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Georgia Institute of Technology > College of Computing > Groups > GVU > FCE > PIE Group

Projects

Current Projects:

DIAMOND

Opportunistic Annexing

SEREFE

Translucent Computing

Previous Projects:

Supporting Routine Decision-Making

Mobile Sensing

Cepher

DynEx M/F

Taking Over the World, One Device at a Time

Students: Heather Hutchings , Shwetak Patel

Small, portable devices such as PDAs and cellular phones provide a convenient way for users to access data anytime and anywhere. Inherent to the portability of these devices are small displays and the limited input capabilities of pen input and phone keypads. To overcome these difficulties we propose a system which would allow small device users to opportunistically annex input and output devices that they encounter in their environment. Users could annex a keyboard to quickly type an email on their PDA or a monitor to view their calendar while talking on their cellular phone. Current issues that we are exploring include short range connections over Bluetooth and the value of splitting interfaces between small devices and desktop computers.


  The goal of opportunistic annexing is to allow users to improve their interaction experience by taking advantage of input and output resources in their local environment. Annexing allowing users to improve the capability of their personal devices without improving their luggability.


  Users can potentially annex devices by pulling the desired interface from the personal device using a public device, or by pushing it using the personal device. We have augmented a cell phone with an accelerometer to explore gesture authentication mechanisms when pulling interfaces.

  A possible gesture users might make is to shake their device in a displayed or predetermined sequence; such a gesture proves physical possession of the device without requiring direct interaction with it. Authenticating by proving possession is not vulnerable to reply attacks, unlike authenticating by demonstrating secret knowledge (e.g. passwords).

 

Publications:

Jeffrey S. Pierce and Heather E. Mahaney.
Opportunistic Annexing for Handheld Devices: Opportunities and Challenges.
Human-Computer Interaction Consortium (HCIC) 2004, Fraser, CO.

Heather E. Mahaney and Jeffrey S. Pierce.
Opportunistic Awareness: Annexing Peripheral Devices for Information Monitoring.
Position paper and presentation for the Workshop on Multi-Device Interfaces for Ubiquitous Peripheral Interaction at the Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UBICOMP) 2003, Seattle, WA.

Shwetak N. Patel, Jeffrey S. Pierce, and Gregory D. Abowd.
A Gesture-based Authentication Scheme for Untrusted Public Terminals..
Proceedings of UIST '04, pages 157-160.