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Roy Want

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Roy Want
Born
London, United Kingdom
NationalityBritish
CitizenshipAmerican (USA)
EducationCambridge University, United Kingdom
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science

Roy Want is a computer scientist born in London, United Kingdom in 1961. He received his PhD from Cambridge University (UK) in 1988 for his work on multimedia Distributed Systems; and is known for his work on indoor positioning, mobile and ubiquitous computing, automatic identification (e.g. RFID and wireless beacons) and the Internet of Things (IoT). He lives in Silicon Valley, California, and has authored or co-authored over 150 papers and articles on mobile systems, and holds 100+ patents. In 2011 he joined Google as a senior research scientist, and is in the Android group. Previous roles include senior principal engineer at Intel, and principal scientist at Xerox PARC...[1]

Projects

Active Badge system components.
Location map of Active Badge participants.
PARC-Tab (the first context-aware mobile computer) being used with a stylus.

Among his earliest contributions (circa 1988) was the Active Badge[2] system that identified individual mobile users, and their location, to the computing infrastructure inside a building. This pioneering work was done at the Olivetti Research Ltd (ORL) in Cambridge, United Kingdom and its seminal publication has been recognized with the ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award (2016). Over 1000 Active Badges were deployed outside Olivetti, at laboratories including DEC SRC, and Xerox PARC. These deployments sparked the creation of the first generation of context-aware software systems in the larger research community.

Want was a central figure in the earliest realization (at Xerox PARC) of Mark Weiser’s vision of Ubiquitous Computing.[3] The PARC program involved three devices: PARC-Tab,[4][5] PARC-Pad, and LiveBoard.[6] Today, these form-factors map directly to smartphones, tablets and smart-TVs. In the early 1990s, Want was the principal architect and implementer of PARC-Tab, the world’s first context-aware mobile computer in a smartphone form-factor. It could adapt the behavior of applications, depending on the user’s context, a decade before the emergence of the iPhone (2007).  A key technology that made the PARC-Tab context-aware was the use of an infrared network, both connecting the device to the local area network, and localizing it to a room using a diffuse infrared-network transceiver.

In the late 1990’s at PARC, Want also pioneered extending the classic notion of a mobile UI to incorporate inertial sensors,[7] taking advantage of the new MEMS technologies, and designed the Hikari handheld digital organizer. It would automatically change from portrait to landscape format as you rotated it; now a commonplace capability for smartphones. Lists could also be scrolled and items selected using a tilt and clutch mechanism, and photos selected from a 2D grid using a ball-in-a-maze puzzle style of user interface.[8][9]

By the end of 1990s, Want led PARC’s electronic tag project, “Bridging Physical and Digital worlds”,[10] based on passive RFID. It was the first comprehensive published vision that electronic tags (inexpensive, and battery-free), could link the then new mobile platforms with a location, and related digital web content/control; another example of context-aware computing[11][12][13][14][15]

Want continued to make pioneering contributions to mobile computing over the following two decades. At Intel Research, he led the Personal Server project (2001),[16][17][18][19] a platform later integrated into an early smartphone, which enabled users to present their personal digital content and media onto nearby displays. This led to his vision of Dynamic Composable Computing (2005),[20][21][22][23][24] in which a mobile user is able to rapidly assemble a logical computer on-the-fly through wireless-connected components. Today, the Personal Server concept is embodied in Apple’s Airplay and Google Cast media services, and as a result the original paper was given the 10-year impact-award at ACM Ubicomp ’12[25]

At Google, Want was one of the leads for the Eddystone Bluetooth-Low-Energy (BLE) beacon project, with similar context-aware goals to RFID, but enhanced by ubiquitous readers in the form of smartphones, which can detect BLE advertisement IDs at much greater range, and now supported commercially by many vendors.[26][27][28]

Technical Service

In addition to his technical contributions, Want has been a dedicated member of the ACM SIGMOBILE community and made many leadership and service contributions. He was the Chair of SIGMOBILE[29] from 2009-12, and has served as program chair for top tier conferences such as ACM MobiSys, ACM HotMobile, IEEE PerDis, IEEE ISWC; and in the role as Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine (2006-09) [26-32] and provided Editorial Board contributions to IEEE Computer magazine.

