报告题目: Research Issues in Adapting Computing to Small Devices

报告人: Francis C.M. Lau 香港大学计算机系主任

报告地点: 中央主楼610

主办单位: 国家CIMS工程技术研究中心

Abstract:

Advances in pervasive and mobile technologies are making computing available to us at anytime anywhere. Availability however does not automatically mean it is in a form that implies ease of use. Usability in the mobile world amounts to a set of problems that are not so much precedented in the history of computing. Handheld mobile devices that are thin-lean-mean for instance present challenges that require fundamental changes in the way computation is carried out, its architecture, or its supporting environment. A practical goal is to minimize these changes, which calls for automatic or semi-automatic adaptation of existent computing to the small devices. We discuss the issues and research challenges of "X adapting to Y", where X includes content, data, code, computation, GUI, and so on, and the changes in semantics and/or syntax due to the adaptation are to satisfy the constraints of Y. Some experiments we have carred out for content and code adaptation provide some useful illustration.

Bio:

Francis C.M. Lau received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Waterloo in Canada in 1986. He has been a faculty member of the Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong since 1987,

of which he is now the head of department. His research specializes in operating systems, parallel/distributed systems, and pervasive/mobile computing. He created the Systems Research Group (SRG) which has

graduated many Masters and PhDs over the years. The group has produced several Java-based software packages which have earned a reputation for the group. SRG is also responsible for the Hong Kong University Grid

Point which is a key node of the China National Grid as well as an important gateway to the Asia-Pacific Grid. One of the focuses of his current research is to tackle some of the fundamental problems

associated with the realization of the "pervasive grid".