DATE: Thursday, October 19, 2000
TIME: Noon - 1 pm
PLACE: Wean Hall 8220

SPEAKER:
Mary Baker
Assistant Professor
Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

TITLE:
Communicating with Mobile People

ABSTRACT:
People are the outsiders in the current communications revolution. Computer hosts, pager terminals, and telephones are addressable entities throughout the Internet and telephony systems. Human beings, however, still need application-specific tricks to be identified, like email addresses, telephone numbers, and ICQ IDs. The key challenge today is to find people and communicate with them personally, as opposed to communicating merely with their possibly inaccessible machines---cell phones that are turned off, or PCs on faraway desktops.

The main goal of the Mobile People and IdentiScape projects is to put the person, rather than the devices that the person uses, at the endpoints of a communication session. The Mobile People Architecture introduces the concept of routing between people. To that effect, we define the Personal Proxy, which maintains the list of devices or applications through which a person is currently accessible and dispatches the communications appropriately, filtering out undesired commumications and converting communications into a format that the recipient can make use of immediately. It does all this while protecting the location privacy of the recipient from the message sender and allowing the easy integration of new application protocols. The IdentiScape project introduces a name service that allows us to name people across all online applications in a unique, robust, and historically persistent manner.

BIO:
Mary Baker is an assistant professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Her interests include operating systems, distributed systems, and mobile networking. She is now leading the development of the MosquitoNet mobile and wireless computing project and the Mobile People Architecture. Baker received a BA degree in mathematics in 1984 from the University of California at Berkeley, and MS and PhD degrees in computer science in 1988 and 1994 also from U. C. Berkeley. Baker is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a Terman Fellowship, an NSF Faculty Career Development Award, and an Okawa Foundation grant.

SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/