BU Research Blog

EPSRC is holding a two-day workshop on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing. The workshop will be highly multidisciplinary as well as bringing together those who are developing platforms and standards with researchers deploying and evaluating in real world environments.

In the Balancing Capability exercise, Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing was selected as an area to grow. While this is likely to happen due to the increasing economic and social influence of the Internet of Things and related technologies, EPSRC believe that some effort is required at this stage to ensure a balanced portfolio of funded research by the end of the delivery plan period.

Moreover, while they believe this field has a key role to play in contributing to the achievement of their cross-ICT priorities, they think that to achieve the objectives described in the priorities: People at the Heart of ICT, Safe and Secure ICT and Cross-Disciplinarity and Co-Creation a mature community discussion will be required.

Further information about EPSRC‘s portfolio and strategies, see our website.

What is Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing?

Put broadly, Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (PUC) is the fundamental and applied research that aims achieve the integration of computing into any device in any location that interacts with our lives.

Research in this area is necessarily multi-disciplinary and in order to achieve success will draw-on and synthesise ideas at the boundary of numerous other strands of research. This includes:

• Context awareness and affective computing in mobile systems and fundamental research into smart devices.
• Communication and information management between trillions of devices as well as new forms of distributed data handling and processing at scale.
• Research into the software or hardware of devices that have mobility as a unique aspect of their application. This includes the solutions to challenges of building systems on a grand scale such as interoperability, reliability and scalability.

Research into new forms of interaction with pervasive computer systems and related research into trust, privacy and security. This will require novel computer science and engineering while incorporating research from the social sciences, humanities and law.

How to apply

Those wishing to attend the workshop should complete the short Expression of Interest (EoI) form on this page.

This is a fantastic opportunity for BU academics as a lot of our research would be classed as ‘Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing’.  If you do get a place, please can you let your RKEO representative know as we are interested in how this area will grow and what calls may come out of it.