Testimony of Dr. Greg Pottie

Pervasive Computing Overview (PPT)

Professor, UCLA Electrical Engineering Department
Associate Dean, Research and Physical Resources, HSSEAS

Imagine if
High-rise buildings in Los Angeles were able to detect their own structural faults (e.g., weld cracks or plumbing infrastructure)
Belmont school could reliably measure toxic levels at very low concentrations, and trace contaminant transport back to its source
Buoys along the coast could alert surfers, swimmers, and fisherman to dangerous bacterial levels
An earthquake-rubbled building could be infiltrated with robots and sensors to locate signs of life and evaluate structural damage
We could infuse complex and endangered ecosystems with a plethora of chemical, physical, acoustic, and image sensors to track global change parameters continuously.
Dangerous bacterial and contaminant levels could be detected "on the farm" through dense sampling, instead of "in the market" through sparse sampling

Embedded Networked Sensing will reveal previously unobservable phenomena
Micro-sensors, on-board processing, wireless interfaces feasible at very small scale--can monitor phenomena "up close"
Enables spatially and temporally dense environmental monitoring.

Widely networked computing technology that becomes effectively invisible in the environment
Need not be small
E.g. Electric motors
Computers are everywhere, but most are embedded and at best only locally networked
E.g. Automotive control systems
Networking produces such increased value as to enable entirely new applications, that were previously too costly to conceive or run on large scales
Technological forces:
Decreased size and cost of electronics of all kinds
Improved networking and database technologies
Pervasive proposals: Over 1000 research proposals in response to small NSF program on sensor networks

In a village, everyone knows just about everything about everyone else; in a city, real privacy exists
In a networked global village, "everyone" potentially extends to anyone who pays to find out, anywhere in the world, to a level of detail not even available in a village.
The only privacy will be that which is explicitly designed in, from the beginning.
Regulations become costly after deployment--retrofit of large installed base
Patches often have security holes
Early regulation, in contrast, will often have little cost, since many design choices in information technology are somewhat arbitrary

RFID is one of many technologies that can bind information to an object
The binding problem is how to determine that information collected by diverse information sources (sensors/manual data entry) actually applies to the same object or person
Electronic tagging is convenient since:
Includes unique ID
Provides easy means of detection (may even broadcast)
Data format is known
Other binding technologies: facial recognition algorithms, identity or credit cards (swiped or manual data entry), signature recognition, biometrics, etc.
The data management (privacy, security, etc.) issues also apply to these other technologies
RFID and cameras have the additional issues of notification of surveillance

Societal values can also be served by new information technologies; imagine:
Distributed private networks of environmental monitoring, to measure actual total exposures to contaminants
Improved public safety through monitoring of ports, pipelines, and other infrastructure
Increased economic efficiencies in supply chain from manufacturing processes through to retail
Economic, political and technological forces will make pervasive computing a reality, in an incremental fashion, due to the perceived benefits
However, the best societal outcomes will not happen without embedded responsibility in the the information technology
This will require study and regulation in partnership with government, consumers, and technology providers