In 2019 he became a Technical Editor for the IEEE 802.11az Wi-Fi standard,[30] working on the Next-Generation Positioning standard, and leading the integration of 802.11mc with Android P+ to enable enhanced context-aware operation for more than 2 billion devices with Android P+. The technology was presented publicly at Google IO ’18,[31] and is expected to lead to ubiquitous (1-2m) indoor location accuracy as the world upgrades its Wi-Fi infrastructure to the latest standards.

Awards

Want is an ACM Fellow (2005)[32] and IEEE Fellow (2005).[33] In 2003 he also received the Lillian Gilbreth Lectureship award[34] from the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for his work on the Intel Personal Server; The Gilbreth Lectures were established in 2001 by the Council of the National Academy of Engineering as a means of recognizing outstanding young American engineers. Later in 2019 he received the Outstanding Contributions Aware (OCA) for “For hardware and software contributions to the conception and practice of context-aware mobile computing” (2019), the most prestigious award presented by ACM SIGMOBILE.[35]

References

  1. ^ "Roy Want – Google Research". Google Research. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  2. ^ "The Active Badge Location System", Roy Want, Andy Hopper, Veronica Falcao & Jon Gibbons, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems (TOIS) Vol. 10. No. 1, Jan 1992, Pages 91-102. (SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award 2016)
  3. ^ Ubiquitous computing fundamentals. John Krumm. Boca Ragon: Chapman & Hall/CRC Press. 2010. ISBN 978-1-4200-9360-5. OCLC 417446236.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  4. ^ "An Overview of the Parctab Ubiquitous Computing Experiment", IEEE Personal Communications, December 1995, Vol 2. No.6, pp28-43 Roy Want, Bill Schilit, Norman Adams, Rich Gold, David Goldberg, Karin. Petersen, John Ellis, Mark Weiser.
  5. ^ "Context-Aware Computing Applications", Bill Schilit, Norman Adams, Roy Want, 1st Annual Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA), Dec 1994, Santa Cruz.
  6. ^ "It's time to reap the context-aware harvest". PARC. 2010-09-21. Retrieved 2021-02-23.
  7. ^ "Squeeze Me, Hold Me, Tilt Me! An Exploration of Manipulative User Interfaces". Beverly L. Harrison, Kenneth P. Fishkin, Anuj Gujar, Carlos Mochon, and Roy Want - ACM SIGCHI '98, Los Angeles, CA, April 1998.
  8. ^ Proceedings of the 15th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology : 2002, Paris, France, October 27-30, 2002. ACM Digital Library, SIGGRAPH. [New York]: Association for Computing Machinery. 2002. ISBN 1-58113-488-6. OCLC 612956789.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  9. ^ "Embodied User Interfaces for Really Direct Manipulation", Communications of the ACM, Sept. 2000, Vol.43 No.9, pp75-80, Ken Fishkin, Anuj Gujar, Beverly Harrison, Tom Moran and Roy Want.
  10. ^ “Bridging Real and Virtual Worlds with Electronic Tags", Roy Want, Ken Fishkin, Beverly Harrison, Anuj Gujar. Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI. May 1999, Pittsburgh, pp370-377.
  11. ^ "Ubiquitous Electronic Tagging", IEEE Distributed Systems Online, September 2000, Vol. 1, No.2, Roy Want and Dan M. Russell.
  12. ^ "RFID: The Key to Automating Everything", Roy Want, Scientific American, Jan 2004, pp56-65.
  13. ^ “The Magic of RFID”, Roy Want, ACM Queue Magazine, pp41-48, Vol 2, No.7 Oct 2004.
  14. ^ Want, Roy (2006). RFID explained : a primer on radio frequency identification technologies (1st ed.). [San Rafael, Calif.]: Morgan & Claypool Publishers. ISBN 978-1-59829-109-4. OCLC 72002340.
