Enabling a Symphony of Devices

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The NSERC Portal has stripped this proposal of helpful formatting and hyperlinks. A version with identical text, but which includes links to all papers and videos referenced throughout, can be found at the URL below; all logging has been disabled for the directory to preserve anonymity. This link is included with permission from NSERC. http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~dwigdor/discovery_2015 Imagine you are a motivational speaker roaming a stage, a politician standing at a podium, a professor tethered to a laptop, or a member of small group meeting. Foreseeing and designing an application to tailor itself to all of these uses, and thousands of others, is daunting. You could speak with only a projector; both you and your audience would only see your slides. But what if you connected a phone, and it displayed a list of slides, a timer, and your speaker notes. If you added a smart watch, the display on your wrist could show you not only the current time, but also the timer and the progression of your talk. Putting on a head-mounted display, such as Google Glass would move your speaker notes, providing a private teleprompter. What if you would like your hands free? Put the phone away and the display of available slides resizes itself and appears on your Glass. You could advance the slides by pressing a button on the watch, by speaking a command, or by tapping the side of your Glass. Each of these configurations is appropriate for a different type of talk. My work focuses on how the user can tailor an application's behavior simply by adding the right devices, and enabling the software to reshape and optimize its user experience to the new topology. Critical to achieving this future is meeting the challenge to enable software to grow and shrink to take advantage of all available hardware, without the need for developers to foresee all hardware combinations in advance. Research in ubiquitous computing thus far has focused on enabling transitions between devices, such reading a webpage or book on one device, and then moving it to another to pick-up at the same point. This just begins to scratch the surface of what is possible. We are develop