The Computer Journal presents the first Computer Journal Lecture: 'Ubiquitous Computing' by Robin Milner - Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

The lecture, chaired by former BCS president Wendy Hall, took place in the BCS London office, Southampton street, on the 23rd February. It was followed by a debate on the lecture and Q&A from the floor.

The talk

Robin Milner dealt with the enormous challenge of ubiquitous computing to computer science and engineering. He covered how we can develop concepts and engineering principles that will properly support systems that are adaptable to changing requirements and cannot be taken offline for reconstruction.

Abstract: The vision of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is that computing entities become an effective part of our environment, supporting our lives without our continual direction, so that we can be largely unaware of them.

One of the UK Grand Challenges for Computing Research addresses not only the ubicomp vision, but also the design principles and theories that will support it. Ubicomp will entail hardware/software systems that exceed those that we know by orders of magnitude in size.

There is little chance of extrapolating existing methods of software production to cope with them. Ubicomp offers an opportunity to develop a deeper science of computing that interweaves three ingredients - vision, design and theory - more intimately than ever before. This is the Grand Challenge; the lecture will explore how we may approach it.

The Speaker

Robin Milner graduated from Cambridge in 1958. After short posts he joined the University of Edinburgh in 1973, where he co-founded the Laboratory for Foundation of Computer Science in 1986.

He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1988, and in 1991 won the ACM's A.M. Turing Award. He joined Cambridge University in 1995, headed the Computer Laboratory there for four years, and retired in 2001.

His research achievements (often joint) include: the system LCF, a model for many later systems for interactive reasoning; Standard ML, an industry-scale but rigorously based programming language; the Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS); the Pi Calculus. Currently he works on Bigraphs, a topographical model for global computing.

The Discussion

Tom Rodden (Nottingham) gave the vote of thanks.

Morris Sloman (Imperial) stressed the need for modularization in  developing and managing safety critical systems.

Martyn Thomas (MTA) raised the issue of whether theory really  follows, rather than precedes, practice, and that software  houses were already facing many problems in this field.

Karen Sparck-Jones (Cambridge) focused on re-use. She drew the analogy with a bee-keeper who must respect the role played by  the bees.

Jon Crowcroft (Cambridge) noted that physical and other models have also to be considered in the "tower of models" introduced by Robin.

Marta Kwiatkowska (Birmingham) pointed to how ubiquitous computing  was also characterized as "the disappearing computer", and asked  if this implied that computer science had to disappear also -  or at least merge into a new discipline. She also favoured some  aggregate of models other than a "tower".

Paul Garner (BT) presented a perspective related to telecoms in the health area. He wondered how the end user will be affected and what the reaction will be.

Nick Jennings (Southampton) referred to the multiple stake-holders in this field, and the potentially important role of computational game theory. He also spoke of his own (team's) work with a sensor network in a Norwegian glacier.

Vladimiro Sassone (was Sussex, now Southampton) motivated consideration of an interlaced, patchwork of models. He drew the parallel between the conceptual framework that was long in existence for the Moon landing, compared to the absence of a clear conceptual framework for ubiquitous computing.

Eamonn O'Neill (Bath) pointed to the difficulty of HCI (human-computer interface) work and the need to be pragmatic. Users, he said, can and will subvert the best design.

Mike Wooldridge (Liverpool) focused on the difficulty of proving correctness in this area and proposed that a new view was needed, one based on a "computational social contract". This was again posited on the relevance of computational game theory. As in other fields (social sciences, physics) there is also a burgeoning need to interface modelling of the small with modelling of the large.

The lecture itself, and the detail of the discussion following it, are edited for the Computer Journal and are now available. View the presentation and discussion.

The paper and the discussion from this lecture was published in the Computer Journal.

Computer Journal Lectures