  15. ^ "An Introduction to RFID Technology", Roy Want. IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol. 5, Number 1. pp25-33, Jan-Mar 2006.
  16. ^ "The Personal Server: changing the way we think about ubiquitous computing", Roy Want, Trevor Pering, Gunner Danneels, Muthu Kumar, Murali Sundar and John Light. Proceedings of Ubicomp 2002: 4th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Springer LNCS 2498, Goteborg, Sweden, Sept 30th - Oct 2nd, 2002, pp194-209. (ACM Ubicomp Test-of-Time Award 2012).
  17. ^ "CoolSpots: Reducing the Power Consumption of Wireless Mobile Devices Using Multiple Radio Interfaces", Trevor Pering, Yuvraj Agarwal, Rajesh Gupta and Roy Want, Proc. ACM MobiSys 2006, Uppsala, Sweden June 19th, 2006, pp220-232.
  18. ^ "SwitchR: Managing Low-Power Wireless Connections in a Multi-Radio Environment", Yuvraj Agarwal, Trevor Pering, Rajesh Gupta and Roy Want; IEEE ISWC'08, 1st Oct 2008.
  19. ^ "Enhancing Web Browsing Security on Public Terminals using Mobile Composition", Richard Sharp, Anil Madhavapeddy, Roy Want, and Trevor Pering; Proc. ACM MobiSys 2008. Breacon Ridge Colorado.
  20. ^ "Dynamic Composable Computing", Roy Want, Trevor Pering, Shivani Sud, and Barbara Rosario. ACM HotMobile 2008, February 2008 Napa Valley, California.
  21. ^ "Enabling Pervasive Collaboration with Platform Composition”, Pervasive Computing 2009, Trevor Pering, Kent Lyons, Shivani Sud, Barbara Rosario, & Roy Want, Nara, Japan, May 2009.
  22. ^ "Multi-Display Composition: Supporting Display Sharing of Collocated Mobile Devices", Kent Lyons, Trevor Pering, Shivani Sud, Barbara Rosario and Roy Want, Interact'09, Uppsala Sweden, August 24th 2009.
  23. ^ "Context-Aware Composition”, HotMobile-2009, Kent Lyons, Roy Want, David Munday, Jia Jia Sheng, Shivani Sud, Barbara Rosario & Trevor Pering, ACM Hotmobile 2009, Santa Cruz, CA, Feb, 2009.
  24. ^ "Spontaneous marriages of mobile devices and interactive spaces", Trevor Pering, Raffael Ballagas, and Roy Want, Communications of the ACM, Volume 48 , Issue 9, (Sep. 2005), pp 53 - 59, Special Issue: "RFID - tagging the world".
  25. ^ "Ubicomp Awards". ubicomp.org. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  26. ^ “Enabling the Internet-of-Things”, R. Want, B. N. Schilit, and Scott Jenson, IEEE Computer, Jan 2015, Vol 48. No. 1, pp28-35.
  27. ^ “Bluetooth LE Finds its Niche”, Roy Want, Bill Schilit, Dominik Laskowski, IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 12-04 (2013), pp. 12-16.
  28. ^ “Bluetooth Low Energy in Dense IoT Environments”, Albert F. Harris III; Vansh Khanna; Guliz Tunca; Roy Want; Robin Kravets; IEEE Communications Magazine, Volume: 54, Issue: 12, December 2016, pp 30-36; DOI: 10.1109/MCOM.2016.1600546CM.
  29. ^ "Committees | SIGMOBILE". www.sigmobile.org. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  30. ^ "IEEE P802.11 - NEXT GENERATION POSITIONING STUDY GROUP". www.ieee802.org. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  31. ^ "Presentation at Google IO '18". YouTube.
  32. ^ "Recipients". awards.acm.org. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  33. ^ "IEEE Fellows Directory - Alphabetical Listing". services27.ieee.org. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  34. ^ "Armstrong Endowment for Young Engineers - Gilbreth Lectures". NAE Website. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  35. ^ "Outstanding Contribution Award | SIGMOBILE". www.sigmobile.org. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
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