With increased "media horsepower" and richer on-device support for heterogeneous networks, mobile devices are rapidly making the transition from enabling a communication-oriented mobile1.0 experience to a mobile2.0 phase where the application drivers center on media, entertainment and intelligent personal assistance services. Increasingly, the mobile device is viewed not as a separate universe, but as a mechanism for mobilizing services previously limited in the home, auto or enterprise, thus driving a convergence of service architectures across these spaces. Another trend in mobile 2.0 services is the mashing-up of hitherto separate content and communication services into hybrid social services that blend Content and Communication in interesting ways, with Community and Context as overlays (and Commerce enablers as an incentive and subsidy mechanism). We use the term Seamless Mobility to articulate the system challenges in creating novel social services, and supporting service availability across devices and networks.

In this talk, we address seamless mobility from a 'transitional' pervasive computing perspective and explore the resulting challenges and opportunities afforded to pervasive computing researchers in delivering compelling mobile experiences. The talk will cover a wide variety of past, ongoing and future research projects undertaken in three core areas: seamless content consumption, sensing & sense-making and social interactive entertainment. Topics that will be covered include distributed intelligent caching architectures, integrated context frameworks, social media and interactive entertainment experiences, ambient interfaces and related issues in privacy, usability and efficiency. The talk will also feature demonstrations of ongoing research technologies and conclude with an open discussion of new directions and opportunities for research.

Host: Lin Zhong, lzhong@rice.edu

Biography of Venu Vasudevan:
Dr. Venu Vasudevan is the Director of the Pervasive Platforms & Architectures Lab (PPAL), part of the Applications Research Center within Motorola Labs. PPAL focuses on the development of platform technologies for mobile and pervasive computing. The department currently has active projects in mobile gaming, seamless advertising, distributed context frameworks, multi-modal architectures, wireless peer-to-peer platforms, wireless sensor networks and distributed wireless caching architectures. Before taking his current position, Venu was (in reverse chronological order) a Fellow of Technical Staff at Motorola Labs, a researcher at a virtual company funded largely under DARPA's program on Collaborative Agent-Based Systems, and the Database and Network Management architect at Motorola's Iridium project (still considered one of the largest network management endeavors).He is a member of the Motorola Science Advisory Board (SABA).