Jadwiga Indulska

Pervasive/Ubiquitous Systems

Prof J. Indulska was the Research Leader of the project on Pervasive, Autonomic, Context-aware Environments (PACE) carried out in 2002-2005 in cooperation with the CRC on Distributed Systems Technology. This project investigates how computing applications can self-adapt to both the changing computing environment and a variety of network technologies in order to provide users with seamless computing (i.e. make applications independent from the underlying computer and network technologies). One of the great challenges of pervasive computing is to model the context of computation, i.e. the requirements and current status of a computing application and its environment. Context changes need to be evaluated and this evaluation can trigger decisions about applying adaptation methods to adapt the whole system to these changes. Such adaptations can be carried out at various layers of the system (e.g. by adapting user applications or applications, communication streams, adapting the distributed computing middleware or the behaviour of the underlying operating system or communication protocols). This project focused on many aspects of pervasive systems including: context models and context management, location management, adaptation methods, service discovery in pervasive systems, and programming models for pervasive applications. Pervasive systems encompas a variety of computing devices (workstations, laptops, PDAs, phones, sensors) and a variety of networking technologies (wired/wireless networks, sensor networks) creating an integrated computing environment built from these various technologies. Pervasive systems have applications in a variety of areas, i.e. telecommunication, education, defence, tourism, agriculture, smart homes, health (e.g. support for independent living of the elderly). She was also a Research Leader in the Australian National Centre of Excellence in ICT (NICTA) and carried out research on pervasive computing with the emphasis on adaptive communication protocols.