Place Lab: Device Positioning Using Radio Beacons in the Wild

Location awareness is an important capability for mobile computing. Yet inexpensive, pervasive positioning—a requirement for wide-scale adoption of location-aware computing—has been elusive. Place Lab is designed to overcome the lack of ubiquity and high-cost in existing location sensing approaches. Place Lab is software allowing commodity laptops, PDAs and cell phones to estimate their position by listening for radio beacons such as 802.11 access points, GSM phone towers, and fixed Bluetooth devices that already exist in large numbers around us. These beacons all have unique or semi-unique IDs, for example, a MAC address. Clients compute their own location by hearing one or more IDs, looking up the associated beacons’ positions in a locally cached map, and estimating their own position referenced to the beacons’ positions. Place Lab clients can determine their location privately without constant interaction with a central service. This talk will provide an overview of Place Lab, show research results on coverage, accuracy, and beacon densities in the greater Seattle area, and present a survey of the many ways Place Lab has been used in both applications and research.
Web: www.placelab.org

Speaker Bios

Jeffrey is a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He holds an MS from the same and a BS from the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research area is ubiquitous computing: employing devices, services, sensors, and algorithms so computing calmly fades into the background of daily life. Jeffrey spent summers 1999 and 2000 at Xerox PARC working on ad hoc wireless location sensing and was a 2000-2002 Microsoft Research Fellow. He is currently working with Intel Research Seattle on the Place Lab initiative to make location-enhanced computing simple and ubiquitous.

Anthony LaMarca is the associate director of Intel Research Seattle. His research interests include location technologies, ubiquitous computing, distributed systems and human-centered design. He most recently led the Place Lab project which sought to enable wide-scale device positioning using radio beacons. He has a BS in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley and an MS and PhD in computer science from the University of Washington. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Date:
Haut-parleurs:
Jeffrey Hightower, Anthony LaMarca, and Yatin Chawathe
Affiliation:
Intel Research Seattle