research issues the center should investigate. (For more about the Summit, please visit the CyLab Mobility Research Center website.)