Department of Electrical and Information Engineering
MediaTeam Oulu
University of Oulu
Finland

Introducing Open Ubiquitous Oulu

The talk introduces the first installation of the Open Ubiquitous Oulu deployed by the UrBan Interactions (UBI) program in cooperation with the City of Oulu. The installation comprises of novel urban pervasive computing infrastructure and a set of applications demonstrating the new possibilities created by the infrastructure. The presented deployment is the first step towards a functional prototype of future ubiquitous Oulu, where downtown Oulu becomes a smart urban space populated with UBI hotspots providing rich interaction between physical, virtual and social spaces. A key feature of the UBI initiative is openness: the infrastructure and the applications are offered as open horizontal computing resources to the community. The whole community is challenged to join the innovation, development and evaluation of new services, to turn Oulu into a real urban living lab with a sustainable ecosystem. The talk concludes with a discussion on the challenges and future directions of the UBI program.

Biography:

Timo Ojala is professor of computer engineering at the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering of the University of Oulu and the associate director of the MediaTeam Oulu research group. He received his M.Sc. (with honors) and Dr.Tech. degrees in 1992 and 1997, respectively, from the University of Oulu, Finland. He is the responsible director of the UrBan Interactions (UBI) program, which aims at building a functional prototype of future ubiquitous city in Oulu. He has authored about 100 international scientific publications on mobile multimedia, human computer interaction, networking and computer vision. He has served as the founding co-chair of the 1st International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2002), the general chair of MUM 2007 conference and in the program committees of many international conferences and workshops.